Comment by tbyehl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbyehl | Hacker News Reader

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Urban/suburban government tends to be... anti-self-sufficiency. Not so long ago a Florida town was making headlines for going after a resident who'd disconnected from the power grid. New wells and septic permits are often disallowed once a city starts offering water and sewer. Etc.

I'm on the border of where my area turns more rural. There are a couple of properties with horses just outside my single street subdivision where I have ~1 1/2 acres. I can have chickens but I can't eat them. Can't have any other foul or livestock without at least twice as much land and a bunch of other restrictions, and I wouldn't be allowed to eat them, either. There's actually _no_ land zoned for general agricultural purposes in my county. None at all. In theory we have a zoning classification for a small farm / ranch type property that allows a smaller than 3ac lot and fewer restrictions on setbacks but I can't find any actual properties with that zoning in the county GIS.

I am allowed to shoot a gun in my back yard tho. Just not at any of the delicious wild animals that pass thru.

The wells thing is tricky, though. There is only one water table, and we all need to share it. Is it ok for one person to dig a well on their property, and say, pump millions of gallons out and sell it?

It makes sense that we want to regulate how much water each person is allowed to extract.

"Is it ok for one person to dig a well on their property, and say, pump millions of gallons out and sell it?"

--> This is an actual problem in India. The govt made electricity FREE on farm lands. So, now people with farmland dug borewell, pump out water and sell them in tankers in the city, where many apartments don't have municipal water connection. Water is cheaper for apartments where there is low ground water, as cost of electicity consumption for farmers is nil.

> I can have chickens but I can't eat them.

How could they check that you don't eat your own chicken ?

Didn't they mean that you can't sell the meat ?

Hens are allowed for "personal enjoyment." Eating their eggs is fine. Slaughtering them myself for meat is not. Might be a loophole if I took them somewhere that could legally process them but I can't imagine that's a commercially viable service at the backyard chickens scale.

In Florida I have a friend with a 5ac farm. He can send his pigs and goats to a USDA-approved facility for slaughter when someone wants to buy them for meat, sell them as live animals, or slaughter them himself for personal consumption. Sells the honey his bees produce. Can grow plants and sell their edible parts.

What recently brought code enforcement to his door was growing plants in pots to sell as plants -- that's running a nursery, which isn't allowed in his zoning and would come with a slew of requirements if it were.

Zoning talk on HN tends to be about density and off-street parking and recently ADUs with the CA legislation encouraging them... But once zoning starts in an area it tends to grow until it touches upon _everything._

(I also have an ADU [not in CA] that would not be legal to build under current zoning [it was at the time], and my purchase of the property included tenants in the ADU which is not technically legal [no idea if it was when they signed their lease])

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