As a public health nurse I fully realize that we are healthier today not due so much to modern medicine but due to environmental measures such as purifying water, pasteurizing milk and separating disease vectors, like animals, from people. This has put me in conflict at times with my desire to live sustainably through eating super locally and having a strong connection with nature through raising my family’s food.
Most of us have grown up in an age without the horrors of pregnant women losing babies from listeria, neighbors getting sick from tainted beans and other things that can happen when good sanitation and safe practices aren’t followed. As a result things like pasteurization and vaccinations can seem like restrictive government interventions rather than positive procedures that keep populations healthy.
So where is the balance? Can we safely raise animals in the city? My hope is that the answer is yes but it is a question that I think will be raised more and more as urban ag grows.
Dr. Will Butler of Florida State University has written an excellent paper on this topic. Here is the abstract:
Pre-industrial city dwellers put up with noise, odors, pestilence, and disease associated with livestock as animals were integral to urban life. With technological advances over the last 150 years, dependence on local livestock has evaporated and animals largely have been moved out of the city. However, in the last decade, calls for sustainability and urban resilience as well as public health concerns related to diet have led to calls for a more localized food system. The local foods movement has gained traction, urban agriculture is on the rise, and livestock is finding its way back into the city. Through an analysis of municipal codes in communities that recently have taken up the issue of urban livestock, this paper explores how municipalities have navigated tensions associated with welcoming livestock back into the city. For each locality, I examine regulatory planning tools including zoning, site level restrictions, and permitting programs used to mitigate these tensions. I conclude by outlining questions that remain in planning for urban livestock and explore the implications for resilience and public health.
Here is a link to the full article.
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