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.

Urban Agriculturalist: Backyard Chickens

Meredith Melnick — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:28:23 +0000

Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

Behold Gallus Domesticus, the backyard chicken and latest slow food phenomenon. Traumatized by images of chicken warehouses, disgusted by food recalls and perhaps even longing for animal companionship, urban dwellers are becoming enthusiastic chicken owners. Urban Chickens is their gathering place, Backyard Poultry their manifesto and Mad City Chicken their rallying cry. But just where does one procure a baby chicken? How many eggs can a person expect? And what level of companionship are we talking here? All this and more after the jump.

Green Options » poultry

New Cities Join The Urban Chicken Movement

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

Urban Agriculturalist: Backyard Chickens