Georgia to Legalize Urban Chickens at State Level?

If you've taken a look at the nascent Urban Chickens Network Legal Resource Center, you know that trying to keep track of the seemingly endless variations of ordinances regarding keeping chickens in the backyard is a difficult task, at best.

It seems every town and city has to have its own version of the law allowing urban chickens (if, indeed, they are allowed), and depending on just where you're geographically located, you may not enjoy the same chicken-owning rights as your next door neighbor.

Thanks to frequent reader Linda S, I've been alerted to an interesting approach being proposed in the state of Georgia. The Georgia General Assembly is considering a statewide law governing the growing of crops and keeping of small animals in HB 842 - Agriculture; preempt certain local ordinances; protect right to grow food crops; provisions.

The First Reader Summary says

A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Chapter 1 of Title 2 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to general provisions relative to agriculture, so as to preempt certain local ordinances relating to production of agricultural or farm products; to protect the right to grow food crops and raise small animals on private property so long as such crops and animals are used for human consumption by the occupants, gardeners, or raisers and their households and not for commercial purposes; to define a term; to provide for effect on certain private agreements and causes of action; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.

Now, whether or not the bill passes, I like this approach: deal with matters on a state level so that the constituents don't have to scratch their heads wondering whether something legal or illegal based on the whims of the local government.

It'd sure go a long way toward simplifying the process of knowing where your food comes from.

Does anyone know of another state that is considering (or has even passed) such a law?

Oh, and have you yet added your own town's urban chicken ordinance to the Urban Chickens Network Legal Resource Center? We're at 36 cities and growing!

Photo credit: atlexplorer on Flickr

Urban Chickens on the Martha Stewart Show? Be There!

Got an email this morning from Anne who works in the audience department at the Martha Stewart Show in NYC.  They're taping a show on urban farming in March 2010 and are looking for urban chicken farmers (among others) to be in the audience.

If you're interested in being there, you have to request tickets and help them understand why you should be in the audience. The details are in Anne's email:

If you or someone you know have recently turned your backyard space into a chicken coop or turkey pen, we have a special show that's just for you! We're filling our studio audience with individuals who raise livestock in urban environments as we celebrate the backyard farming movement. If you're interested in attending this show, please be sure to tell us about yourself and your backyard farm, as well as why you'd like to be part of this special audience. Please feel free to spread the word and request tickets as soon as you can if you're interested! 

The link to request tickets is www.marthastewart.com/get-tickets; scroll down to ‘calling all urban farmers.' 

I hope to see you there next month (if they approve my request to attend, that is... fingers crossed!)

benefits checklist for urban chickens

It's one thing to own urban chickens and live day-to-day with the benefits of raising your own backyard hens. It's quite another to be able to clearly talk about these same benefits so others can understand just why you keep your chooks around.

Lucky for us, the fine folks running the Windsor Eats blog have shared a list of benefits that urban chickens bring to a community by way of documenting the efforts of Steve Green of Windsor Essex Community Supported Agriculture to legalize chickens in Windsor, Ontario (just across the bridge from Detroit, Michigan).

Some of the key benefits to our community:

• Chickens can provide healthy, pesticide free eggs
• Reduction of weekly food bills
• Reduction of green house gases through reduction in food transport costs
• Chickens consume kitchen waste, reducing municipal waste problems
• Chickens produce great compost for the garden
• Chickens are a great way to teach kids about food sources, hands-on
• Chickens make great pets, for big kids and little kids alike
• The path to global environmental sustainability begins with local initiatives and urban chickens are one of those initiatives
• Chickens kept in back yards are generally living in much more humane conditions than their battery cage industrial chicken counterparts

This list is a great start... are there any others you'd add to the list?

Photo credit: Windsoreats.com

Fresh grass for urban chickens all year long

Urban chickens love their greens, sometimes (often?) to the detriment of existing landscaping. Hens don't much care how much a plant costs you to replace, they just care if it's yummy or not.

Yes, there's been many an urban chicken farmer who, with best intentions, has moved their run on top of the grass for a day or so only to come back to find a patch of dirt under some rather content hens. So, how to provide your girls with greens, especially when it's still cold and snowy out still (in most of the country, at least)?   

Mary D was kind enough to send me an email sharing her instructions for providing fresh greens to your urban hens.

I get unhulled seed, (whatever is available) at our local Co op, and rotate four trays of seed growing continuously. When I start seed, I lay it down thick on potting soil, cover with a piece of newspaper, keep the newspaper moist, and keep covered with a plastic wrap, until seed really gets sprouting.

I do all of this on a grow rack in our house throughout the winter and each day our hens get a 1/2 flat of fresh grass.

This is wheat berry growing in the above pictures, but I experiment with any grain I can find. They love it!

As soon as one tray is empty I start another. From seed to "chicken ready" is usually 7 days. 4-6 trays keep you in grasses for 8 hens.

Bonus: you can find all kinds of quantities of grass seed ready to be shipped from Amazon.

Thanks for the tip, Mary. I know you're making a lot of snow-bound urban chickens very happy!

What do you do to keep your urban chickens getting their greens during the long winter months?

UPDATE: Derek, from mypetchicken.com, chimes in with this little tip he got on growing grass in trays: "add a hardware cloth top to the trays (might have to make the trays out of wood) and let the grass grow through.  This way the chickens can eat the grass, but not scratch up all the dirt and require reseeding the trays every time.  You can cycle a couple of the trays so that they always have fresh grass"

Food Curated's Brooklyn Chicken Video

Got a nice note from Liza de Guia about a video posted to Food Curated about Brooklyn's Backyard Chicken Keepers. The high quality video and the enthusiasm of Megan and Katrina (the owners) make the video worth the 3 minutes to see the whole thing.


Brooklyn's Backyard Chicken Keepers *food curated* from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

It's especially great that they got their four day-old chicks from MyPetChicken.com and you can see in the blog post update that Megan and Katrina got their very first eggs over the holidays (after the video had been shot). Reminds me of when my CBC Radio interview happened just prior to our first eggs and then the day after broadcast, the girls decided it was time.

Urban Chickens on the Rise? Follow the Money

At last, there's some interesting economic data about urban chickens in an article by Brendan Murray over on BusinessWeek.com.

Brendan had interviewed me about urban chickens earlier this month, and when he asked how big the urban chickens movement is, I gave the answer I give all reporters: I'm not sure, but there's got to be sales data for feed and chicks and whatnot available to show this urban chicken movement is real.

And when his article about the fight to legalize urban chickens in Washington, DC, posted online, I was thrilled to see he'd actually done some investigating on the economics.

Two highlights:

• Ideal Poultry Breeding Farms (Cameron, TX) says sales to customers who buy just a few chicks has grown from less than 2% of Ideal's sales a decade ago to almost 35% of sales last year. (They shipped 4.5 million chicks last year)
• Land O'Lakes Purina Mills, while not disclosing the numbers, sees sales increasing of its 25- and 50-pound bags of feed for adult birds, and this year is marketing a 5-pound package of feed for baby chicks, tailor-made for us urban chicken farmers. If a company that size is getting into the market, you know the MBAs have crunched away the data and see significant money to be made.

I know our local Feed & Fuel has seen a dramatic rise in selling chicken feed (again, no numbers, just an anecdotal observation by the owner) over the last few years.

Anyone else out there have firm data showing the growth of the urban chicken market?

I have a hunch that our showing the economic benefits of allowing urban chickens might be another arrow in our quiver trying to get hens legal inside city limits.

Photo credit to zizzybaloobah on Flickr

Urban Chickens goes to Thailand

Sorry for the long lapse between posts, but I've been on a business trip to Thailand. You can bet I've been taking pictures of all the urban chickens I've seen here in this beautiful country (they definitely free range them here, unlike the States).

So, until the next post, please enjoy this lovely little rooster I caught outside a wat (temple) in Chiang Mai up in the northern part of Thailand.