The Freedom To Farm

I love eggs. When our budget was tight, I could always rely on eggs to provide much needed animal protein. Eggs for breakfast in the morning, and then for lunch, eggs added to my salad made from lettuce grown in my garden.

It’s no secret that the price of eggs has skyrocketed. From 99 cents a dozen to almost six dollars, 2025 is looking to be a doozy. And healthy organic watermelons are notoriously expensive, making them out of reach for many people, despite many studies on the unhealthy pesticides used on watermelons. In fact there are many fruits and vegetables that, bought from the store, pose health risks.

And yet our state, local, and federal governments have spent a tremendous amount of time trying to cull, get rid of, or otherwise interfere with egg, fruit, and vegetable production.

H.R. 349 (Goldie’s Act) is the latest attack on our ability to produce food, a bill introduced to give the USDA unchecked power to seize your farm animals without any warrant. This bill in particular seems to target anyone who breeds and sells animals.

Kathy Hochul in NY decided to stop poultry farmers from showing their chickens in live poultry farms, because a single chicken farm had an outbreak of bird flu. Despite the farms complying with testing and having no signs of bird flu, every farm in the area was ordered to sell down all their inventory and close for five days.

Some of these measures claim to reduce the prevalence of the notorious “bird flu”, while to be honest most of it seems petty. “We don’t want these dirty birds in our back yards!” And “We want perfect manicured lawns!” seems to be the prevailing sentiment.

Even a garden far more beautiful than my own, consisting of raised beds, drew the ire of the local government in Michigan because apparently “vegetables are unsightly.” But it’s interesting to me that our government chooses to focus on bird flu and aesthetics while ignoring the positive benefits of gardening and backyard homesteading with chickens.

For example, a single backyard chicken can consume 82 pounds of kitchen scraps per year, and a chicken produces half of the greenhouse gases as allowing those kitchen scraps to simply decompose.

Additionally, factory farming accounts for 11% of the greenhouse gas emissions, so reducing dependence on store-bought eggs, chicken, and fruits and vegetables would theoretically reduce dependence on factory farming, and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions overall.

You would think our government, with their constant bemoaning of greenhouse gas emissions, would jump on this opportunity, but alas they seem to lack the vision of the opportunities presented in our feathered friends and beautiful vegetable gardens.

When it comes to fruits and vegetables, on the federal level our government pays out hefty subsidies to farmers for wheat, corn, and other grains but almost nothing for healthy fruits and vegetables. This disincentivizes farmers from producing healthy fruits and vegetables, and instead our factory farms become big suppliers for ultra processed food companies.

Meanwhile, on the local level, my local government has a ton of restrictions and regulations about fencing, which makes it difficult to keep pests out of your vegetable garden. No permanent fences in the front yard is a common restriction in many cities.

For me at least, that means I’ve had to get creative. I have a fence that I can put up and take down at any time (non permanent), and I have herbs that I will grow that hopefully will deter the deer from eating my bean plants this year. But I’m lucky, because some zoning laws outright ban vegetable and fruit production altogether, or restrict where exactly someone is allowed to plant.

And all of these local code regulations don’t even speak to the horror that are homeowners associations (also known as HOAs). From what color you can paint your house, to when you are allowed to put up Christmas decorations, your neighbors, apparently craving control over other people's property, will in fact form coalitions to control other neighbors and fine them exorbitant fees if necessary.

People knowingly trade their freedom to do what they wish for a pool and some lawn care, only to find out how tyrannical HOAs can be when they get a warning and fine in the mail.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a perfectly manicured lawn as much as the next gal. However, food prices in the store have risen a staggering 2.6% as of March 2024, not even including all the inflation we have had since 2019. Basic supply and demand principles argue that in order to lower demand, and prices, you must increase supply.

And you can’t do that with the government choking local homesteaders as well as farmers with oppressive regulations. We are simply not a free people without property rights, and the ability to use our property to feed our families makes us freer. It allows us to break the chains of the FDA and the USDA and instead produce food in our own yards, with our own property using our own two hands.

It brought me great joy to provide my family with pesticide-free watermelons, green beans, and tomatoes last year, and this year’s gardening plan is to go even bigger. Two states, Florida and Illinois, passed “right to garden” acts that have prohibited local governments and HOAs from interfering with people’s right to produce their own food, and hopefully more states will follow suit, but this will only happen if more people want it too.

We need a cultural shift towards freedom for all to operate their properties as they wish, and shifting away from many of the local laws that interfere. I understand freedom is messy, and that my yard is perhaps unconventional. But between threats of war, bird flu, and factory farming constantly under attack, we need freedom more than ever.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.