When Kelly Cahill isn’t bartending, she tends to around 300 birds on her poultry farm — not in rural Louisiana, but just a short drive from the French Quarter.

The only poultry farmer with her own processing shop in New Orleans, Cahill runs a one-woman show in Lower Coast Algiers, raising, slaughtering and selling the pasture-raised chickens and ducks to farmers markets and restaurants around the city.

“It’s what I’ll do forever,” Cahill said on an October afternoon, peering into a mobile coop with 100 young ducks.

Cahill, a 34-year-old Lafayette native, first got into farming through a Craigslist job posting for a vegetable farm over a decade ago. The vocation connected her to her food in a way she hadn’t experienced before, she recalled, and she’s been farming ever since.

Through her business, Yardbirds, Cahill rears and processes birds on land owned by Cheryl Nunes and Annie Moore, a farmer couple who seven years ago bought 88 acres of mostly undeveloped pasture — the largest privately owned property in the city without any subdivisions. They transformed the land into River Queen Greens, a certified naturally grown vegetable farm that leases out some of their land to a couple of smaller-scale farmers, including Cahill.

But they aren’t the only farmers nearby.

Yardbirds and River Queen Greens are part of a growing number of farming operations in Lower Coast Algiers, an area on the outskirts of New Orleans that feels utterly pastoral, but is only a 15-minute drive from downtown. The neighborhood is the only district in the parish zoned “rural residential,” which means no permit is required for agriculture and livestock. A wide range of mostly women farmers has sprouted in the area over the last 10 years, selling citrus to high-end restaurants, supplying produce to food banks and providing kids with outdoor education field trips. 

“It’s a really prime example of how important it is for there to be an actual quantity of land, real food production close to a market for a farmer,” said Marguerite Green, the executive director of the Louisiana Food Policy Action Council, a statewide nonprofit that develops legislation to better the state’s food system. “We think of New Orleans as an exclusively urban parish. … But there are these really interesting pockets of New Orleans where there is larger-scale land access.”

‘Connecting people’

In 2017, the owners of River Queen Greens started farming in New Orleans in a way that looked a bit more urban: a half-acre of leased land in the Bywater. Two years later, they bought the land in Lower Coast Algiers and dedicated themselves fully to the business. They grew around 60,000 pounds of vegetables last year while working “double full-time,” Moore said.

Food grown on urban farms in New Orleans is insufficient to feed the entire city, noted Grace Treffinger, the urban agriculture liaison at the city’s office of resilience and sustainability. But semi-urban operations like River Queen Greens are “the only place you can really do a substantial amount of food production” only 20 minutes from downtown, she said.

Still, there are dozens of small-scale farms and community gardens scattered across the city, and the benefits of urban farming can extend beyond food production, she said. Sugar Roots Farm, a nonprofit farm in Lower Coast Algiers, offers field trips for children, beekeeping classes and volunteer opportunities for people at an addiction recovery center in New Orleans.

“It’s connecting people to their food system in a way that people in a city don’t usually get,” Treffinger said.

‘Let’s try it out’

But land access for farmers in the city can be a major financial barrier, Green said, one that River Queen Green’s “incubator-style model” for smaller growers can help address. The city currently lacks a pipeline for many people to expand their farming ventures — from something like community gardening to market gardening to purchasing semi-urban land — because of the capital investments required and “the giant commitment” it takes to produce at a larger scale, Green said.

Imani Miller, who runs Imbue Farms a short drive from River Queen Greens, had the opportunity to give farming a kind of trial run because of her access to land. She started farming on three acres of land in the town of Independence that her in-laws owned, before leaving her job in the school system in 2021 to farm full-time.

“Since I had never farmed before, my husband and I thought, ‘Well, let’s try it out on land that we already had,’” Miller said.

She found success and fulfillment with the venture, and started a weekly farm share, where she sold to regular customers and New Orleans restaurants, as well as donated food to community fridges and food banks. But the long drive from Independence to her customer base, family and her own home in New Orleans was time-consuming.

She bought the Lower Coast Algiers property last October, and began planting greens and herbs on a fenced-in acre-sized plot — to keep out hungry deer — about a month ago. The closer proximity to her customer base made “a huge difference,” she said.

‘Countless hours’

While the new location is an improvement, there are also challenges when it comes to navigating policies, Miller pointed out. For instance, she wasn’t able to get electricity on the property — for lights or a greenhouse — because she didn’t have a building on the land.

“It’s a weird thing to be able to say, ‘Yes, I’m on the property. I’m functioning on the property. But it’s a farm. It’s not a house, it’s not a building,’” Miller said.

Cahill, the poultry farmer, also faced delays in securing the permits she needed for her processing site. She was the first person in the city to go through this process, and it ended up being long and costly. For instance, she lost $11,000 for drawings to an architect. Operating costs are still expensive and inconvenient, as she needs to commute to the northshore for supplies.

“I put in countless hours that I’ll never get paid for,” said Cahill. “I’m putting in tens of thousands of dollars a year.”

Many of the obstacles that the semi-urban farmers are facing stem from a lack of familiarity within government agencies, said Treffinger, the urban agriculture liaison at the city. Her job is the first of its kind, created last year to help address a lack of local understanding about agricultural businesses.

State and federal farm policies are often geared toward large-scale, single-crop operations in rural locations. At the local level, better communication is needed when it comes to urban farms, she said.

In October, New Orleans’ City Council passed an ordinance that grew out of Treffinger’s conversations with urban farmers and local officials. The update to the city code recognizes cover crops, a farming practice that improves soil health and minimizes the need for herbicides. But neighbors and city workers have confused cover crops for unkempt grass or weeds, and urban farmers have, in turn, received city fines, even though some of them received federal grants for the sustainable method.

But the new ordinance is only the first step in a broader effort to develop more policies around urban farming.

“Farms are in this gray area for the city,” Treffinger said. “There aren’t yet systems in place that are clear and accessible for growers to navigate.”