Imagine developing an urban farm in an area of the city that’s zoned agricultural. What would you do if the city didn’t understand your mission and destroyed everything you planted?

In this story, one biologist is in that exact situation, so he finds a way to get even while still creating a place he can conduct research.

Keep reading for all the details.

The city wanted us to get rid of native grass, so we built an urban wetlands!

It all goes back to the summer of 2021.

I started working as a biologist at an urban farm, planning and constructing polyculture systems to research food production.

I developed A plan for noxious weed control and started to construct the systems over the course of a two years.

They had to reach an agreement with the city.

During this time we had some back and forth with the city council, who didn’t understand the nature of our agriculturally zoned property.

After several meetings and lots of work over 2 years, we’d finally made a lot of progress and reached an agreement with the city by the summer of 2023.

Part of the agreement was to mow ditches and the small yard of our properties farm house.

I’ll remind you the property is zoned as agriculture. So we have no obligation to follow residential ordinances.

This is awful!

About halfway through the summer at the end of July, the city came on to our property and mowed are entire native pasture and what was soon to be an orchard of already planted baby trees..

When we talk to them, they noted ordinances against tall grass and state noxious weed laws as a justification.

The later of which is ironic because they interrupted our system of invasive plant control by mowing in a time when we should’ve been spraying bio herbicide.

Time for another plan.

So now in order to remove all the invasive plants from my property and comply with all the ordinances. None of which have anything to do with water! I have created a massive urban wetlands.

It’s huge, it’s beautiful, it’s wet. It’s compliant to every law and ordinance. It’s mine and the city mayor who lives next door to my farm can enjoy it just as much as I enjoy it living five miles away.

So now I have a wetlands to research instead of a prairie, and I love it! ❤️

The city clearly didn’t understand the mission, but at least OP found a way to modify the plan of action while annoying the mayor.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Time to hire a lawyer.

One person thinks this story sounds very familiar.

I was thinking about mosquitos too.

Here’s a good tip.

When one plan is destroyed, create an even better one!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.