How one urban farmer battled red tape to sell local food and flowers in LA

Silver Lake Farms’ delicious microgreens: pea shoots (pictured above) and radish greens.

Struggling to Start a Farm in Los Angeles

By Karen E. Klein
Business Week
Dec. 28, 2010

Excerpt:

Kolla enhanced her soil with organic compost and planted it with dozens of annual and perennial varieties not usually sold by commercial florists. She invested about $15,000 in a truck and materials, including seeds, soil mix, and a market stand. “I had 14 rows, 15 feet each, of annuals such as sweet peas, ranunculus, cornflowers, anemones—dainty, old-fashioned flowers that people seem to really respond to because they are so quaint,” Kolla says.

Although there are restrictions on running businesses from private homes, Kolla says an official from her city council member’s office and a senior inspector in L.A.’s Building and Safety Dept. told her when she started that she would be fine as long as she didn’t sell the flowers on her property. By 2005, Kolla says she was breaking even by selling directly to the public at three farmers markets and wholesale to local flower shops. (She declines to disclose her revenue.)

Trouble started after she began holding occasional organic gardening classes in her backyard. In 2008, neighbors complained and circulated a petition against her company. “An inspector from Building and Safety knocked on my door out of the blue and informed me that I could not do what I was doing,” Kolla says. “It was a shame. Nobody [from the neighborhood] ever even talked to me to say it was a problem.”

Read the complete article here.