A new ordinance makes it legal, even easy, to start a farm in the city. Here’s what the future could hold.

The Boston Zoning Commission did something that promises to give the city back a piece of its past while potentially catapulting it into a strange new future: It approved a new rule making it legal to start a commercial farm inside city limits.

Until the turn of the 20th century, it wasn’t all that unusual for Bostonians to earn their living through farming, and as late as 1895, the city was producing more crops and livestock products than any Massachusetts town except Dartmouth. This changed as the city modernized and grew denser, driving real estate prices up and eventually, in 1965, leading to the passage of a citywide zoning code that introduced all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles to starting a farm anywhere in Boston.

No longer. The new zoning ordinance, known as Article 89, explicitly lays out what kinds of farms Bostonians are allowed to start—from how many acres they can be to whether farmers are allowed to slaughter chickens on site. (The answer to that second one is no.) Thomas M. Menino signed off on the ordinance as one of his final acts as mayor, opening the door to an unfamiliar vision of Boston—as a city that grows its own food.

What will urban farming look like? The most obvious agrarian fantasies—cows grazing on the Common, like they did until 1830, or the concrete bustle of Dewey Square giving way to the peaceful swaying of corn stalks—are, perhaps just as obviously, the least likely to happen. But not every farm looks like a farm any more. A new type of agriculture has been sprouting up in urban centers like Tokyo, New York, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and Boston’s new ordinance opens the city up to a whole range of ideas about how to integrate food production into city life.

To its devotees, urban farming is not a trend but a movement—one with ambitions to improve the quality of the food city-dwellers eat, decrease the distances food must travel before it arrives in their stomachs, and provide access to nutritious produce in low-income neighborhoods. And it has inspired schemes from the very pragmatic to the wildly fanciful.

On the practical end, Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development is already accepting proposals for three separate sites in Dorchester and Roxbury that they hope will turn vacant lots into farmland. On the more inventive side, entrepreneurs are trying to reimagine the traditional mechanics of agriculture so that it might be woven into the built landscape of a dense and busy city. Now that Boston has officially signaled its interest, the possibilities are vast—maybe Boston can even become home to North America’s first skyscraper farm, an idea put forward by Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier, who believes the future of agriculture lies in stacking greenhouses one on top of another.

Not everyone thinks urban farming is the future of food production, or even a good idea in the first place. As economists have pointed out, conventional agriculture in a thriving city is an extremely low-value use of square footage and one that might waste as much energy as it saves. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of the book “Triumph of the City,” wrote in these pages that, “it is a mistake to think that metropolitan areas could or should try to significantly satisfy their own food needs.”

The skepticism about urban farming surely deserves a hearing, and land prices may well have the final say on whether the idea ever becomes more than a series of pilot projects. But it’s also worth opening this question up to clear blue-sky imagination: What could Boston be in for, exactly, if urban farming here didn’t just take off, but went into the stratosphere?

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> via Boston Globe