Will Maine’s Constitutional ‘Right to Food’ protect backyard chickens in town?

Kamiwan and Paul Oliver against the city of Calais, me is a legal challenge to a local order regulating garden chickens in a city of around 3,000 residents on the Canadian border, under the “right to food” of Maine, adopted in November 2021.

Maine’s “right to food” is not a document, but a subsidy of its kind in the nation so that individuals cultivate, increase, harvest, produce and consume food of their choice. When adopted, some predicted that the “right to food” would cause a flood of judicial disputes. This was more a net, but the Calais affair deposited on September 10 with the Superior Court of the County of Washington of Maine may not be resolved until it reaches the Supreme Court of the State.

The question is the 2024-100 ordinance, adopted by the Calais municipal council on June 13, 2024, which regulates the backyard chickens in the more densely developed residential nucleus of the city using setbacks, location restrictions and size requirements, with a limited herd size of six chickens or less.

Kamiwan and Paul Oliver are rural dishes for life of modest means, with three children, aged 5, 10 and 10 years old. Kamiwan continues his part -time business diploma, and Paul is associated with sales. They live in a single -family house inherited on a quarter of a quarter of Acre in Calais. They relied on a form of public assistance to help meet the basic needs of their families, sometimes experiencing food insecurity when their income alone does not reliably provide enough food for everyone in cleaning.

Raising chickens since October 2023, the Ollivers to use their own properties to provide for their needs directly – offering a more stable and worthy food source than dependence on external aid. With 19 chickens and no roosters currently, they said that 15 chickens and no roosters could meet their needs. They do not provide eggs or chicken meat to anyone outside of his family.

Their trial against the city of Calais is based on what the “right to food” really means under the Maine Constitution.

“The Kamiwan and Paul Oliver complaint raise chickens to feed their family, but a local prescription in Calais, Maine, makes them practically impossible to do so. By imposing rigid and structure requirements – and by prohibiting more than six chickens per household – the prescription effectively prohibits most residents from keeping chickens on the back, ”says their opening complaints.

“The olivers bring this costume to apply their” natural, inherent and inalienable right to … grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume food for their own food, their subsistence, their bodily health and well-being “in article I, section 25 of the Maine Constitution”, it continues.

“This provision, known as the” right to food “amendment, was ratified in 2021 and reflects the long-standing values ​​of Maine of self-sufficient and individual freedom. This is among the first challenges to invalidate local restriction as incompatible with constitutional law.

Although the “right to food” is the first new right recognized by the Constitution of the State in 200 years, the Olivers maintain that the content is in accordance with the history of Maine. “From the colonial era to the State in 1820 and in the present, the Mainers continued to feed their families with cultivated food, raised or gathered on the ground of Maine”, according to the complaint.

The amendment of the “right to food” of Maine was adopted by large bipartite majorities in the legislative assembly and then approved by around 61% of voters, which makes it the first new individual right added to the Maine Constitution since the colonial days.

The new unique constitutional language consecrates “natural, inherent and inalienable law to … grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume food of their own choice for their own diet, subsistence, body health and well-being.”

At the time, legislative sponsors declared that “the right to food” was explicitly designed to limit the intrusion of the government to individual right to produce its own food.

However, what this means precisely in the Maine’s legislature.

Earlier this year, for example, “an act to allow chickens on private residential properties” was introduced to facilitate residents of Maine to keep the backyard chickens by prohibiting municipal prohibitions. But as signed by Governor Janet Mills on May 30, changes in the status did not expressly pre -fulfill the municipal regulations,

Maine has authorized the “manufacturing of home food” since 1980.

The modification of the constitution of the State to include a “right to food” was born from the law on food sovereignty of Maine, adopted in 2017, which allows local governments of the State to legalize the sale of almost all types of homemade food directly to consumers.

Before the law takes effect, the state adopted an amendment to exclude home transformation from meat and poultry. The amendment also excludes sales on farmers and other public sites. Under the law on food sovereignty, sales must occur on the “production site”, which means only in farms and private residences. By 2021, around 100 of the 500 cities and cities in Maine had adopted such an order for food sovereignty.

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