Green Options » backyard chickens

Myths About Raising Chickens in Your Backyard

Scott Cooney — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:34:31 +0000

Just like many other social phenomena that are good for the environment, the exploding trend of people growing their own chickens in the backyard has its naysayers. Naysayers come in a wide variety of stripes. For example, the widespread understanding that global warming is real and that we’re causing it has its naysayers, many of whom stand to lose a lot of money when their oil and coal has to internalize the cost of the pollution they’ve been making us pay for since their inception. Or those that say that electric cars are not realistic…sure there are naysayers…wait, is there a trend here that the oil industry is against everything good? Hmm…

But I digress. Suffice it to say, there are naysayers who don’t want us to live well, to live with a lower carbon footprint by producing our own food. Kimberly Willis and Rob Ludlow, co-authors of Raising Chickens for Dummies, can be counted among those that are dispelling these myths and empowering the people.

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Texas Town Enforces Chicken Ban, Assaults Sustainable Living

John Chappell — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:04:12 +0000

The small city of Lancaster, Texas has had a law on its books banning all chickens within the city limits, but for years it had gone unnoticed and unenforced, until recently. That changed when a local resident found out that the previously unknown law would now be enforced citing anyone who kept chickens within the city limits.

Local food writer and sustainable living proponent Marye Audet, has kept a flock of 19 chickens on her 2 1/4 acre rural homestead for the last five years in a rural area of town, unaware that she was breaking the law by doing so.

“This is not about us living in a subdivision of $400,000.00 homes and being the Beverly Hillbillies.”

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Save My Chickens: Take Action Against NAIS

Cate Nelson — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:00:41 +0000

I’m sitting in my backyard, surrounded by chickens and children. A couple of dogs periodically pester both species of livestock. (Yes, I did just call my child flock “livestock.”) I’m waiting on the first egg of the day, a pink speckled one from my oldest Americana hen.

This backyard chicken experiment is new to my family, only a 6-month-old endeavor. We wanted our children to know where food comes from. We wanted to know that the eggs we ate were from happy chickens.

But as the number of small chicken “farmers” pop up in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike, our collective grand experiment may be in peril.

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Cluckin’ About Urban Chickens

Becky Striepe — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:00:31 +0000

The urban chicken movement is growing as more and more folks try to move away from factory farmed food and towards self-sufficiency.

[Creative Commons photo by Linda N.]

Why Chickens?
Chickens are pretty low-maintenance. Once you have your coop set up, you just have to make sure they’re fed, watered, and get to run around outside. Most people who raise their own chickens do so for the eggs, not the meat. Instead of buying eggs from a factory farm or from hundreds of miles away, urban chicken owners benefit from a cheap, local, reliable source of protein. Chicken poop is also a great fertilizer for your garden!

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New Cities Join The Urban Chicken Movement

Meg Hamill — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:55:42 +0000

Across the country, cities are passing new laws to allow backyard chickens.

Cities across the country have shown new leniency in the urban chicken arena. Ann Arbor, Michigan, South Portland, Maine and Fort Collins Colorado, have all voted in the past year to allow backyard chickens. They join the growing number of U.S. cities to make legal the raising of poultry in the backyard.

Illegal or not, city chicken flocks are more popular than ever.

“It’s no longer something kinky or interesting,” said Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network. “The ‘chicken underground’ has really spread so widely and has so much support.”

Though some worry that backyard chickens might carry and transmit avian flu, advocates of urban chicken farming claim that farming poultry on a small scale presents less of a risk of disease than large-scale production.

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The Newest Hedge Against Industrial Food, Bad Economy? Backyard Chickens

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:39:40 +0000

I’ve written before about communities in the U.S. that have changed their laws to allow homeowners to keep chickens in their backyards. Now I’ve found some great resources for those in the pro-poultry movement,which a new report from the Worldwatch Institute describes as an underground “urban chicken” movement sweeping across the U.S:

“It’s no longer something kinky or interesting,” Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network, tells Worldwatch writer Ben Block. “The ‘chicken underground’ has really spread so widely and has so much support.”

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