Another reader asks for a post on the economics of keeping chickens, or a goat; and/or having a vegetable garden.
Hmm. Well, the most valuable concept you need here is that of opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is the next best alternative use of an asset--in this case, your time. Say you are offered two jobs, one that pays $100,000 and one that pays $60,000. That $60,000 is the opportunity cost of taking the higher paid job.
So if you're going to have a vegetable garden or stock, you want to carefully consider the opportunity cost of your time. You could be taking on extra work to pay for food. Unless you make a very low wage indeed, you will probably spend less time earning the money to buy the food than you would growing it yourself.
Yes, you may say, but I can't find a decent job for only a few hours a week at my convenience. But wait! Don't forget that your leisure is also an important opportunity cost. After all, if you didn't value it pretty highly, you'd already have another job. If you wouldn't trade that hour of leisure for fresh vegetables in a straight-up barter deal, you probably shouldn't garden. And critters are even more demanding. Also, they smell quite a bit, so if you don't like farm smells (it happens I do), you should never keep stock.
Did I mention that if you get chickens/goats/pigs, the neighbors will almost certainly complain?
On the other hand, animals are a lot of fun to watch, and pretty rewarding to feed. And lots of people, through some sort of tragic congenital failure, actually enjoy gardening. And unless you live in farm country, your own tomatoes will be vastly superior to anything you can buy--they are literally priceless.
Carefully weigh all those considerations, and then decide what's right for you. Me, I've got a dog and a window box, and that's about enough.
"the neighbors will almost certainly complain"
And the zoning officials will agree with your neighbors.
"the neighbors will certainly complain"
Not if the Coase theorem works...
Unless, of course, you would trade in that hour of leisure for fresh vegetables and an hour working in the garden.
I live in an urban neighborhood where, by ordinance, you can keep up to three chickens (though no roosters), though I haven't gotten any yet.
Megan misses one other positive: if you grow it you have better confidence in what's in it. Even if you spring for the high-end eggs at the supermarket, you're dependent on some other organization to ensure the accuracy of claims about the chickens being cage-free and their feed being vegetarian, or whatever it is you demand from your eggs.
This isn't a huge point, but for some will count as much as the pleasure of feeding the critters.
With a title like, "Growing your own," I thought this post was going to be about something else entirely. =(
I just spent this past week looking for housing and I found a place yesterday that was perfect in every respect, except the landlady kept a coop of hens in the backyard for eggs. Even assuming the birds are wonderfully cared for, who wants to hear and smell a bunch of chickens? It was reason enough for me to rule out living at the place.
So, in this case anyway, here's a concrete example of a property becoming harder to rent when backyard farm animals are brought into the mix. I can't imagine it makes you popular with the neighbors, either.
Also, it's worth remembering that nowadays chickens are bred either for meat or for eggs. The male "layer" strain is identified after hatching and killed, often by being tossed into a trash can and smothered beneath the weight of other male chicks. You can probably give your hens better welfare in your backyard than they would receive at a free-range egg farm, but unless you're taking in an equal number of layer-strain roosters, there's killing that happens behind the scenes for each female chick you take in.
And unless you live in farm country, your own tomatoes will be vastly superior to anything you can buy--they are literally priceless.
I don't understand this. Even if they are vastly superior to any other tomato you can buy, why would they be "literally" priceless? Even the most superior quality item of any particular class surely has a price, no?
That said, I can't wait for the Cherokee Purples growing in my backyard.
Just to consider a nit, if I may. In your example of opportunity cost, wouldn't it be clearer to point to the $40,000 differential between the two salaries as the opportunity cost, or benefit foregone, of taking the lesser-paid job? Or did I miss some aspect of opportunity cost in your explanation that went over my head like an unmanned spy plane?
Now, to the matter at hand: I'd be interested in reading your take on the many online futures markets for such commodities as the results of the recent Presidential primary races and other outcomes in the spheres of current events and sports and such.
why would they be "literally" priceless?
I think she was trying to say they otherwise wouldn't exist, therefore you couldn't buy them, therefore they were without price.
Megan misses one other positive: if you grow it you have better confidence in what's in it. Even if you spring for the high-end eggs at the supermarket, you're dependent on some other organization to ensure the accuracy of claims about the chickens being cage-free and their feed being vegetarian, or whatever it is you demand from your eggs.
This isn't a huge point, but for some will count as much as the pleasure of feeding the critters.
Posted by Lorenzo | June 17, 2008 5:59 PM
Lorenzo,
for anyone who isn't, still, suckling on the teat of all things CorpGov, it should be a huge point.
People who don't investigate what's in their Processed/Packaged Foods, labeled 'Organic' or not, or, further, who haven't bothered to consider the implications of J-I-T, Financially driven, madness, are courting far more Risk than they may, otherwise, care to bear..
Different plants have different costs. Basil thrives on neglect, for instance. Also, when we get herbs we don't always use them all in a week. Whereas if I have a rosemary plant I can pick small amounts of fresh herb as I need them and get them perfectly fresh ... It still isn't worth my time though.
But then, the less area of your yard which grows grass the less time and energy you need to devote to that complete waste of space. I prefer living in the desert and just xeriscaping but if I have to grow something, herbs are better than grass.
John:
$60,000 is the opportunity cost--what you've forgone by taking the higher paying job. $40,000 is the net gain, and because it's positive, you should take the higher paying job (all other things being equal, of course.)
Slow day?
The Soviets tried something similar where citizens were allowed to cultivate a small plot of land outside the city. Though I've never seen any actual numbers, supposedly despite the fact that these plots combined to a very small percentage of the total farmland, they produced a very significant amount of produce, thus being far more efficient than the collective farms.
Of course in Western world, farms are much more efficient and opportunity costs are vastly different.
Of course in Western world, farms are much more efficient and opportunity costs are vastly different.
This seems important based on the original question - if the goal is to minimize my costs, I'm not confident that I can produce food for less than those who specialize in it, any more than I'd expect a farmer to be a more productive engineer than me.
IMO the greatest benefits of "raise your own" are not economic, but social. If more people had first-hand experience with food-providing plants and animals from a young age, more of them might refrain from adopting exceedingly silly perspectives on dietary lifestyles later in life. (Which is not to say that all motivations for those lifestyles are silly, only that too many of them are.)
"Growing your own" makes economic sense on a small scale if you broaden the definition to participating in Community Supported Agriculture. CSAs are a way to lease a bit of a farm's production. Farming is a skill and Joe and Jane Average don't have it circa 2008. CSAs do a better job of spreading risk then farming in your backyard, have higher skill operators, and more variety. If you want to go outside the prevailing economic model of food production the smart choice is to join a CSA, not grow your own food on 1/3 acre in your backyard.
I feel I should respond to Erik above:
I have four chickens, they hatched from some chickens of a neighbors. We had roosters as well, but they are a bit noisy. Didn't bother me but some other neighbors complained. Turned out the local orchard was more then happy to have them (they walk around eating bugs which is a nice natural way for them to keep the bug population down). The chickens are pretty pleasant little things wandering around the yard eating shoots and bugs. They are very little trouble four quite a lot of eqqs. Zoning here allows chickens (though not roosters).
There is nothing like growing some of your own food to make you realize how miraculously inexpensive commercially grown food really is. I do it because I enjoy it, of course, but I'm not going to quit my day job to become a subsistence farmer. Nor will anyone else who makes more than a dollar an hour or so.
Chickens also attract rats, who are attracted to the feed. And foxes, if you live in England at least.
This is a more detailed analysis of the costs of growing your own...but did I originally see it here? I can't remember!
May I also point out that if you have a small yard, chickens will eat and tear up all your kitchen scraps, thereby reducing how much household waste goes into the landfill system? (Meat and fat don't compost well, but chickens love them.)
There is another opportunity cost. Always buying your food at the supermarket means not knowing where your food comes from. Not only in a geographic sense, but in the sense that the food comes from the ground and grows on plants. There are many people that have no idea how food is grown. Just ask your kids.
Why is this important? Because it cuts you off from your human roots. Were you evolved to watch tv or to grub in the ground for food or hunt in the forest for game? What does it cost us, as individuals and as a culture, to no longer be in touch with that heritage?
You mean we're not going to eat free-range chicken and goat?
Free Range Chickens are one of those animals that just aren't worth it to raise yourself to eat. They're a lot of work to prepare once you've killed them and not very good eating since they run around so much if they're free range.
Sadly it's only hormone injected, never moves more than 2 inches chickens for me.
Now if you use them for eggs that's ok. And they do taste diffrent (some say better).
Literally priceless?
Yes, for it is written in the Book of John Denver: "Only two things that money can't buy: That's true love and home grown tomatoes."
The analysis on a theoretical level is solid- however, there is an easier way to determine whether or not one should do it. Just try it for a growing season, and if you don't like doing it, then don't. Some people enjoy home gardening/animal husbandry more than other hobbies, while others will find it to be a chore. I am a scientist- I like experimentation.
An urban vegetable garden's opportunity cost is there to be conspicuously consumed, not calculated.
I am looking out my window at my nine wooded, rolling acres in East Tennessee, and wondering -- what are these "neighbors" and "zoning" of which you speak? They sound dreadful.
A point I don't see raised on the economics, though Yancey hints at it: If you have a job you enjoy that pays decently that takes 40-50 hours a week of your time, you still might prefer not to work even more hours at it. After 8 hours at a computer working in my perennial beds (which don't even provide food, but make looking out the window and arriving at my home much nicer) is more appealing than one more hour of editing, and gets me outside and lightly exercising. So if you actually LIKE gardening, or at least the results, there's an opportunity cost to not doing it and putting in one more hour of work instead.
With limited flat sunny backyard space and many rampaging children, I've settled on four little raised beds, one for each child who lives here (economic benefit almost nil, growing their own things in dirt benefit worth the cost of seeds and moo doo), one for lettuces (truly makes a better salad if you pick it yourself 10 minutes before dinner) and one for tomatoes (no one argues with homegrown tomatoes in the thread, I notice). But I would absolutely hate having to garden at a level that would feed my family for a year, even though I admire people who do it.
As for chickens, they seem to be allowed in my suburb.
Response to elmo
I live on 7 acres in South Louisiana. I would say that gardening can easily pay for itself. I have a fig tree (singular) that is productive enough that I can jar 30 - 40 lbs of figs from that tree alone every year. Last year I had two Jalepeno pepper plants, three bell pepper plants and two tomato plants. I jarred 12 lbs of Jalepeno peppers and 6 lbs of Jalepeno relish (Jalepenos, bell peppers, tomatoes and store bought onions chopped up and jarred) This in addition to fresh vegetables for a month or so when they were producing. This year I don't have a garden yet because I was moving into my new house on the same property) If done right gardening is easily productive. The problems are:
To many people don't know how to do it efficiently
People try to grow exotic vegetables or 'perfect' organic vegetables instead of going for a larger volume of slightly imperfect ordinary vegetables.
Raising animals for food is worthless as far as saving money is concerned - you cannot compete.
Elmo:
Where in East Tennessee? I have about 13 acres outside of Johnson City myself. Are you a native or did you move to East Tennessee for the rural lifestyle?
There are two additional things to consider, supply and demand. If this was done by many people, two things would happen. The demand would decrease for the various global markets. The supply would increase (although you would be consuming the supply). The overall effect would be lower prices around the world. This would be a good thing because it would allow more food to be purchased by poor areas with the same amount of aid dollars. This could help reduce poverty!
"Raising animals for food is worthless as far as saving money is concerned - you cannot compete."
I have to disagree. I keep three heifers and each year slaughter three yearlings. My sister and I each keep one and we sell the other. Our only costs are hay for the winter, miscellaneous fencing and barn supplies, tractor fuel, vet services (most years only artificial insemination), and the butcher costs to cut and wrap the meat. Most years the costs are covered by the beef sale. We probably put in five hours per week on average, more in winter and less in summer. Seems to work well for us anyway.
When I was young my father did all the cutting and wrapping and we made our own hay so costs can even be less. In the future I may have the time to get back to that.
By the way, our property is rocky hill country, not good for much, even my grandfather couldn't make it as a subsistence farmer.
" ...I keep three heifers and each year slaughter three yearlings...."
How do you kill them? When I was a kid, my parents used to raise their own beef, and we would kill the animal by shooting it in the forehead with a .22 revolver and then immediately cutting the throat. That works fine when you live on a large farm and the neighbors are completely out sight and sound range, but it wouldn't be practical when you're close to suburbia.
I can say this much. Everyone should have the opportunity to labor in a garden.
Some things build character, and if you think your time is not worth spending it weeding, cultivating the ground, weeding, planting seeds, weeding, watering, weeding, and sweating under the sun, your missing out on something that isn't exactly quantifiable in this life.
They're more to life than stuff and money.
I never knew how nice it is to labor from time to time in the garden until I planted one a few years back.
Hard work, perserverence, better person and all that. And strangely enough its one of the times my wife and I get to spend the time with each other, planting these insignificant looking seeds, wondering if by the same miracle as last year they'll actually grow again this year, fighting the demon weed overlord and being thrilled that we spent 3 months tending some corn that would have cost us a mere 25 cents an ear at the store...
We used to shoot them with a small caliber rifle and process them ourselves. Now since we use the butcher service they do that since they have to be alive when they show up.
I don't think this kind of operation would work very well close to suburbia. For grass fed beef you need quite a few acres, otherwise you lose your cost advantage by buying grain.
Toddg,
I think you are underestimating, if not ignoring entirely, the opportunity cost of raising your livestock. You say you and your sister spend about 5 hours a week on your livestock, which comes to about 5200 hours a year. The exact value of that time is hard to measure, but you can get an idea of it by asking yourself how much someone would have to pay you to sit in a room and copy a dictionary for five hours a week. That gives you an idea how much you value those five hours of leisure.
Twenty bucks per hour, maybe? If you take that as a reasonable guess, then there is another ten grand or so in opportunity costs. The point Jane was trying to make is that that opportunity cost will make raising your own food a losing proposition for most people. Now, you may derive some intangible benefits (enjoyment, family bonding, etc.) from the activity that makes it a net gain for you personally, but a lot of people will see raising livestock as work, rather than recreation, and it is those people we are talking about.
Unless you're taking samples of your home-grown produce, poultry, eggs, etc., to the chem lab for analysis, you have no idea what's in it.
Psittakos,
I'm in Roane County, about 30 miles west of Knoxville. I'm a California transplant (sorry!)-- moved here about 5 years ago specifically because I could get a whole lot of land for very little money. And because it's so GREEN! Growing up in Southern Cal, and then living in the Sierra for 8 years, I hadn't ever seen so much greenery in my life.
On the topic of the thread, we grow tomatoes, peppers, basil, rosemary, blueberries, blackberries, squash, and cucumbers. Last year I planted two cherry trees and two apple trees, but they haven't started producing yet. Oh yes -- and I grow prodigious amounts of kudzu, wild rose, wild blackberry, honeysuckle, and poison ivy. The place was completely overgrown when I bought it, and I have been cutting down kudzu and honeysuckle vines as big around as my forearm.
When I get some more fencing up, it'll be time for goats and chickens to join the eight dogs I already have. (Yes, they live in the house. The dogs, not the goats and chickens.) Although I'm intrigued by toddg's heifers! Producing yearlings via AI hadn't even occurred to me.
All that country living, and I'm only a half-hour away from lots of convenient shopping, a university hospital, and a pretty cool downtown scene. Shhhh! Don't tell anyone!
How about an article on making your own clothes or building your own house? We could also generate our own energy using windmills and pump and filter our own water. This whole specialization thing has obviously been a big failure... let's go back to being self sufficient.
Or not... I suspect that my self-sufficient ancestors did not fare nearly as well as I am in any way. Well... they probably didn't have to worry about which of many liesure activities to do in their free time.
Calculating opportunity cost based on salary is useful only to an extent. What is the real alternative? When I come home from work, if I'm not laboring in the garden, it's not like the alternative is to do more work. More likely, without a garden I would be watching TV. Also, I have to calculate in benefits like the exercise I get from gardening, which means I don't have to spent hours in the gym to look good.
If there's one thing that proves what utter nonsense economics is, it's the concept of "opportunity cost." What a load of bullshit!
Making at least some of your own clothes is fun, as every knitter knows.
Couldn't pay me enough to get me to tend a big garden, though. The one my family experimented with in the 70s put me off that sort of thing for life. (Good thing nobody forced me to knit at the time, because I would have grown up hating that too.)
I grow basil, mint, rosemary, and strawberries. Not enough of any one of them to do much more than make a little bit of pesto, season some meat, or snack on a fresh berry or two a day - but it's easy to do, and a lot cheaper for some things than buying at the supermarket (fresh herbs are ridiculously expensive, but incredibly easy and cheap to grow).
Staple foods, though? Forget it.
rpl,
I had given some thought to the value of our time. 5 hrs/week x 52 weeks/yr x $20/hr equals $5200 so you can probably buy a lot of beef for that.
But can I get $20/hr doing an enjoyable task at home on my own schedule for five hours per week? I wish I could find something like that. I might pay a kid $5/hr to do what I do but not much more. No skill involved, only consistency and dependability.
I suppose my opportunity costs are more like getting up 15 minutes early every work day and getting home 15 minutes later, and the odd Saturday spent in the field or the stable.
There definitely is a cost though, otherwise I suppose I would raise a few hogs or some goats too. I gave up on the chickens because I was loosing too many to predators.
With regards to the opportunity costs of raising beef cattle, what about taxes?
I say this because I worked with a guy who lived on his family's farm in Rappahannock County, VA and always had a couple of heads of Black Angus cattle. He, like toddg, said that the time and money they required were minimal and he always made it back when he sold his yearlings at auction, PLUS he had a huge property tax break because his land was being used for agricultural purposes. Meanwhile his rich neighbors who just liked living on lots of land were paying a lot more. But maybe that's a peculiarity to his county, though I did catch him trying to convince a fellow co-worker who had 10 acres in western Loudoun County to get into the game too, if only for the tax break.
I'm intrigued by the analysis: "opportunity cost". Seems rather static to me. My observation over 30+ years of gardening in a community spot is the key is the learning curve versus the enthusiasm decline. Those who start off having learned about gardening when they were small have an idea of what they're getting into and are somewhat realistic about the tradeoffs of time/expense versus pleasure/produce. Those who have more to learn seldom seem to find the experience rewarding, at least as the realities of weeds and watering and deer and chipmunks come into play.
No, you have not foregone the $60,000 - you got that plus $40,000 more. A better way of looking at it is if you took the $60,000 job (maybe you feel you would be giving back to the community or some such). The opportunity cost in passing up the $100,000 job is $40,000. Note: it is not $100,000, since you are still able to collect the $60,000. $40,000 is the opportunity cost you are paying to feel better about what you do to earn your living.
Or not... I suspect that my self-sufficient ancestors did not fare nearly as well as I am in any way. Well... they probably didn't have to worry about which of many liesure activities to do in their free time.
Posted by Earnest Iconoclast | June 18, 2008 2:02 PM
EI,
you seem to be, in general, cognitively abled, on this score, however, you may want to think again..
one clue, simply: your expressed thoughts, above, belie your Nom de Blog..
you should care to remember that there isn't any Quantitative difference between standing in the 'check-out' line, at the SuperMarket, and standing in a 'Soup Line'..
As always, you're Free to Choose, and 'Differin Opines make'm Run the Equuines'
response to toddg:
You are forgetting some very significant up front (and partly ongoing) capital costs that you mention in your post, but forget to calculate as part of your costs:
Your property is fenced - You either had to build that fence or pay for it in the price of the property. At some point you will need to re-do it because no fencing lasts forever. I don't have a fence around my property - since I have no livestock I don't need one. Lets assume you use old materials, scrounge, etc and can build your fences for nothing but 10 hrs of labor per acre (probably an understatement)
You have barn expenses - but first you need a barn. Just like the fence, it will also eventually need replacing. I don't have a barn because I have no livestock.
You have to maintain your tractor - once again, you had to buy a tractor to. I don't have a tractor because I don't need one.
If you factor in the cost to build a barn, buy a tractor, and put up your fencing, you are looking at a cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 - 30,000 dollars depending on how fancy you get. For that price you could purchase literally tons of beef, and that is even before your maintainence costs. If you usually cover your costs with the beef sales, then you have actually lost money on every single dollar of your capital investments - you would have been better off using the money that built (or bought) the barn, the tractor and the fencing to do something else.
Toddg:
I get your point; there may be no $20/hr job around as an alternative, but leisure is always an alternative, and it has some value to you. Exactly how much it is worth is hard to quantify, but estimating how much somebody would have to offer you to give up your leisure is a good start. So, it doesn't matter that nobody is actually willing to offer you $20 an hour to give up your leisure; if in fact you would say no to anything less than $20, then your leisure time is worth at least $20/hr (to you).
Similarly, the fact that working with your livestock is enjoyable doesn't reduce the opportunity cost; it just provides a benefit that may induce you to incur the opportunity cost in the first place. From the sound of it, that non-pecuniary return makes the whole deal a net positive for you. Somebody who does not reap that return (i.e. does not enjoy farming for its own sake) would probably find it a net negative, despite the fact that it slight accounting profit.
The last point speaks to Anon Y. Mous's objection to calculating opportunity costs. The fact that job A pays $100k does not negate the $60k opportunity cost of not taking job B (if B was indeed your next best alternative); it just means that job A provides benefits that exceed the costs, making it a good choice. Choosing job B would incur a $100k opportunity cost in exchange for $60k of benefits, making it a bad choice unless there were some other benefits we weren't told about (e.g., lower stress or more enjoyable work).
To put it another way, we incur opportunity costs every time we decide to do one thing and not another. If we are wise, the benefits we gain from those choices make the costs worthwhile, but they don't make the costs go away.
rpl &Eric,
Good comments, let me explain the background.
For fencing, that is a good part of the 5 hrs/week labor. We have moveable electric fence that must be moved during the summer to keep the pasture fresh. Then the rest of the year we have to walk around it and repair it due to the numerous deer knocking it down. (so a good part of my $20/hr job is just walking around the fence line)
My capital costs are sunk, so that doesn't change my decision making, but I'd like to point out that I drive a '49 Ford 8N tractor (runs like a top) and the stable was built around 1903.
My marginal cost advantage over the factory farms is spending nothing for feed. They obviously have the economies of scale. They also produce a better (more fatty) product. But when you are getting by on the cheap you can't have first class quality.
If I was starting from scratch, I would "bootstrap" the operation with minimum capital investment. No tractor until I saved the money to buy a used one. I would throw up a three sided shed to use for shelter. It wouldn't be for nothing, but I bet I could get started pretty cheaply. Both my grandparents were depression era farmers and that mentality prevails around here. (There are jars filled with used nails in the stable.) There is usually a cheap and scroungy way to do things, although that way usually involves more labor.
I also get your point about the personal gains I get from this job instead of pursuing leasure activities. Actually, I get that point just about every day. And I wouldn't take a $20/hr job and neither would my sister (she is president of an engineering firm). I think my leisure is worth about $50/hr, then I would think about take on more work.
So on a year to year cash basis, I am eating a lot of cheap steak and roasts. But if you charge the overhead and labor costs for a couple educated professionals then it doesn't money out so well.
Toddg,
good to see that you understand the difference between Economics and Finance, others would do well to take a page..
Your wannabe detractors offer the niggling points of the truly Naive.
toddg - yeah - having a reliable old tractor helps immensely and so does the old barn. Where I work there are a lot of guys in the cattle business - ranging from those with a couple of cows like yourself to the largest Brangus Breeder in the state of Louisiana. About 1/2 of them do things the way you are doing them, and the other 1/2 are in it to make 'real' money. The ones doing just a few cows are either doing it because they prefer to grow their own meat, or because they 'just like having animals around' or because they have horses or some other kind of animals they are already taking care of. It is based on their constant discussion of what they do, how they do it, the prices, etc. that has convinced me that there is no way in he** that I want anything to do with it.
Just a few words to anyone who might care to peruse them. Yall might not be in areas where chickens are welcome or cows are a discussion of the day but there is someone that got left out of the picture. What about the truck farmer who is hoping that her produce is selling well at the farmer's market? One might also consider that "home grown" ANYTHING contains nothing that the grower didn't personally use, apply, inject, etc. Contrary to what Dave might think, your own roast would not have an unknown death date or be full of all sorts of noxious things that would turn you into a diehard vegetarian if you knew what they were. My family eats a lot of venison that is harvested on our property. We have no problems with deer diseases and we know that tenderloin still warm when it hits the skillet is fresh. A standing ovation to yall who still keep a few cows (as we do - 17 at the present) all the way to yall who just grow your own mint and rosemary. And kudos to the one whose children know that groceries don't just happen. There is a saying here in the deep south that says don't cuss the farmer with your mouth full. Please, folks, consider taking your children to a working farm. Take them to the farmer's market. You owe it to them as well as to these hard working producers. Life is too short for kids to miss out on knowing how the world lives outside of "zoning and neighbors". Thanks for reading my humble thoughts.