Category — Livestock

1927 Cover of House and Garden magazine.

Keeping bees, chickens, goats and even ducks in the heart of the city no longer gets you labeled as a wacko

By Tom Watson
June 17, 2011
Special to The Seattle Times
Tom Watson is project manager for King County’s Recycling and Environmental Services.

Excerpt:

Q: Before I take the plunge, I do you have a couple key pieces of advice about raising livestock in residential areas?

A: First check the regulations in your city or jurisdiction. Many cities in the Puget Sound region allow the keeping of small animals for food production. However, rules vary greatly from city to city regarding the number and type of animals allowed and other issues, such as how close bee hives can be to a property line.

Most important, make sure you have a firm grasp of the demands of raising critters for eggs, milk or honey. Keeping your animals healthy, happy and productive requires a significant time commitment.

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Oakland residents should be concerned about encouraging neighbors to breed and kill animals as a hobby in our city.

By Ian Elwood
Oakland North
June 17, 2011

Ian Elwood is an animal rescuer and volunteers with Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary, the Central Valley Chapter of House Rabbit Society and is a former volunteer at Oakland Animal Services. His day job is as Web Producer at International Rivers.

Excerpt:

The people profiled are not continuing the family farm out of economic necessity. Nor are they killing animals because they lack protein in their diet. They are educated, published and politically connected, and they choose to slaughter and eat their backyard animals because of a personal preference to consume a culinary delicacy: locally raised organic meat. Food empowerment this is not.

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City Chicken Project from Just Food on Vimeo.

Help fund their project here.

One elementary school has a “chicken club” that teaches kids how to take care of the birds

By Laura Anderson
Bittman Blog New York Times
June 17, 2011

Excerpt:

The City Chicken Project is about as win-win as you can get: It gives low-income people better access to good, clean, healthy food; improves the quality of the soil in urban farms; engages community members in the production of their food; and educates kids about where their food comes from. The best part, perhaps, is that it’s truly grassroots. Just Food isn’t foisting chickens on communities that cannot support them; to the contrary, it gives chickens only to applicants that have the necessary space, time, manpower, and enthusiasm to raise chickens.

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Dave Ingham and the chickens he rents out.

For $100 plus we will supply you a fully equipped Eco-Coop complete with 2 hens and all their requirements. Six weeks to decide.

Rentachook is located in West Ryde, NSW, Australia

Rentachook started 6 years ago as an idea to encourage people to keep chickens – an environmentally sustainable pet. The concept is that you get to try keeping chooks without having to commit to having them permanently.

Like a try-before-you-buy option, what happens is you buy the Eco-Coop package outright (a chicken coop, 2 hens, feeder, waterer, food and straw) but have 6 weeks to decide if keeping chooks is right for you, your lifestyle, your garden etc.

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The piglet dispersal program is an ongoing activity of the city’s agriculture program that allows poor families to care for and breed the hogs.

By Lydia C. Pendon
SunStar
June 15, 2011

ILOILO City Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog will lead Thursday the awarding of 61 piglets to selected beneficiaries in urban poor and farming communities.

He will be joined by Iloilo City Congressman Jerry P. Treñas, City Vice Mayor Jose Espinosa III and Dr. Sylvia S. Bermillo of the City Agriculturist Office (CAO) in awarding the piglets to the recipients.

City Agriculturist Officer (CAO) in-charge Geraldine Hautea said despite Iloilo’s status as a highly urbanized city in the Visayas, there still exist farming communities in 22 barangays in the city with concentration at the Jaro and Mandurriao districts.

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Ivy Stovall, who lives in St. Johns, gathers an armful of hay to feed the rabbits she raises for her family to eat. Photo by Rebecca Koffman.

“I swear I bought this house because I needed to have a piece of the earth. I wanted to get my hands in the ground.”

By Rebecca Koffman
The Oregonian
June 13, 2011

Excerpt:

Stovall also gives an occasional workshop on raising rabbits for food. She has 26 rabbits at the moment, with one doe about to give birth and a group of 8 adolescents ready for slaughter. “I try to give an honest look at what it involves.”

What are the best ways to eat the meat? Rabbit stew is always good in the winter. In summer you can roast it on a spit.

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Minnie Rose Lovgreen’s “Recipe For Raising Chickens”

By Tristan Baurick
Kitsap Sun
June 4, 2009

Excerpt:

Bainbridge Island

Shortly before her death, longtime islander Minnie Rose Lovgreen confided to a friend at her bedside that she’d long wanted pass on her recipe for raising chickens.

Stored in her head were 60 years’ worth of observations and know-how about how to care for brooding hens, raise baby chicks, build coops, promote quality egg production and calm irate roosters.

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Kaya de Barbaro and her roommates used to take care of Oscar and Owl, two hens, at their home in North Park. But the city of San Diego found out and said the chickens had to go. Now, they live in hiding in a temporary coop elsewhere in the city. Photo by Sam Hodgson.

After a few months, they even started paying rent: One egg a day.

By Adrian Florido
Voice of San Diego
May 15, 2011

Excerpt:

Theirs is a sad story, of two chicks whose lives started with promise, but went terribly wrong. They were raised in a small backyard in North Park by a house full of young, environment-conscious roommates eager to embrace the growing urban agriculture movement. Oscar and Owl lived happy, egg-laying, bug-scavenging existences.

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Photo by Marvin Shaouni. See photos/video of the event here.

17 chickens entered in the race were there to battle it out for charity

Marvin Shaouni Photography Blog
Aug 3, 2010

Excerpt:

Along the Cass Corridor, on a graveled vacant lot shadowed by the Masonic Temple, between the Temple Bar and an old renovated fire station, the first ever Detroit Chicken Race was held. The event would see a flux of about 150 people over the course of an early Sunday evening, rolling into dusk.

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Urban Farmers: Left, Sue Reddington with Victoria Burgess-Hall, a 17-year-old on work experience. Photo by Mark Bickerdike.

“Some people were afraid we were introducing a lot of hippies into Meanwood.”

Yorkshire Post
Apr. 18, 2011

Excerpt:

Thirty years ago this July, the Lord Mayor of Leeds officially opened the Meanwood Valley Urban Farm – one of the first of its kind. It seemed like a good time to ask how the books are balanced.

The front-of-house hens, which wander freely, are backed up by a couple of hundred standard hybrids laying eggs in a deep-litter barn with access to the outdoors – but not quite enough space to be called free-range. The market garden is run on organic lines but without a Soil Association certificate, which is too expensive for the turnover, and it supplies fruit and veg to a smart Leeds restaurant, The Cross Keys on Water Lane, as well as the farm’s own shop. Bees chip in honey. Two little Dexter cows used to get bulled by arrangement and produce a calf each for the market for hobby cattle, but are now semi-retired.

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Easy Acres Chicken Sitting

By Lisa Boone
LA Times
March 23, 2011

Excerpt:

First there was the dog walker.

Then came doggie day care and pet cams.

And now? The chicken sitter.

After spotting a sign that someone posted looking for a chicken sitter, Anna Goeser established Easy Acres Chicken Sitting. Now, when urban farmers and chicken lovers go out of town, they can have more confidence in the idea that their flock is taken care of.

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The Urban Farm Store’s Guide to Chicken Keeping

Written by Robert Litt and Hannah Litt
Publishing date March 22, 2011

Got a little space and a hankering for fresh eggs?

Robert and Hannah Litt have dispensed advice to hundreds of urban and suburban chicken-keepers from behind their perch at Portland’s Urban Farm Store, and now they’re ready to help you go local and sustainable with your own backyard birds. In this handy guide to breeds, feed, coops, and care, the Litts take you under their experienced wings and share the secrets to:

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For Gloria Putnam and Steve Rudicel, goats, eggs and produce make a winning enterprise. Photo by Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times.

Neighbors swap produce, honey, eggs and much more in Altadena, where the urban homesteading movement has produced much more than sustenance.

By Veronique de Turenne,
Los Angeles Times
March 10, 2011

Excerpt:

Sometimes, the peach on a backyard tree is just a peach, a sweet, home-grown bonus. In certain circles of Altadena, though, that peach is a gateway fruit.

One tree becomes three, which becomes an orchard. The quest for organic fertilizer leads to a flock of chickens, which beget a garden. Before you know it, there’s a herd of goats out front, heritage turkeys in back, a beehive, a rabbit hutch and a guard llama.

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Hedahl raises two types of domesticated ducks, khaki Campbells and Indian runners, in her backyard in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood. The colorful duck eggs sell for $6 a dozen out of her home.Photo by Erika Schultz/Seattle Times

Around Puget Sound, urban farming has extended to various small-plot livestock, with lots of city chickens, and now ducks for eggs and goats for milk.

By Tan Vinh
Seattle Times
Mar 9, 2011

Excerpt:

In the name of urban farming, there were a lot of ways BJ Hedahl could have transformed her spacious, fenced backyard in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood: putting in an organic garden, a beehive or a chicken coop maybe.

But no. Hedahl wanted ducks. Or rather duck eggs: richer, denser, with yolks bigger than your chicken variety, she said.

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By Alice J. Hovorka
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,
1360-0524, Volume 13, Issue 3, 2006
Pages 207 – 225

Abstract

The research draws on a feminist political ecology perspective to demonstrate that agrarian restructuring and rural-urban transformation in Botswana offers women opportunities to renegotiate their marginalised positionality within the commercial urban agricultural sector in Greater Gaborone. Men and women participate in equal numbers, and both perceive of this sector as offering them new and accessible avenues for economic and social advancement. Although there is continuity of women’s social and economic disadvantage relative to men from rural to urban contexts, women are actively making claims on land and capitalising on their traditional roles and responsibilities associated with poultry production.

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At the 2008 Summer Olympics, Natalie Coughlin became the first American female athlete in modern Olympic history to win six medals in one Olympics.

February 23, 2011
Natalie Coughlin’s Blog
Natalie Anne Coughlin is an American swimmer known for winning 11 Olympic medals.

Excerpt:

I’ve always loved eggs. Nearly every meet growing up started with my mom making me my favorite pre-meet meal: fried eggs and rice with soy sauce. Despite what we were told during the late eighties and early nineties, eggs are very healthy. Not only are they a cheap and affordable source of protein, but they are also a great source of lutein, choline, omega-3 fatty acids in addition to a variety of other vitamins and minerals. The cholesterol in eggs is only a problem for those who already have heart troubles or high cholesterol.

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Nathaniel Bryant washes one of his five horses in Richland Farms, a unique rural community tucked into the urban core of Compton. Other residents raise goats and poultry. Photo by Mark Boster.

Residents of a small rural enclave in the middle of the city raise goats, chickens and horses, hearkening back to the city’s agricultural foundations. But they fear their way of life is under attack.

By Ann M. Simmons
Los Angeles Times
February 20, 2011

Excerpt:

Over the years, the city has imposed limits on certain animals, granted variances allowing for multiple structures on a single lot and introduced new parking restrictions.

“They are sabotaging the community so that developers can eventually come in and take over,” said Wilkins, a retired teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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Isolde.

Since this is our first season, our rewards so far have been purely visual

By Lydia Strand
Urban Farm Hub Team
February 8th, 2011

Excerpt:

When I tell people that my husband and I keep sheep in the city, some giggle, some are shocked, and almost all want to know how? why? what? So here’s a little background.

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“Lately, we’ve been sending quite a few Henry Milkers to urban farmers.” Mike Henry

Associated Press
Palmer, Alaska
June 23, 2010

(AP) When Mike Henry began raising goats on his 5-acre farm north of Anchorage, he found the milking tough going. His hands ached, and the milk wouldn’t flow. He tied a piece of leather loosely around his doe’s back legs to keep her from kicking, but she didn’t like that at all.

“She would kick loose and kick the milk bucket over and when she wasn’t kicking, she was stepping in it. I honestly tried for two weeks because I thought I was out of practice,” said Henry, 58, who had milked goats as a child. “I thought she would get used to my hands, and she just didn’t.”

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Using modern technology to modernize an ancient practice

By Diana Vergis Vinh
Urban Farm Hub
January 5th, 2011

Excerpt from letter from Lydia Strand:

We have in total 19 sheep at various locations in King County- Tukwila, Redmond, Renton – on land that has been generously offered up by private land owners. We take turns checking in on the sheep, using Google Calendar to choose our check on dates, we meet face to face monthly to talk about the status of the project and what is upcoming for our collective flock. We use email to give daily reports on the sheep and keep on task of our shepherding duties.

See Urban Farm Hub story here.