Kansas City urban farm aims to save the planet.

Neighbors call it a nuisance, city cracks down

By David Hudnall
The Kansas City Star
May 18, 2023

Excerpt:

“Nobody has a problem with the farm itself,” Carrena Moultrie, one of Urbavore’s neighbors, countered in an interview with The Star. “I want them to succeed and flourish. But they chose to move to a residential area. They chose to have a farm in the middle of all these houses. And now they’re running dump trucks and 18-wheelers and causing traffic on our quiet street. And that’s just not the way it’s supposed to be in a neighborhood like this.”

Navigating the bureaucratic maze of Kansas City’s zoning laws isn’t a new challenge for Salvaggio and Heryer. Before they started Urbavore, they ran Badseed Market, a Crossroads-based storefront farmers market stocked with vegetables they grew on a couple of acres near Bannister and State Line roads.

In 2010, neighbors unappreciative of the couple’s backyard livestock began to raise concerns about their operation. The city got involved and issued some zoning violations. One was for selling food on their property through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscriptions, where customers buy a portion of a farm’s harvest in advance and typically come by weekly to pick up their bounty of produce.

“It got really ugly and resulted in some very heated public hearings,” Salvaggio said.

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