BACKYARD CHICKEN BEAUTIES
Chickens are flocking to urban backyards by the droves now. It’s part of the urban livestock movement, which has been growing in recent years across the country. While the White House has passed on the idea of adding a chicken coop annex to their popular vegetable garden on the south lawn, the rest of Washington DC can consider it since city ordinances allow it. We were surprised to learn you can legally harbor backyard chickens in New York City, Boston, LA, San Francisco, and Chicago, to name a few cities where the practice is thriving.
Photo: thomaspix, Chicken with Eglu House
The city chicken trend seems to have started in London, about ten years ago, when the "Eglu" chicken house was invented to help make life easy for new urban farm enthusiasts and their broods. Now, hundreds of thousands of city folks are happily engaged around the world. Community groups, like the Uptown Initiative in Troy, New York, are promoting the idea of backyard chickens as a way to promote sustainability and counter high food prices. But there are many other reasons to support this growing trend.
Backyard Chickens (BYC), just one of dozens of sites devoted to chicken hobbyists, founded in 1999, now has a vibrant community of more than 160,000 chicken owners who add about 6,000 new posts per day.
Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network, shared his insights with WorldWatch about the popularity of urban chicken husbandry today, "It's no longer something kinky or interesting. The ‘chicken underground' has really spread so widely and has so much support."
What’s so beautiful about chickens clucking out back while you go about your own hustle-and-bustle day job? Here are just 10 reasons:
1) Chickens help raise kids.
Kids take responsibility, even more than caring for other pets do.
2) Chickens are great teachers.
They teach kids about where food comes from.
3) Farm to table benefits are greater.
The trip takes minutes vs. days, or even weeks.
4) Backyard coops are eco friendly.
Urban coops provide an alternative to factory farms that pollute local ecosystems. Animal waste generated by commercial farms exceeds waste generated by many small U.S. cities, according to government reports.
Backyard chicken farmers are able to eliminate or reduce herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.
5) Backyard laid eggs taste better.
Egg yolks are firmer, more yellow, and have a much richer flavor.
6) Home Grown chickens are less likely to carry disease.
While there is some concern about risk of spreading diseases such as avian flu and salmonella infection, proper handling and management of backyard coops has proven to largely reduce the risk of disease. Remember the great egg recall of 2010?
7) Raising chickens is economical
Like the Victory Gardens of WWI and WWII, people are saving money now by growing their own.
8) Chickens eat pests.
Chickens eat fleas, ticks, grasshoppers, spiders, slugs, mosquito larvae, small mice, snakes, and other unfriendly critters.
9) Chickens make great pets.
Chickens have personalities, just like dogs and cats, and they can live well over a decade.
10) Chickens can be quite beautiful to look at.
With hundreds of different chicken breeds, include many considered “fancy,” their range of color, shape, and feathers is astounding. Imagine any number of them strutting their stuff in your backyard. Imagine fresh organic eggs each morning for breakfast. And that just might be the beginning of your new beautiful backyard farming pursuits.
While the chicken has become a bit of a mascot of the local food movement in general, raising chickens in city digs is part of a even bigger urban homesteading movement. From veggies to livestock to bees, urban farms are on the rise. Sites like Urban Homestead, Barnyards & Backyards, and Urban Farming, are just a few sites that have cropped up to serve the growing demand for information and like-minded community.
Photo: Reinventing the Chicken Coop
"Reinventing the Chicken Coop," by Kevin McElroy and Matthew Wolpe, (Storey Publishing, 2013) is a DIY manual for building Architectural Digest-worthy urban chicken coops. With plans for 14 complete coops, including one has a water-capturing roof; one is a great homage to mid-Modern architecture; and another has a built-in composting system. Some designs are suitable for beginning builders, and some are challenging enough for experts. Step-by-step building plans are accompanied by full-color photographs and detailed construction illustrations.
Do chickens have a future in your beautiful backyard? Let us know. And enter this week’s BeautifulNow competition. Our theme is, conveniently, Beautiful Backyards. And check back every day this week as we feature fresh, new Daily Fixes dedicated to Beautiful Backyards.
