Please pass this along--GREAT NEWS!!! (For Minnesota cities looking to overturn ordinances)
SO.....I just found some VERY interesting and AWESOME NEWS! The State of Minnesota has what they call a GreenStep Cities program. It's a program cities can voluntarily join and it's a collection of environmental Best Practices and when a city joins they are promising to follow these best practices--implement and support them. Eagan, as of last year, joined the program. When I searched the site, I found the following: (check out letter B in particular!)
Conduct at least one of the following campaigns to measurably increase:
a. Purchase of food with at least one of the following attributes -- local, Minnesota-grown, organic, humanely raised, grown by fairly compensated growers.
b. Backyard gardening / chickens.
c. Institutional buying of local foods by schools, hospitals/nursing homes, restaurants and hotels, or grocery stores.
d.
Sale of local food in markets and restaurants.
We won our petition to overturn the ordinance in Eagan, MN! Should be official in about 30 days when the final ordinance is presented at a city council meeting. For information, please see our Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/eaganmn.backyardchickens