.png)
Municipal Farming Takes Root in Central Illinois
- Bob Heuer
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Growers Like Kelly Lay Finding Ways to Work with City Hall
This article is by Bob Heuer, a longtime advocate for thriving regional agriculture economies and a friend and frequent contributor to Local Food Forum. Bob leads HNA Networks. The Evanston-based firm is helping the nature conservation coalition Chicago Wilderness Alliance build common ground with both commercial-scale and community-centered agriculture.
In spring 2018, newlyweds Kelly and Jacob Lay bought a house in Leroy, an east-central Illinois city located in McLean County near Bloomington. Kelly, then 31 years old, was in the backyard two days later with her hands in the soil.
“I planted raspberries and rhubarb,” she recalls. “I was setting down perennial food roots at the same time that Jacob and I were putting down family roots in LeRoy.”
A year later, Leroy Mayor Steve Dean appointed her to fill an empty aldermanic seat on the City Council. She’s since been elected twice, even as she built out her garden plot into the one-third acre Meadow Lane Farm.
Edible plants and flowers fill the property, including a patch of grass where wild violets feed the “yard weed bees.” On April 25, Kelly will be selling 300+ varieties of veggie, herb, fruit and flower starter plants to area gardeners in partnership with The Shire Farm of Illinois.
A large solar system roof enables Kelly to use grow lights in the basement to create a side business. Meadow Lane Farm is known in places like the Bloomington Farmers Market for the unique heirloom flavors of their products.
(Kelly’s then-nascent cottage food business was featured in a 2022 article on the Buy Fresh Buy Local Illinois website, written by Local Food Forum’s Bob Benenson.)
This Thursday (January 29), Kelly will be in Springfield at the Everything Local Conference, a partnership of Illinois Farm Bureau, Illinois Farmers Market Association and Illinois Specialty Growers Association. She is leading a session to test out ideas about how to foster cooperation between farmers and municipal officials.
Celebrating Celery
Kelly grew up on out-of-state military bases but enjoyed childhood visits to her extended family’s generational hometowns of Kewanee and Princeton in west-central Illinois. Jacob hails from Park Forest, a Chicago suburb in southern Cook County.
The couple met through mutual friends during college and settled into careers in Bloomington. Jake worked for an insurance company, and Kelly was greenhouse manager for PrairiErth — a certified organic farm in Atlanta, Illinois — when they decided to buy a house 15 miles away in Leroy.
This old railroad town had morphed over the years into a bedroom community for several nearby small cities. Kelly says she and Jacob liked LeRoy’s “mishmash of folks” — people working in all the surrounding metro areas interacting with legacy families. A big attraction was LeRoy’s “strong culture of food production at the property owner level.”
Kelly waved to new neighbors walking by as she worked in the yard that first spring. She heard children playing outside the city’s elementary school one block to the north, and the tings of aluminum bats and music from the Leroy Baseball and Softball Fields two blocks to the south.
The Lays made their home a place where friends are always welcome and food is shared. “We celebrate “National Sneak a Zucchini on Your Neighbors Porch Day,” she says. “We fill thrift baskets with extra produce to hand out whenever possible.”
An unexpected favorite is celery. Kelly describes these “home grown flavor bombs” as a “wildly different experience from the grocery store.”
From Food to Flowers
Kelly also became actively engaged in the state’s food and farm non-profit community. She is a member of Illinois Stewardship Alliance (based in Springfield) and works as Local Food Program Manager — first for The Land Connection (Champaign) and now as part of a new Basil’s Harvest initiative to help farms and local food businesses navigate food safety, regulations and operation hurdles.
So it is not surprising to find her in a speaking role at the three-day Everything Local Conference, held at the Bank of Springfield Center. This year’s conference is billed as the Land of Lincoln’s “largest ever” gathering of local and specialty crop supply chain participants.
Kelly’s session will be neither workshop nor panel. She’s looking for productive dialogue. “Many of my farmer friends are terrified to step into city hall because the system of municipal ordinances can be so overwhelming,” she says.
“Smart economic growth for many municipalities means looking inward, to the amazing small businesses our citizens are just waiting for the right moment to start,” she says. “Bridging the communication divide is the first step to unlocking that potential.”
Civic Leadership
Kelly’s first Leroy City Council project was to advocate for a solution to her ward's flooding problem. Collaboration with fellow aldermen and city staff led to the updating of a 60-year-old storm water infrastructure plan. The city then spent $4 million to build a new water plant in 2021.
She partnered with another alderman on an ordinance that legalized the common practice of raising chickens at home, while also creating a simple pathway to legal beekeeping in city limits.
“That first year,” she recalls, “I had to hand-pollinate my zucchini and saw terrible yields because there were no pollinators. I added my own bees and worked to make them legal for all, not just for those who knew how to file a zoning variance. Now LeRoy is filled with pollinators —bees, butterflies, lightning bugs, and more abound.”
“Municipalities often haven't had a reason to focus on food and farming,” she explains. “So it doesn't occur to them how beneficial basic economic development tools, municipal assets and manpower can be for citizens willing to farm, start agritourism businesses, or bring unique food businesses to downtown.
“My session at Everything Local is just the start of a conversation — how can we grow our communities by lifting up the people who want to grow their food and farm businesses? We’ll look at what's already working, how farms and food businesses can start a discussion or ask for support. We also want to start collecting stories (and hopefully some partners).”
Coming out of Springfield, Kelly wants to build momentum around the vision that local food and farming support could benefit all of the state’s nearly 1,300 cities, towns and villages. In September, she’s hoping to bring her story to the Illinois Municipal League’s annual conference in Chicago.
