Shreveport, LA Right to Farm: Agricultural Zoning Protection (2026)

The R-A Rural Agricultural Zoning District sits at the top of Shreveport's residential district list in UDC Article 4, and its purpose statement doubles as the city's right-to-farm protection: new houses are allowed, but only if they defer to the farming already happening around them. Section 4.2.A.1 states the district's intent is to permit single-family residences within agricultural areas, with the express caveat that residences must be compatible with surrounding agricultural operations and must maintain and preserve agricultural activities.

R-A carries the lowest density standards of any residential district under Table 4-1: a one-acre minimum lot area, a 125-foot minimum lot width, and the same 35-foot maximum building height shown for the other single-family districts in that table. That large-lot pattern keeps rural parcels from being sliced into subdivision-sized lots that would crowd out working farmland. Section 3.2.A.2 backstops the district further by making R-A the default classification: any parcel inside Shreveport's city limits not shown within a zoning district on the Official Zoning Map is automatically classified R-A, so newly annexed farmland does not fall into a zoning gap.

The Metropolitan Planning Commission and the Zoning Administrator, not a separate agricultural board, administer R-A applications, and rezoning out of R-A into a denser residential or commercial district requires the standard MPC public hearing and city council approval process that applies to every zoning map amendment in the UDC.