The case for raising animals in Detroit

Detroit Farm and Cider was transforming an entire block in the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood into something the city had never seen before. It would be the only cider mill within city limits and, reportedly, the first Black-owned mill in the country. The farm hosted children’s equestrian programs, farming workshops, and farm-to-table brunches at its four-acre property.

Everything seemed to be going well until Detroit Animal Control confiscated owner Leandra King’s horses after one escaped in 2021. Three years later King is facing criminal charges for keeping livestock like horses, goats, and chickens, which are illegal in the city.

Animal husbandry could soon become legal, however, with a proposed urban livestock ordinance underway. Since 2013, urban agriculture advocates have been working with the City Planning Department to draft the ordinance, which would allow Detroiters to keep chickens, bees, and ducks, and it’s closer than ever to becoming a reality. The ordinance has received mixed reception with the urban farmers behind it, some residents worrying about smells, and some beekeepers wanting bees left out.

City planner Kimani Jeffrey says he’s hoping to present the City Planning Committee with the final draft for a recommendation in early May. If the ordinance gets the committee’s recommendation, it will go to Detroit City Council, which will then host a public hearing and vote on whether to pass it.

It may be too late for Detroit Farm and Cider, however, and it’s unclear whether the ordinance would help the farm anyway. King’s trial was supposed to take place in April but has been postponed until September. She says the case will effectively shut down Detroit Farm and Cider.

“I’ll go to court [and] I’ll lose, because I’m guilty of having the animals, and that will go on my record,” she tells Metro Times over the phone. “Within the next couple of months, when the livestock ordinance becomes legal, other people will be able to have their animals and If I get convicted, I won’t qualify to be able to rezone as a business.”

The ordinance would require farmers to get a $50 license to raise livestock or be subject to a fine. It allows for a maximum of eight birds (including chickens and ducks only) and two honeybee hives. Residents could have four ducks and four chickens, or any combination as long as they don’t exceed eight. It does not cover goats or horses.

City Council President Pro Tem James Tate’s office held a series of community engagement meetings in the summer of 2023 and winter of 2024 for resident feedback along with a public hearing before the City Planning Commission on February 22. The commission asked Jeffrey and urban agriculture organizer Renee Wallace of non-profit FoodPLUS to do more engagement with residents before voting on the ordinance.

City officials say they have ticketed Detroit Farm and Cider for raising illegal animals multiple times.

“City of Detroit ordinances prohibit the keeping of farm animals and the law cannot be ignored simply because the person violating it is well intentioned,” Corporation Counsel for the City of Detroit Conrad Mallett tells Metro Times via email. “In the past, the City has had to remove horses, goats, and other animals from the property. The owner has been reminded on multiple occasions since then that it is illegal to keep these animals and she has been ticketed, yet she persists. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to ask the court to compel her to follow the law.”

While the proposed ordinance only allows for chickens, ducks, and bees as an “accessory use,” the draft does appear to include special exceptions for “principle use” for “a non-profit entity organized for educational purposes” or a “4-H program that is officially sanctioned and recognized by Michigan State University Extension.”

“Accessory” use means raising livestock is not the main function of the property — think of someone with a chicken coop in their backyard or an urban farm with beehives — whereas “principle use” implies the opposite.

Detroit Farm and Cider does provide educational programming and is 4-H certified, which seems to suggest the ordinance could provide a legal pathway. Michigan 4-H programs are those that offer hands-on youth development activities which can include things like farming and working with textiles.

Wallace explains that residents applying for a livestock license would have to select one of three categories: backyard garden, urban farm, or educational operation.

“If you’re doing an educational operation, you have more options for other animals,” Wallace says. “If you look at 4-H clubs, they have horses, sometimes they have pigs. They train young people and show people how to care for them. They would put forth their proposal to the city… If you’ve picked that option, you’ve likely already gotten 4-H certification and then you are bringing that to the city. You may be developing a program or it’s an existing program… That would allow people to have a variety of farm animals in their program, that does not limit it to chicken, bees, and ducks.”

A public hearing would have to be held, with review by several city departments, to approve the educational operation’s proposal.

In addition to being 4-H certified, Detroit Farm and Cider is Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program (MAEAP) verified, which means it upholds standards to mitigate agricultural pollution from the property. MAEAP recognizes landowners for being “environmentally sound” in areas like livestock, cropping, and farmsteading. King says she is also certified through the Right-to-Farm Program via the Michigan Department of Agriculture.

“I submitted a soil test, a manure management plan to show that my manure is being stored ethically, and I had to go through all of these processes,” she says. “My livestock are licensed and tagged. I had to go through very scrupulous training.”

King feels like her farm is being targeted, as other groups like Detroit Horse Power and Pingree Farms have received permits to raise livestock in the city. Similar to Detroit Farm and Cider, Detroit Horse Power hosts equestrian programming for youth. Pingree Farms, located off Seven Mile Road and I-75, is 4-H certified to teach middle school students animal husbandry with rabbits, goats, sheep, chickens, turkeys, miniature cows, pigs, and ponies, according to its website.

King was first charged with “possessing a wild animal without a permit” in 2021 and received a letter of support and temporary permit from Detroit City Council in 2023 that she thought would help her case. The charges were dismissed without prejudice in September of 2023 for lack of evidence but were refiled a month later.

King was in the process of working with the Building Safety, Engineering & Environmental Department (BSEED) to get Detroit Farm and Cider rezoned as a business when the case against her was reopened. The farm is in a residential neighborhood.

“I was able to go as far as having special land use. I can grow food, I just can’t sell anything here without my business license,” she explains. “I thought it was going to be resolved. In the spirit of trying to work with them… I thought that if I got rezoned, and got MAEAP approved, and certified through the Right-to-Farm program, I would be good to go. But for some reason, they are still coming after me criminally.”

Director of BSEED David Bell says via email, “We had attempted for some time to work with the owner of this property to help her business get properly licensed after she had illegally established it in an area that is zoned only for residential use. However, we have ceased those efforts to help her until such time she comes into compliance with the law.”

Mallet adds, “We are a City of roughly 650,000 people. The people who live across the street from the non-licensed property have rights. They have the right to enjoy their homes free from animal smells and noise. Continual violation of our ordinances ultimately will create a consequence where fines and jail time is a possibility. We are protecting all of our citizens and we are disregarding no one’s rights.”

King is adamant that she will not stop keeping animals and facilitating children’s programming, even if the city shuts Detroit Farm and Cider down.

“I know that this isn’t right. It’s not fair,” she says. “If I’m doing everything within my power to appease you as a small business owner, and I’m asking what more you need me to do, and then I do it, and finally your way to shut me down is to criminally prosecute me when you’ve made these exceptions for other businesses, something’s wrong about that.”

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City officials say they have ticketed Detroit Farm and Cider for raising illegal animals multiple times.

More about the proposed ordinance

Smells and noise from animals are often cited as reasons that some residents oppose legalizing livestock in the city.

Bridge Detroit reported a group of residents from the 48217 zip code, considered Detroit’s most polluted, strongly opposed the ordinance at the February 22 hearing.

“I do not approve (of) this ordinance. My parents bought the house that I still live in… it was residential property, not farming property,” Bridge Detroit reported 48217 resident Patricia Gaston as saying. “If the house next door to me decides that they want chickens and all kinds of farm animals I’m going to get all that smell in my yard. I don’t want that.”

To mitigate some of those concerns, the proposed ordinance requires that chickens and ducks be in an enclosure or shelter that is thirty feet away from any neighboring dwelling, and five feet from both the side and rear property line. The bird enclosures are only allowed behind a house, or whatever main structure is on the property, and must be less than 200 square feet.

Beehives must be 25 feet away from the property line or include a flyaway barrier of six feet high installed above.

At a community meeting where residents expressed concerns about animal keeping, a farmer brought a couple of chickens in a cage to prove they didn’t make much noise.

The proposed ordinance specifies animal husbandry as “the keeping of certain urban farm animals and domestic honeybees for personal consumption or utilization of agricultural products, such as eggs, meat, or honey.”

“These are not pets. We’re not talking about your pet chicken. This is food. This is food system work,” Wallace says. “We took a very deliberate and intentional design approach centering three things: the welfare of the animals, how do you center the animal keepers, and how do you center the neighbors?”

This ordinance has been a long time coming. Wallace began working on it in 2011 alongside Kathryn Lynch Underwood, a former senior planner with the City of Detroit City Planning Commission who spearheaded the project. It started with getting an urban agriculture ordinance on the books, which allowed for urban farms and gardens. That ordinance was passed in 2013 and initially included animal husbandry in addition to produce, but Wallace says the animals were removed because they thought it was more likely to pass without them. At the time, animals like goats, turkeys, and rabbits were listed, but they were removed due to community feedback.

“What we found in talking to [the] community was that not many people were raising rabbits,” she says. “Goats are food and provide a lot of different things like milk and cheese… But people said very strongly, no, we do not want to see goats. So it came down to chickens, ducks, and bees.”

The first public hearing for an animal husbandry ordinance in Detroit was in 2016 and things stalled after that. Underwood retired in 2022 but the work continued and Jeffrey took up the charge within the City Planning Department.

“We still worked on the ordinance after that but a lot of things affected that,” Wallace says about why it’s taken so long. “Drop a pandemic in there. Drop a bankruptcy in there when the city has a lot of other things to look at. Elections, leadership changes…. There’s been an elongated timeline for a lot of reasons.”

While the general consensus among Detroit’s urban farmers is positive, Detroit Hives wants bees removed from the ordinance. Detroit Hives co-founder Timothy Paule tells Metro Times that the ordinance puts too many restrictions on beekeeping, and will hinder its operations.

Detroit Hives was founded in 2016 and has hives in over 29 locations including a mixture of vacant lots, urban gardens, and educational institutions in neighborhoods like Brightmoor, Jefferson Chalmers, Osbourne, and more.

Under the proposed ordinance, Detroit Hives would need a separate license for each location.

“Who is pushing for this ordinance as it relates to beekeeping?” Paule says. “After attending several community input sessions, there have been numerous comments as it relates to chickens and ducks. Many residents are against it. However, there have been no complaints as it relates to honeybees… Keeping chickens and ducks is illegal. Those people that’s been keeping chickens and ducks have received numerous complaints and [have] been ticketed. Keeping bees is not illegal in the city of Detroit. ”

Beekeeping is somewhat of a legal gray area in Detroit. It is legal in the State of Michigan, with certain regulations, but the City of Detroit doesn’t have any laws or ordinances that mention beekeeping.

“BSEED’s interpretation is that beekeeping is illegal, and they’re the ones doing the enforcing,” Jeffrey says. “The reason I think there is a gray area is because bees are not mentioned in the current regulations.”

The ordinance also doesn’t allow animal keeping on vacant lots, so Detroit Hives would need to have several special land use hearings to get permission to operate on these spaces. Animal keepers also have to register with animal control and be subject to inspection.

“To me, that looks like there’s more policing in areas that are predominantly beekeepers of color,” Paule says. “We’ve been doing this for over eight years focused on vacant lots. You have a vacancy. It’s not like we’re putting these hives in densely populated communities. It seems like the ideal place to keep them.”

Special land use hearings through BSEED typically cost $1,000 but Jeffrey says the city is considering lowering the cost for farmers. Typically the $1,000 fee is for commercial building projects.

Even if the cost is lowered, Paule worries that the process will take too long, rendering many of their spaces illegal in the meantime. He notes that it once took four years for Detroit Hives to legally acquire a home next to one of their hives through the city.

“We had the resources, the funding. I don’t know what it was, but it took four years,” he says. “We don’t want that to be an issue with the ordinance where it takes that long to get the proper license for us to keep bees.”

If beekeepers don’t want bees included in the ordinance, Jeffrey says he’s willing to remove them. However, he notes that in meetings with local beekeepers, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and Detroit Hives is one of few outliers.

Jeffrey says including bees in the ordinance is a way to protect beekeepers, the same way the urban agriculture ordinance protects farmers and gardeners from having their farms destroyed if they follow the rules.

“My approach is that you want city code to expressly say you have a right to do something because if it doesn’t, at any time it can be challenged,” he says. “If it’s expressly stated, you’re in a much safer space… Our recommendation would be to move forward and review any tweaks to the language. This has been a 10-plus-year journey so I would hate to see us get close to the end and they ask for it be removed and I don’t know when another train is going to leave the station.”

To the naysayers, Wallace stresses that many people are already keeping chickens and ducks in their backyard. Passing the ordinance is just a way to make sure it is being done properly, for both the neighbors and the animals’ sake.

“No one wants to deal with chickens walking down the street,” she says. “And not everybody knows how to take care of animals… I don’t care what kind of space you got, [if] you can’t take care of them, well, you don’t need to have them. This will eliminate some of the bad actors running around… Right now there are people paying the price because it’s illegal and they’re gonna continue to pay that price unnecessarily. Let’s allow people to do it well. If you don’t do it well, you don’t get [the] permits.”

She adds, “Pray in 2024, we’re gonna have an ordinance, and a good one.”