More articles about urban agriculture
Aug. 8th, 2009 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
From the NYTimes
Keeping Their Eggs in Their Backyard Nests
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
As Americans struggle through a dismal recession, many are trying to safeguard themselves from what they fear will be even worse times ahead. They eat out less often. They take vacations closer to home. They put off buying new cars.
And some raise chickens. Lloyd Romriell, a married father of four in Annis, Idaho, recently received seven grown chickens and a coop from a relative. The hens lay a total of about two dozen eggs a week.
“It’s because times are tough. You never know what’s going to happen,” Mr. Romriell said. Although he manages a feed store, he had not kept chickens since he was a child. “If you lose your job tomorrow, you’ve still got food.”
As a backyard chicken trend sweeps the country, hatcheries that supply baby chicks say they can barely keep up with demand. Do-it-yourself coops have popped up in places as disparate as Brooklyn, suburban Chicago and the rural West.
In some cities, the chicken craze has met with resistance, as neighbors demand that local officials enforce no-poultry laws. In others, including Fort Collins, Colo., enthusiasts have worked to change laws to allow small flocks (without noisy roosters).
For some, especially in cities, where raising chickens has become an emblem of extreme foodie street cred, the interest is spurred by a preference for organic and locally grown foods. It may also stem in part from fear, after several prominent recalls, that the food in the supermarket is no longer safe.
But for many others, a deep current of economic distress underlies the chicken boomlet, as people seek ways to fend for themselves in tough times. Even if spreadsheets can demonstrate that raising chickens at home is not cost-effective, it may instill an invaluable sense of self-reliance.
“I’m not into that organic stuff,” Mr. Romriell said. “I think people in bigger cities want to see where their food comes from, whereas us out here in the West and in small towns, we know the concept of losing jobs and want to be able to be self-sustained. That’s why I do it.”
Commercial hatcheries, which typically ship baby chicks around the country by airmail, say they are having one of their best years, on top of exceptionally strong sales last year. Most of the birds go to farm supply stores, but many hatcheries are increasingly making small shipments directly to people who want just a few birds for a backyard flock. The postal service said that in the first six months of this year, it shipped 1.2 million pounds of packages containing chicks (mostly chickens but also baby ducks and turkeys), a 7 percent increase from the comparable period last year. That volume equals millions of birds, as the average chick weighs slightly more than an ounce.
Marie Reed, a sales representative for Ideal Poultry, a large Texas hatchery, said that managers of rural feed stores that sell the company’s birds told her they had seen a spike this year in demand for baby chicks, along with an upturn in sales of garden seeds — and ammunition.
“People are buying up guns and chickens and seed,” Ms. Reed said. “That tells me people are wanting to depend on themselves more.”
Yet, even as many people see raising chickens as a hedge against hard times — and a way to get tastier eggs and meat — they often acknowledge that it is not really a way to save money on food.
“You can buy eggs in the grocery store cheaper than you can raise them,” said David D. Frame, a poultry specialist who works with the Utah State University Extension. “You’re not saving money by doing it.”
He said that feed represented 75 percent of the cost of raising a bird. Commercial poultry operations that buy huge amounts of feed at wholesale have much lower costs per bird than the backyard chicken enthusiast can typically achieve.
Jasmin Middlebos, 36, a librarian who lives with her husband, a sheriff’s deputy, and their three children in a rural area outside Spokane, Wash., began raising chickens last year. She now has 26 birds, which produce up to two dozen eggs a day. (In hot weather, production can drop by half, and in winter it can stop altogether.) In September, she began selling some of the eggs — she gets $2 to $3 a dozen — and started keeping track of her income and expenses.
Since then, Ms. Middlebos said, she has taken in $457 from egg sales and spent $428, mostly on feed. That left $29 in the Mason jar where she keeps her earnings, to spend the next time she buys feed.
But that accounting does not include the cost of buying the birds as chicks — $1.50 to $4 each, depending on the breed — or the $1,500 she spent converting the old shed in her yard to a henhouse.
Ms. Middlebos said that she was pleased to be covering her immediate costs but that she viewed her small flock more as a hedge against an even deeper recession.
“Because our economy is going so bad,” she said, “I feel like I have a trump card in my hand.”
In New York City, where it is legal to raise chickens, Declan Walsh, 41, has been doing so in his backyard in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn for several years. Mr. Walsh, the director of community outreach at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has 25 hens and, to cover his costs, sells eggs to a local restaurant for $6 a dozen.
But this year, Mr. Walsh, who is married with three children, is trying something new. He spent about $300 to build a coop and a fenced-in chicken run on a vacant lot and is raising 49 broiler hens for meat. A share of the birds will go to the lot’s owner and others who are helping him.
The economics are very different from raising egg-layers. Broiler birds eat far more than the laying hens, and the organic feed he gives the broilers is expensive (the layers often eat kitchen scraps). He estimates that once he has slaughtered the birds, he will have spent about $8 a chicken, including the cost of the bird and its feed.
In contrast, he pointed out that, in a promotion, a restaurant chain was advertising whole cooked chickens for $1.99.
“I don’t know that, for small-time folks, you’re going to be able to beat the factories,” he said, referring to large poultry producers. “But it definitely will taste better.”
Chicken hatcheries say that it is typical in a recession for their business to do well. But some hatchery veterans say they have never seen a year like this one.
Nancy Smith, whose family owns Cackle Hatchery in Lebanon, Mo., said there were times over the last year, as the economic news grew worse and worse, that her customers seemed to be “in a panic mode” to buy birds they could begin raising at home.
“I see it as a sense of security,” Ms. Smith said. “If they don’t have the dollars that week to get the meat they need at the grocery store, they can go kill a chicken.”
From TIME magazine
It has photos!
Nigerian dwarf goats grow to only 21 in. tall, about equal to a medium-size dog. "But they have giant udders," says Novella Carpenter. She should know: she has six goats that together provide a quart of milk a day, which she drinks and uses to make cheese and butter. And when the bleating beauties are not grazing in her 1,000-sq.-ft. yard, they're hanging out on the porch of her second-floor apartment in the middle of Oakland, Calif.
Carpenter, a city dweller who in recent years has tried her hand at raising turkeys (she got three day-old poults for $2 each) and pigs (which she fattened to 300 lb.) for dinner, says she turned to milk-producing goats because "I decided I needed a more long-term relationship." The author of the new Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, she is eager to help others get into what she describes as a "hobby that involves sex and birth and death and life." (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)
There have been lots of stories lately about chicken coops' becoming a new urban and suburban accessory. But Carpenter considers the squawking hen "the urban-farming gateway animal," the first occupant of a big metropolitan menagerie. Among eco-foodies, the hottest urban livestock bleat, quack, gobble, oink, buzz and ... well, whatever noise rabbits make. Just ask the folks at Seattle Tilth, a composting and gardening nonprofit that this summer added goat sheds and pens to its long-standing local chicken-coop tour. Or ask the participants in Detroit's Garden Resource Program, which recently launched beekeeping classes and saw them fill up immediately. Even the so-called Chicken Whisperer, a.k.a. Andy Schneider, who hosts an urbane chicken radio show six days a week from suburban Atlanta, is branching out. He is planning an episode on turkeys after fielding so many questions about them from listeners. (Watch TIME's video "Barnyard Animals in Back Yards.")
The growing popularity of raising barnyard animals in backyards — or indoors (at least two companies, ChickenDiapers.com and MyPetChickens.com sell nappies to people who want their birds to bunk with them) — has forced many municipalities across the country to statutorily reckon with allowing livestock within city limits. But legal or not, urban animal husbandry is gaining cachet. That's not only because of the desire to eat local and organic but also because the shaky economy has more people wanting to be more self-sufficient. Says Seattle Tilth garden educator Carey Thornton: "Food you raise yourself just tastes better."
Most newbies keep chickens for eggs. Schneider's organization, Backyard Poultry, has groups in 19 cities in the U.S. and four outside the country; of the 700 members in Atlanta, for example, only five raise hens for consumption. Miniature goats are usually kept for milk and weed-eating; bees, for honey and pollination.
But the truly hard-core urban farmers are plumping their animals for meat, shortening the food-supply chain and being responsible carnivores. "It's empowering," says Carpenter, who is nurturing 10 bunnies to eat. "People want to own their meat-eating."
See pictures of urban farming around the world.
See TIME's photoessay "Cow-Pooling."
Of course, not everyone wants to get that close to their food sources. Dwarf goats in particular have been a point of contention. They smell bad and can wreak havoc if they escape, opponents say; some also worry that allowing goats will pave the way for legalizing llamas and cows in cities. Goat advocates, who note that only horned males emit musk, say the ruminants are gentle enough to be walked on a leash and that they generate high-quality manure, which can be used as fertilizer.
The movement has led to heated debates in city-council meetings over the definitions of livestock, small animals and farm animals. The result: a hodgepodge of animal-ownership laws across the nation and even within a state. This spring in North Carolina, for example, Asheville voted to allow temporary permits for goats to clear vegetation, while Charlotte banned them from properties smaller than a quarter of an acre — despite supporters showing up at a city-council meeting with signs reading I LOVE MY PYGMY GOAT.
Those enthusiasts may have taken a page from the godmother of goat lovers, Jennie Grant, owner of Brownie and Snowflake, who founded the Goat Justice League two years ago while pushing Seattle to legalize miniature goats. It is now permissible to have three on a 5,000-sq.-ft. lot, and some city departments have hired goats to clear blackberry brambles. "Part of my lobbying effort included bringing fresh chèvre to city-council members' offices," she says.
Locavore yuppies and suburban soccer moms aren't the only ones committing to animal husbandry. Catherine Ferguson Academy, a Detroit high school for teens who are pregnant or have already become mothers, has for years had a working farm adjacent to campus. The school considers gardening and raising animals integral to its curriculum. Under the tutelage of life-sciences teacher Paul Weertz, the young women built a barn one year and provide daily care for rabbits, horses, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys and peacocks. The students recently acquired a pig and, says principal Asenath Andrews, they're going to eat it.
Andrews hopes farming teaches the girls to be more entrepreneurial, well-rounded moms. "Breast-feeding, which is definitely not a popular adolescent activity, is looked on differently by the girls who experience the lessons with baby rabbits," she says. A teachable moment happened the day students broke open an egg containing what appeared to be a viable chick, which the girls frantically tried to save, even calling in the school nurse. The chick died, but the episode sparked a thoughtful conversation about premature human babies, the risks they face and the possibility that saving ailing preemies isn't always merciful. It was one of her most fulfilling days as an educator, Andrews says. "If we have one of those discussions a year, it's worth having a goat — or 10 goats — at the school."
Of course, which animal is most valuable to the downtown farmer depends on whom you ask. "[Rabbits] are the ideal urban farm animal," says Carpenter, because "they can feed almost exclusively on Dumpstered items like lettuce, stale bread, etc." Seattle Tilth's Thornton thinks that ducks are better for gardens than chickens and that they provide tastier eggs. "I think the duck is the future," she says. Game on, chicken lovers.
Keeping Their Eggs in Their Backyard Nests
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
As Americans struggle through a dismal recession, many are trying to safeguard themselves from what they fear will be even worse times ahead. They eat out less often. They take vacations closer to home. They put off buying new cars.
And some raise chickens. Lloyd Romriell, a married father of four in Annis, Idaho, recently received seven grown chickens and a coop from a relative. The hens lay a total of about two dozen eggs a week.
“It’s because times are tough. You never know what’s going to happen,” Mr. Romriell said. Although he manages a feed store, he had not kept chickens since he was a child. “If you lose your job tomorrow, you’ve still got food.”
As a backyard chicken trend sweeps the country, hatcheries that supply baby chicks say they can barely keep up with demand. Do-it-yourself coops have popped up in places as disparate as Brooklyn, suburban Chicago and the rural West.
In some cities, the chicken craze has met with resistance, as neighbors demand that local officials enforce no-poultry laws. In others, including Fort Collins, Colo., enthusiasts have worked to change laws to allow small flocks (without noisy roosters).
For some, especially in cities, where raising chickens has become an emblem of extreme foodie street cred, the interest is spurred by a preference for organic and locally grown foods. It may also stem in part from fear, after several prominent recalls, that the food in the supermarket is no longer safe.
But for many others, a deep current of economic distress underlies the chicken boomlet, as people seek ways to fend for themselves in tough times. Even if spreadsheets can demonstrate that raising chickens at home is not cost-effective, it may instill an invaluable sense of self-reliance.
“I’m not into that organic stuff,” Mr. Romriell said. “I think people in bigger cities want to see where their food comes from, whereas us out here in the West and in small towns, we know the concept of losing jobs and want to be able to be self-sustained. That’s why I do it.”
Commercial hatcheries, which typically ship baby chicks around the country by airmail, say they are having one of their best years, on top of exceptionally strong sales last year. Most of the birds go to farm supply stores, but many hatcheries are increasingly making small shipments directly to people who want just a few birds for a backyard flock. The postal service said that in the first six months of this year, it shipped 1.2 million pounds of packages containing chicks (mostly chickens but also baby ducks and turkeys), a 7 percent increase from the comparable period last year. That volume equals millions of birds, as the average chick weighs slightly more than an ounce.
Marie Reed, a sales representative for Ideal Poultry, a large Texas hatchery, said that managers of rural feed stores that sell the company’s birds told her they had seen a spike this year in demand for baby chicks, along with an upturn in sales of garden seeds — and ammunition.
“People are buying up guns and chickens and seed,” Ms. Reed said. “That tells me people are wanting to depend on themselves more.”
Yet, even as many people see raising chickens as a hedge against hard times — and a way to get tastier eggs and meat — they often acknowledge that it is not really a way to save money on food.
“You can buy eggs in the grocery store cheaper than you can raise them,” said David D. Frame, a poultry specialist who works with the Utah State University Extension. “You’re not saving money by doing it.”
He said that feed represented 75 percent of the cost of raising a bird. Commercial poultry operations that buy huge amounts of feed at wholesale have much lower costs per bird than the backyard chicken enthusiast can typically achieve.
Jasmin Middlebos, 36, a librarian who lives with her husband, a sheriff’s deputy, and their three children in a rural area outside Spokane, Wash., began raising chickens last year. She now has 26 birds, which produce up to two dozen eggs a day. (In hot weather, production can drop by half, and in winter it can stop altogether.) In September, she began selling some of the eggs — she gets $2 to $3 a dozen — and started keeping track of her income and expenses.
Since then, Ms. Middlebos said, she has taken in $457 from egg sales and spent $428, mostly on feed. That left $29 in the Mason jar where she keeps her earnings, to spend the next time she buys feed.
But that accounting does not include the cost of buying the birds as chicks — $1.50 to $4 each, depending on the breed — or the $1,500 she spent converting the old shed in her yard to a henhouse.
Ms. Middlebos said that she was pleased to be covering her immediate costs but that she viewed her small flock more as a hedge against an even deeper recession.
“Because our economy is going so bad,” she said, “I feel like I have a trump card in my hand.”
In New York City, where it is legal to raise chickens, Declan Walsh, 41, has been doing so in his backyard in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn for several years. Mr. Walsh, the director of community outreach at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has 25 hens and, to cover his costs, sells eggs to a local restaurant for $6 a dozen.
But this year, Mr. Walsh, who is married with three children, is trying something new. He spent about $300 to build a coop and a fenced-in chicken run on a vacant lot and is raising 49 broiler hens for meat. A share of the birds will go to the lot’s owner and others who are helping him.
The economics are very different from raising egg-layers. Broiler birds eat far more than the laying hens, and the organic feed he gives the broilers is expensive (the layers often eat kitchen scraps). He estimates that once he has slaughtered the birds, he will have spent about $8 a chicken, including the cost of the bird and its feed.
In contrast, he pointed out that, in a promotion, a restaurant chain was advertising whole cooked chickens for $1.99.
“I don’t know that, for small-time folks, you’re going to be able to beat the factories,” he said, referring to large poultry producers. “But it definitely will taste better.”
Chicken hatcheries say that it is typical in a recession for their business to do well. But some hatchery veterans say they have never seen a year like this one.
Nancy Smith, whose family owns Cackle Hatchery in Lebanon, Mo., said there were times over the last year, as the economic news grew worse and worse, that her customers seemed to be “in a panic mode” to buy birds they could begin raising at home.
“I see it as a sense of security,” Ms. Smith said. “If they don’t have the dollars that week to get the meat they need at the grocery store, they can go kill a chicken.”
From TIME magazine
It has photos!
Nigerian dwarf goats grow to only 21 in. tall, about equal to a medium-size dog. "But they have giant udders," says Novella Carpenter. She should know: she has six goats that together provide a quart of milk a day, which she drinks and uses to make cheese and butter. And when the bleating beauties are not grazing in her 1,000-sq.-ft. yard, they're hanging out on the porch of her second-floor apartment in the middle of Oakland, Calif.
Carpenter, a city dweller who in recent years has tried her hand at raising turkeys (she got three day-old poults for $2 each) and pigs (which she fattened to 300 lb.) for dinner, says she turned to milk-producing goats because "I decided I needed a more long-term relationship." The author of the new Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, she is eager to help others get into what she describes as a "hobby that involves sex and birth and death and life." (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)
There have been lots of stories lately about chicken coops' becoming a new urban and suburban accessory. But Carpenter considers the squawking hen "the urban-farming gateway animal," the first occupant of a big metropolitan menagerie. Among eco-foodies, the hottest urban livestock bleat, quack, gobble, oink, buzz and ... well, whatever noise rabbits make. Just ask the folks at Seattle Tilth, a composting and gardening nonprofit that this summer added goat sheds and pens to its long-standing local chicken-coop tour. Or ask the participants in Detroit's Garden Resource Program, which recently launched beekeeping classes and saw them fill up immediately. Even the so-called Chicken Whisperer, a.k.a. Andy Schneider, who hosts an urbane chicken radio show six days a week from suburban Atlanta, is branching out. He is planning an episode on turkeys after fielding so many questions about them from listeners. (Watch TIME's video "Barnyard Animals in Back Yards.")
The growing popularity of raising barnyard animals in backyards — or indoors (at least two companies, ChickenDiapers.com and MyPetChickens.com sell nappies to people who want their birds to bunk with them) — has forced many municipalities across the country to statutorily reckon with allowing livestock within city limits. But legal or not, urban animal husbandry is gaining cachet. That's not only because of the desire to eat local and organic but also because the shaky economy has more people wanting to be more self-sufficient. Says Seattle Tilth garden educator Carey Thornton: "Food you raise yourself just tastes better."
Most newbies keep chickens for eggs. Schneider's organization, Backyard Poultry, has groups in 19 cities in the U.S. and four outside the country; of the 700 members in Atlanta, for example, only five raise hens for consumption. Miniature goats are usually kept for milk and weed-eating; bees, for honey and pollination.
But the truly hard-core urban farmers are plumping their animals for meat, shortening the food-supply chain and being responsible carnivores. "It's empowering," says Carpenter, who is nurturing 10 bunnies to eat. "People want to own their meat-eating."
See pictures of urban farming around the world.
See TIME's photoessay "Cow-Pooling."
Of course, not everyone wants to get that close to their food sources. Dwarf goats in particular have been a point of contention. They smell bad and can wreak havoc if they escape, opponents say; some also worry that allowing goats will pave the way for legalizing llamas and cows in cities. Goat advocates, who note that only horned males emit musk, say the ruminants are gentle enough to be walked on a leash and that they generate high-quality manure, which can be used as fertilizer.
The movement has led to heated debates in city-council meetings over the definitions of livestock, small animals and farm animals. The result: a hodgepodge of animal-ownership laws across the nation and even within a state. This spring in North Carolina, for example, Asheville voted to allow temporary permits for goats to clear vegetation, while Charlotte banned them from properties smaller than a quarter of an acre — despite supporters showing up at a city-council meeting with signs reading I LOVE MY PYGMY GOAT.
Those enthusiasts may have taken a page from the godmother of goat lovers, Jennie Grant, owner of Brownie and Snowflake, who founded the Goat Justice League two years ago while pushing Seattle to legalize miniature goats. It is now permissible to have three on a 5,000-sq.-ft. lot, and some city departments have hired goats to clear blackberry brambles. "Part of my lobbying effort included bringing fresh chèvre to city-council members' offices," she says.
Locavore yuppies and suburban soccer moms aren't the only ones committing to animal husbandry. Catherine Ferguson Academy, a Detroit high school for teens who are pregnant or have already become mothers, has for years had a working farm adjacent to campus. The school considers gardening and raising animals integral to its curriculum. Under the tutelage of life-sciences teacher Paul Weertz, the young women built a barn one year and provide daily care for rabbits, horses, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys and peacocks. The students recently acquired a pig and, says principal Asenath Andrews, they're going to eat it.
Andrews hopes farming teaches the girls to be more entrepreneurial, well-rounded moms. "Breast-feeding, which is definitely not a popular adolescent activity, is looked on differently by the girls who experience the lessons with baby rabbits," she says. A teachable moment happened the day students broke open an egg containing what appeared to be a viable chick, which the girls frantically tried to save, even calling in the school nurse. The chick died, but the episode sparked a thoughtful conversation about premature human babies, the risks they face and the possibility that saving ailing preemies isn't always merciful. It was one of her most fulfilling days as an educator, Andrews says. "If we have one of those discussions a year, it's worth having a goat — or 10 goats — at the school."
Of course, which animal is most valuable to the downtown farmer depends on whom you ask. "[Rabbits] are the ideal urban farm animal," says Carpenter, because "they can feed almost exclusively on Dumpstered items like lettuce, stale bread, etc." Seattle Tilth's Thornton thinks that ducks are better for gardens than chickens and that they provide tastier eggs. "I think the duck is the future," she says. Game on, chicken lovers.
