Among the topics discussed in this appearance: the Supreme Court decision regarding the Affordable Care Act, the possibility of Saint Louis city and county sharing police resources, Schlafly Brewery’s urban farm proposal (and its tax implications).

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They aren’t asking for subsidies for their enterprise, and they don’t insist on free public land. They aren’t lobbying the state to impose their preferences on anyone else, either. While they would like more people to agree with them, they go about convincing people without coercion. They show their neighbors the benefits of their lifestyle — no local food mandates or preferential policies are involved.

Anyone who lives in an area that allows chickens can try this approach.

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“It’s really a conundrum,” says Sibella Kraus, president of nonprofit Sustainable Agriculture Education, or SAGE, which encourages sustainable local farming. “There is this demand for local, but we’re not really investing in local.” Ms. Kraus, known for her work planning the San Francisco Ferry Building market, says that while development is at a lull now due to the real-estate downturn, government at the state and local level hasn’t created enough incentives to prevent farmland loss when economic activity rebounds.

It’s worth noting that the advocates quoted here are not fighting for environmentally sound agriculture, or for forging relationships with farmers, or for supporting small farms. All those things could be done at a distance. They want the farming to take place at close geographical proximity; they think minimizing the physical space between grower and consumer is what matters. If what they really cared about were the environment or small farms, they would drop their demands for farmland in San Francisco — where it makes no sense economically — and instead support those practices where farmland is affordable. Which is more sustainable: farming in a rural area where land values are stable and crops pay for themselves, or farming next to a big city where the high price of land means the enterprise would fail without subsidies?

So, advocates should abandon the idea that “local” is a code word for “sustainable” or “better.” It isn’t. It just means “close by.” If you look around and see that the farmers near you are environmentally responsible, you can’t conclude that farmers everywhere are equally responsible. And those other farmers are local from the point of view of their neighbors. Every destructive, unsound farming practice is local to the people who live near it.

When cities or state grant subsidies to local agriculture — and in every policy I’ve seen proposed, “local” is defined in terms of a geographical area — they can’t be sure that those subsidies will go to the good local farmers and not the bad local farmers. Even if all the farmers who currently work in that region are all virtuous, there’s no guarantee that an unscrupulous farmer from somewhere else won’t move in to become local and claim the subsidy.

To those who argue for such subsidies in Missouri, I say: Not in my backyard!

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The Carbondale, Ill., Planning Commission was debating this month whether to allow residents to keep chickens when Priscilla Pimentel, a member of the city’s Sustainability Commission, added goats to the mix.

“If you can have a 250-pound dog in town, why not a miniature goat that can produce milk?” she says. “It’s just common sense.”

Miniature goats are about as big as medium-sized dogs, and can be led around on leashes. Like chickens, they’re domesticated animals that don’t threaten anyone. People should be allowed to own them in cities.

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Unwanted chickens will be kept to a minimum if the birds go to people who seek them out of their own volition. Foisting chickens on reluctant citizens will result in abandoned animals. With that in mind, I’m not in favor of the Maplewood-Richmond Heights School District’s plan to encourage chicken ownership. The district has a goal of convincing 50 families to keep chickens. I’m afraid that if it offers too much encouragement, people who aren’t so excited about chickens are going to give in and adopt them, only to abandon them later. A better goal would be to provide information about chickens to anyone who’s interested, without setting a lower bound for the number of chicken owners.

The district’s on-site chicken coop is a good idea; children can learn a lot about animal life cycles from watching chickens. When I was in elementary school, individual classrooms raised chicks. Building one coop for the whole school might allow for more efficient maintenance, and classes could come one at a time to observe the birds. It also could be more practical to keep chickens on a permanent basis than to order new chicks each year and give them away when school’s out.

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Bailey was quoted suggesting that urban chickens undermine local economies, saying, “We have a lot of small farmers around here making chickens and eggs available for sale. My fundamental question is: Why aren’t we supporting the regional economy?”

Here is the op-ed’s excellent response:

I would argue that urban chickens would in fact strengthen Iowa’s economy, especially when we consider unique and important businesses such as the McMurry Hatchery in Webster City, known nationally for its collection of rare chicken breeds. Likewise, I highly doubt Bailey would make such an argument when considering whether citizens ought to be allowed to have vegetable gardens.

City residents are also part of the economy, and they shouldn’t have to pass up opportunities to create value for themselves in order to protect people who are already farming. Transactions in which money changes hands aren’t the only economic activity that matters.

In fact, the freedom to raise your own chickens is an important check on the farmers’ power. When customers can build their own chicken coops, farmers aren’t able to overcharge them for eggs or sell lower-quality eggs than what the market demands. If farmers don’t offer acceptable price and quality, customers will walk away and raise chickens themselves.

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The urban farmer seemed out of place, because he made little effort to connect his locavore ideology to the problem of childhood weight gain. Of course, children will be healthier if they eat lots of fruits and vegetables, but there’s no reason those fruits and vegetables have to be grown in their cities instead of, say, shipped in from a field in California. The farmer railed against buying food from foreign countries — which, again, is no reason to avoid food from California, even if you accept his protectionist premise. Then he concluded with a few more off-topic pronouncements, including, “When farmers are in business, schools are out,” which sounds to me like an argument against relying on local food for children’s nutrition, and a recommendation that cities grow food in vacant buildings. (Not vacant lots, vacant buildings.)

The mayor of Hernando, Miss., offered more relevant comments, although he too gave the obligatory nods to farmers’ markets and urban gardens. He had a lot of ideas about things cities can do to invite physical activity, such as repairing sidewalks and building playgrounds. The mayor’s emphasis on local policies rather than federal mandates was refreshing. (You see, I have local biases of my own.) And I appreciated it when he said that government should not tell people to be healthy because “that’s a private decision.”

The mayor of Somerville, Mass., advocated a more invasive approach for government. His “Shape Up” campaign goes so far as to place a public stamp of approval on certain menu items at restaurants. Even more troubling is the mayor’s declaration, “The healthy choice must be the easy choice.” This recalls the attitude expressed by a student in Clayton when she spoke in support of the proposed smoking ban: If a choice is good, the city should ensure that it is also easy and fun. In other words, you shouldn’t have to make any sacrifices or be at all inconvenienced when you do the right thing — not if the government can help it. Take that way of thinking just a tiny step further, and the government will be making your choices for you.

While most of the speakers had creative plans for cities and schools, none of them explained why the federal government should play a role or why change couldn’t come from the ground up. The first lady emphasized that her campaign won’t try to impose Washington’s vision on everyone, but it’s hard to believe that when she says she’d like to turn convenience stores into produce markets.

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The text of the proposed ordinance anticipates concerns about sanitation and possible nuisances, and it includes regulations to prevent problems. I hope that those clauses satisfy the critics. Cities like Columbia should not allow anyone to pack unsanitary numbers of poultry into city plots, but residents who raise a few hens in their backyards without harming their neighbors should be left alone.

If you’d like to learn more about urban chickens in Columbia, supporters have created a blog and a series of YouTube videos.

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Shelter Relations Coordinator Allison Toth said a chicken was brought in during the summer. The staff named it Tyson, after the food manufacturing company.

[…] It was a small inconvenience until Tyson was finally adopted by board member Ann Korschgen, who owns a farm.

But staff cannot rely on such acts on a regular basis.

The argument that no one should be permitted to keep chickens because a few of them will probably be abandoned is unpersuasive. By that reasoning, the city should ban cats and dogs, too, because some owners leave them at shelters. And, although it’s inconvenient for a shelter to build new coops, the city’s animal population changes over time and shelters need to evolve.

The shelter’s contract for 2010 excludes chickens, and the city is thinking of other ways to deal with abandoned chickens this year — perhaps paying a farmer to take care of them. That means the shelter would have a whole year to prepare for the chickens’ arrival.

And I don’t buy the argument that no one will adopt chickens. When urban chickens are illegal, the shelter has to wait for someone from a farm to take a stray chicken. But if city residents could keep chickens, there would be many more potential chicken owners. Finding homes for abandoned chickens would be easier.

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These videos are more professional than anything people will produce at the “Portrait of America” kiosks. They show edited interviews with rural, small-town, and urban residents. Each segment tries to convince viewers that the Census is important.

I started with “Broadway” and watched Breanne and Dave talk about their urban garden. The video briefly mentions that the Census helps determine the allocation of grant money, including the funding their garden received. But, mostly, Breanne and Dave list the fruits and vegetables they’re growing. We also get to see a close-up of their coop, and to read this message:

So you can have a say in how your neighborhood grows.

This implies that how people garden in your neighborhood is something we all have to decide collectively — and that if you don’t fill out your Census form, you won’t get to choose between strawberries and tomatoes.

Next, I turned to “Pine Road.” (Who came up with these hokey names? Well, I guess I should just be glad they didn’t call it “Highway Census.”) You can’t miss the farmer’s market. I searched the scene in vain for a raw milk distributor — maybe they’re hiding the milk in one of those coolers in fear of a sting operation.

I listened to Chris’ story — and was amused by the Census Bureau’s stereotypical depiction of free-market supporters. Chris is a taxidermist. He doesn’t have a license to do this, because his state, Texas, doesn’t license taxidermists. That seems unremarkable. Why should you have to get a license to stuff dead wildlife? Who would the license protect? The animals? They’re already dead!

Chris doesn’t think we need any more laws and regulations about taxidermy. Because of this, the website informs us in the written preview of the video, Chris is reluctant to share any information with the government. In other words, this implies, if you don’t want your state to impose a bunch of extraneous license requirements on you, you must be a paranoid Texan who doesn’t want to fill out a form about how many people live in your household. And you probably have a whole herd of dead deer behind you, too.

Then, something amazing happens. The interviewer hands Chris a Census form. Chris has never seen one of these before and doesn’t know what’s on it. (I wonder where he was when we did this 10 years ago. Maybe he was too busy hunting.) In addition to being a skilled taxidermist, Chris is also an expert speed reader. He glances at the sheet for one second, expresses astonishment that it’s only a page long, and is converted. The Census doesn’t ask any questions about income, so Chris is willing to fill it out. The interviewer doesn’t bother to inform him that we tell the government about our income on a different form, one we’re supposed to fill out more often than once a decade.

Breanne, Dave, and Chris are all entitled to their opinions. What I don’t like is that the Census Bureau is using tax dollars to produce videos about them, giving the impression that personal gardens are good uses of federal funding or that Chris’ views are representative of free-marketers. The Census Bureau should stick to its job of administering the Census. If these other people want to share their lives, they can do that on YouTube.

One last thing, in case you’re wondering: If you want to be a taxidermist in Missouri, you’ll need to buy a $30 permit.

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