Urban Chickens written up in Newsweek

Don't miss this week's Newsweek.com's article "The Craze for Urban Chicken Farming" which I think does a nice job covering the urban chicken territory. The author of the article, Jessica Bennett, does a great job capturing all the reasons we, as a group, are into urban chicken farming, and she calls out the usual suspects where we gather as a community online:

Chicken farmers are finding each other on sites like TheCityChicken.com, UrbanChickens.org and MadCityChickens.com. BackyardChickens.com logs some 6 million page views each month and has some 18,000 members in its forum, where community members share colorful stories (giving a chicken CPR), photos (from a California chicken show), even look to each other for comfort. "I am worried that non-BYC people won't understand why a 34-year-old woman would cry over a $7 chicken," writes a Stockton, N.J., woman, whose chicken was killed by a hawk.

And a BIG congratulations to KT Labadie over at UrbanChickens.org (what a great name!) for her paragraph in the story:

Over at UrbanChickens.org, which launched this year, founder K. T. LaBadie, a master's student in community planning, provides updates on city ordinances, info about local chicken-farming classes and coop tours and has been contacted by activists hoping to overturn chicken bans around the nation. In Albuquerque, where she lives with her husband and four chickens—Gloria, Switters, Buffy and Omelet—residents can keep 15 chickens and one rooster, subject to noise ordinances, as well as slaughter the chickens for food. In July, LaBadie wrote in detail of her first killing: she and her husband hung the bird by its legs, slit its throat, plucked its feathers and put it on ice. Then they slow-cooked it for 20 hours. "It's not pretty, it's kinda messy, and it's a little smelly," she writes. "But it's quite real."

I remember when I first met K.T. last year when she reached out to me doing research on urban chickens as part of her studies. I'm so amazed at what she's pulled together over on her .org site to help the entire urban chickens movement.

Here's hoping there are many more urban chicken farmers about to join us!