A Northern California County Pushes Farming Incentives for Vacant and Blighted Plots
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Santa Clara County takes advantage of a state law that green-lighted urban agriculture.
Growing food where people live—it’s an increasingly popular idea. Startup companies are doing it. Nonprofits are doing it. Former Black Panthers are doing it. Cities and counties are doing it, too.
In Northern California, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously at the end of September to make open space available to farm by creating Urban Agricultural Incentive Zones in unincorporated sections of the county. The program has been in the works since February, introduced by Supervisors Ken Yeager and Mike Wasserman. It will provide tax breaks to landowners who put vacated and blighted plots to use growing vegetables and feeding farm animals.
“I’m excited that vacant plots will be used for growing fruits and vegetables,” Board President Dave Cortese said in a county announcement. “Many of the parcels that qualify for the program are in the 95127 ZIP code where I grew up. I watched farmland become housing developments and commercial districts.”
According to the announcement, Santa Clara County has lost nearly half of its farmland over the last 30 years.
The county includes California’s third-largest city, San Jose, and suburbanized Silicon Valley cities like Palo Alto and Mountain View in the north and stretches south roughly 50 miles to the fragrant garlic fields around Gilroy.
Santa Clara County is riding the top of a regional urban-farming wave, together with Oakland, San Francisco and Sacramento.
Acting on a 2013 state law, AB 551, that green-lighted urban agriculture, local officials have voted to clear away regulations and provide subsidies for small-scale farms. They’re taking a sort of bureaucratic weeding and fertilizing approach to attack blight, maximize resources, boost property values, eliminate food deserts and improve community health and nutritional awareness.
To be eligible for the new subsidy program, lots have to be located in areas home to populations of at least 250,000 residents; they can’t be smaller than about 4,000 square feet or larger than three acres; they have to be free of residences; and landowners have to commit to the farm project for at least five years.
This summer, the Santa Clara County board approved agricultural incentive zones in 13 of the county’s 15 cities. The board estimated that 37 lots in the unincorporated sections of the county could become incentive-zone farms.
Nonprofit local garden groups Veggielution, Garden to Table and Valley Verde have been tapped to help start and run local urban farms. The groups offer guidance in getting started and in getting produce harvested and delivered to residents and to local restaurants.
Urban farming takes on all kinds of shapes. Santa Clara County could soon become host to farms grown in the beds of parked pickup trucks, modified shipping containers, portable greenhouses and multi-story structures. So-called dirt farms could take hold—agricultural enterprises that basically “farm” compost and act as organic recycling organizations and supplier to neighbor farmers growing vegetables and raising animals.
John Tomasic is a journalist based in Boulder, Colorado.
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