Sessie
In the Brooder
Nope. Not in NJ. There's a reason why we New Jerseyeans often refer to our state as "the Gestapo State" - an obvious commentary on the stet of affairs here within "the Garden State".Perhaps you could get together with the other undercover chicken keepers and apply for the variance en masse?
All that will accomplish is for the authorities to hammer down HARD on all who keep chickens, contrarily to the statute(s) on the books.
NJ is very, VERY harsh, bureaucratically speaking.
Here's one example of this: Many years ago (mid-1990s?), when I was living in very urban Orange (Essex county), NJ - there was drought conditions and watering lawns, flowers & shrubs, trees - anything that was not covered as "agricultural" and "food" - was strictly forbidden, under penalty of very stiff/high fines (like $500 for first-stime scofflaw of the watering ban, and it went up to 6 months jail time + $5000 for repeated offenses… meaning 2 or more times). My vegetable & fruit garden was enclosed inside a 4-ft tall picket fence in the front (southern-exposure facing) yard, just outside my front door. I knew enough to know that agricultural plantings - food - was exempt from the water ban in the Garden State. I had - in raised beds, within my picket fence - rows of tomato plants, an asparagus bed,peppers & eggplants, cardoons, fennel, about 40 different herbs - all in pots, raspberries, strawberries, marigolds,cabbages & rainbow Swiss chard, cukes, peas, beans… and a few edible flowers. Outside my picket fence - but within the front yard - I had climbing roses (edibles), a crabapple tree, and ornamental/edible cabbages along both sides of the entire blue slate front path. I had every right, by law, to water anything edible. And so I positioned my 40+ pots, tubs, and half-barrels of herbs around everything ornamental - my 18403 magnolia tree, my mountain laurel and rhododendron, my forsythia, hosta & lilacs, and my tulip tree… and I strategically replanted the blueberries and strawberries similarly. I added a few miniature apple trees and fig trees - in pots - as well… they were all on get-it-gone-NOW clearance sale, since no one was buying, thanks to the draught conditions and the ban. And then, I watered, right out in the open - during the day, NOT late at night in the dark. I watered the dukey out of it all. I stood out there with the hose… as even for agricultural plants, it was forbidden by law to use sprinklers an other automatic watering devices… you had to stand out in the broiling heat and kiling sun and manually use a hose to water food crops. I did it. Three times a day. For hours. Each day. Of course, the cops came by and ticketed me the first day… the second day… the seventh day… and tenth day… I kept on telling them that I was only watering agricultural food crops. I let my grass lawn go brown and dry up and die. Didn't care. Finally, I was arrested as a scofflaw. Hubby took over, watering thrice daily, as necessary, pointing out it was only food crops. Before they could arrest him, I went before the municipal judge. I was armed with the proper state statutes. Hubby had also hire a lawyer for me, but he wasn't necessary. I insisted that I represent myself, for this, and the municipal prosecutor (whom I know, she was a neighbor of mine) allowed it. I won my case. I also forced the city to allow me to water my edible food crops in peace, thereafter, for the duration of the ban, that year. My neighbors who had quince trees tried to move what they could closer to their quinces to do as I was doing. I had to do this ALONE, though; had I done it with a whole gaggle of people, the prosecutor and judge would have fought me tooth and nail, as that would have seriously jeopardized the city's statistics for water consumption drop - which had to be reported to the state. All of my neighbors were all kinds of ticked off at me for not doing a class-action kind of thing, a group case. But they did better because I pioneered the way on my own. I had opened that door wide open for them to follow suit… and they sure did! Then, West Orange residents began to follow suit… those who lived in the Orange/West Orange Valley had heard about my experience, and the word passed up the hill to the fancier parts of West Orange. Then, neighboring residents of South Orange (in the Historic Montrose section, adjacent to our historic Seven Oaks section of Orange began to do the same.) In the end, my actions did nothing dangerous to the water source at the Orange Reservoir , and many valuable plants were saved.
The way to accomplish anything of this sort in NJ is to do it like I did - alone, in control, and with a LOT of pre-planning. It's just a Jersey thing. lol ;-)
