After dispute, Assembly allows small-scale farmers to continue selling hay and feed in Anchorage neighborhoods

A land-use dispute between the municipality, a small family farm tucked off of O’Malley Road and its neighbors recently gained the attention of the Anchorage Assembly.

Dalton Baines started helping his family distribute hay in South Anchorage more than two decades ago, when the bales weighed more than him. Now 32, he owns the family’s farm and runs a secondary small business called Alaska Hay & Feed Supply.

After numerous visits from code enforcement for suspected land-use violations, Baines said the municipality had threatened fines and to shut down his operations.

The Assembly on Tuesday unanimously passed an ordinance reaffirming that the retail sale of hay, feed and compost — at businesses like Baines’ — are allowed under city code.

Baines and other horse and livestock owners said they hope the ordinance will help promote food security in Alaska and ensure the thousands of horses, cows and other livestock on the Anchorage Hillside stay fed when local supplies run low.

“It’s an ecosystem to stay alive up here in Alaska,” Baines told the Assembly on Tuesday during a public hearing.

“(This ordinance) ensures that all animals are protected and able to be fed, especially when barges are late, or crops are late, like this year,” he said.

City code allows on-site feed storage and transactions for animal boarding and training and horse riding lessons. It did not, in “plain language,” permit the retail sale of hay, feed and compost at those facilities, said Assembly member Keith McCormick, who represents South Anchorage. He co-sponsored the ordinance with member Zac Johnson.

“This omission otherwise leaves compliant operators exposed to code enforcement for activity that Anchorage has allowed in practice for decades,” McCormick said.

Baines finished building a new warehouse space, which looks like a set of large garages with a loading dock, last spring on one of his Gander Street properties. The warehouse is usually full of pallets of alfalfa hay bales he imports from Washington state, but his stock was thinner than usual on Wednesday, he said.

After burning through his last shipment, he said he had decided to wait to order more until he knew the outcome of the ordinance.

Livestock facility limits

Baines built a new warehouse space, which looks like a set of large garages with a loading dock, last year on one of his Gander Street properties. The warehouse is usually full of pallets of alfalfa hay bales he imports from Washington state, but his stock was thinner than usual Wednesday, he said.

After burning through his last shipment, he said he had decided to wait to order more until he knew the outcome of the ordinance.

The dispute between Alaska Hay & Feed Supply and the municipality’s Development Services Department began almost two years ago with a noise complaint.

According to a June 2025 memo from former Planning, Development and Public Works Director Lance Wilber, it eventually raised the question: “Does commercial activity associated with large domestic animal facilities include the retail sale of hay and feed?”

Any property with four or more animals, such as cows or horses, falls into that category. This included Alaska Hay & Feed Supply.

The short answer, Wilber said, was “yes, with limitations.” Commercial sales should serve the animals kept on-site and are intentionally limited because livestock facilities are allowed in a number of Anchorage’s residential areas, the memo stated.

Repeated encounters with a code enforcement officer spurred Baines to file a lawsuit.

The municipality put the debate in front of its Zoning Board of Examiners and Appeals in September. During the hearing, neighbors said they believed the hay and feed business had lowered property values and complained of noisy delivery trucks and equipment.

The board ultimately decided Baines’ hay sales violated city code, an action that led to the Assembly ordinance.

In addition to feeding his own black Angus cows and horses, Baines supplies hay and feed to hundreds of customers in Anchorage. Many simply don’t have enough acreage to support livestock, and Alaska’s harsh climate presents another set of challenges for hay growers, he said. His customers range from those with a couple of chickens to horse barns with as many as 40 horses.

Rose English, the owner of Rockin’ B Ranch in South Anchorage, said there have been times in the past when the weather did not allow Alaskans to grow hay, forcing farmers to import hay and feed. She shared containers with neighbors so they could also feed their animals, she told the Assembly on Tuesday.

During the pandemic, her farm also raised pigs, chickens and dairy goats they used to provide meat, eggs and milk to residents when the shelves at the grocery store thinned. It’s necessary for places like her ranch to provide when and where gaps exist, she said.

“It’s going to be very difficult in the future, if anything ever happens, like an earthquake,” English said. “These situations need to be available to help people make ends meet.”

In a written letter from the Hillside Home and Landowners Organization, President Katie Nolan said the recent interpretation of Anchorage’s large domestic animal facility rules created “untenable situations within the agricultural community.”

Nolan encouraged the adoption of the ordinance on Tuesday, citing all the work that had been done under previous mayoral administrations on Anchorage’s animal control laws.

“We ended up with something that worked for our city for decades,” she said. “Unfortunately, along the way, somebody reinterpreted code, and because of that, we had a glitch that needs to be fixed.”

The new ordinance became effective immediately.