Surprise, AZ Right to Farm: Agricultural Zoning Protection (2026)

5, Agricultural Operations and Facilities, sets the zoning framework that permits farming inside city limits while fencing off the uses most likely to create nuisance conflicts with neighboring residential development. Subsection A requires a minimum site of forty acres before an agricultural operation may be permitted at all. Subsection B flatly bars commercial pen feeding, commercial feedlots, or the commercial feeding of garbage to animals. Subsection C pushes agricultural structures used to store or maintain specialized machinery and equipment back at least two hundred feet from any lot line, and subsection D limits open outdoor storage to plants, bulk organic dirt, or packaged fertilizer.

Subsection E requires commercial or wholesale plant nurseries and greenhouse enclosures to sit at least fifty feet from any lot line. § 3-365 for schools, day cares, and adjacent residential uses. The section also authorizes a farm stand as an accessory use for selling produce principally raised on the premises: subsection H requires the stand to sit at least thirty feet from the nearest right-of-way, be anchored against movement into the right-of-way, provide off-street parking, be portable and removed during the off-season, and stay under ten feet tall and four hundred square feet.

Subsection I folds animal keeping on these sites back into Chapter 10 of the city code. Together the section functions as the city's local agricultural-zoning standard, letting farm-scale operations locate while capping their footprint and screening the most intensive uses from residential neighbors.