Where are all the goats?

I feel for Quentin Nguyen.

He’s the guy who’s in trouble for trying to grow some green beans and broccoli at his home up in the Twin Cities.

It might help to imagine one of our predecessors from a few generations back visiting today’s typical residential neighborhood. Once he got used to the traffic, I’d guess that one of the first questions to come to his mind would be “Where are all the goats?”

Looking at the seemingly endless vista of closely nibbled grazing land, he’d no doubt be puzzled by the absence of the expected romping, gamboling flocks of goats, sheep, llama and maybe a Jersey cow or two. He might spot a squirrel or two doing a high wire act or the occasional bold bunny rabbit nosing out of a patch of hostas or around the corner of a backyard shed, but the critters who croppoed such a green and verdant pasture would be nowhere to be found, and if there were none to be had, an individual whose life had depended on the optimal utilization of every fertile acre could only be left to wonder what manner of bizarre ecology is this?

Such a thought, it seems, must have crossed Nguyen’s mind.

These, after all, are not ordinary times. When we venture out, masked and wary, encounters with sporadically stocked grocery shelves – the result of COVID-disrupted supply chains -- confounds our consumerist complacency. Discovering that what we’ve so long taken for granted may or may not continue to be granted, be it by chance, choice or circumstance, is more than a bit unnerving.

If the cupboard goes bare, what are we going to do?

Well, in Nguyen’s case he looked out over his 2/3 acre of unpastured pastureland and saw supper. Not right away, mind you, but given time, seeds, sun and cultivation he could easily envision a bounty of salads, side dishes and the occasional entrée where naught grew but unpalatable fescue and Kentucky blue.

So Nguyen got a tiller and got busy.

Then the city of Falcon Heights stepped in and civic authority put its foot down.

Right in the middle of Quentin Nguyen’s vegetable garden.

Seven decades ago the Falcon Heights city fathers – I imagine they’d be city grandfathers by now – decreed that the lands within the city not occupied by home, street, sidewalk or driveway should be planted to nothing but shrubs, trees and turf grass. Presumably, maintaining a bunch of billy goats to benefit from such a cityscape was also beyond the bounds of the law.

Thus, acre upon acre of potentially fertile farmland was legislated into uselessness – a landscape to be planted, watered, fertilized and tended to no rational economic or ecological purpose.

And of course, it’s not just in Falcon Heights. Turning a useless front lawn into a productive vegetable patch is well beyond the pale of local legislation in most neighborhoods, and if not explicitly afoul of an ordinance, definitely in defiance of prevailing practice.

Personally, I’m not particularly interested in tilling the sandy, cinder-ridden soil along my front walk. I’m not particularly interested in growing grass there either, but in either case the preference is a matter of overall horticultural indifference. My real preference would to toward native prairie, though I don’t have acreage sufficient to support so much as a single buffalo.

But if I did want to put in a few rows of string beans, snap peas, carrots, cukes and a melon vine or two – or if my neighbors were so inclined – I’d see it as no more an infringement on the civic good than the raucous roar and sulfurous spew of mowers, trimmers and edging machines doing violence to the morning peace.

A flock of goats, I’m not so sure about…