Mosby Farms on Green Valley Road wants to expand its farming operations, located for more than 30 years at 12747 SE Green Valley Road.
Short-term plans call for a new, 5,000-square-foot farm stand, commercial greenhouses and gardens at the pumpkin patch just inside the city limits adjacent to the westbound Highway 18 onramp from Black Diamond Road. Preliminary plans show gardens, a pumpkin patch, a corn maze and vineyards.
Over time, Mosby hopes to build a winery there, too, to set up an espresso stand and, in partnership with local schools, to teach school-age kids about healthy eating and farming and gardening practices.
To make it happen, the City of Auburn will have to change its zoning plan.
Right now it does not allow agro-tourism outright in the residential conservancy (RC) zoning district. Without a primary residence on the property, the code also nixes the road-side stand, the commercial greenhouses and the farm-related buildings. It does allow the pumpkin patch, the maze, the gardens and vineyards, however, as outright permitted uses.
Auburn’s Planning Commission, the City’s Hearings Examiner and the Planning and Community Development Committee have all taken a look at the proposed changes.
“The full City Council will probably have it by June,” planner Stewart Wagner said recently after the Planning and Community Development Committee took another look.
“We’ve had a pumpkin patch there since 1993, we’re just trying to move our farm stand down there so we don’t have two locations,” Burr Mosby, who with his brother, Paul, started Mosby Brothers Farms in 1977, about a half-mile south of Green Valley Meats told the Auburn Reporter last year.
The current zoning code only allows a roadside stand 300 square feet or smaller in size.
Changes discussed would:
• Eliminate the requirement for the single-family residence in the RC zone and allow the desired features to be permitted outright as stand-alones, not as secondary to a single-family home. Doing so also would allow for commercial greenhouses to be built with no limitations on size.
• Change the permitted uses in the residential conservancy district to allow for wineries to be built there, part of the proposed zoning code amendment. A conditional use permit could determine size, design and placement of wineries, or they could be outright permitted if the wineries did not exceed an agreed-upon maximum square footage.
Mosby has been farming in the local area since he was 14. He lives on the family farm with his wife, Rosella, and their children Emily, Casey, Lily and Henry. Every week the farm donates thousands of pounds of food to local charities, including the Auburn Food Bank, Tukwila Pantry, Food Life Line, 2nd Harvest, and St. Francis House. Mosby submitted requests for these changes formally to the City.
