Monday, November 16, 2009

Find an urban chicken farmer near you!

While sites like MyPetChicken and BackyardChickens are great resources for figuring out how chickens work in a general sense, there's nothing like having someone from your neighborhood to chat with about local sources of supplies, the effects of weather on the flock, and how to keep local predators at bay.

With urban chicken owners popping up all over the place, it's getting easier to find someone in your neighborhood who's got chickens in their backyard:
  • Search Yahoo! groups or Google Groups (each of these links drops you on the results for "chicken") to see who's already talking about chickens near you. Join the group and have the discussions emailed to you in a daily digest so you can scan the topics to see what interests you. Listen first, then jump in and ask or offer advice once you're comfortable.
  • Join a Meetup of fellow chicken enthusiasts. There are at least 835 urban chicken meetups happening across the country each month! The best thing about meetups: you get to mingle with fellow chicken owners face-to-face and swap tips and tales in real time. If there's no meetup already existing around you, you can sign up to be notified when one does get started (or start one yourself!)
  • Find the 4-H nearest you and ask about their poultry program. Do a google search on 4-H and your town name to get the contact coordinates for the local program. Unfortunately the National 4-H program is a complete mess when it comes to helping you find a local poultry program, so you're best off just using google to find what you need.
For those of us in the Bay Area, here's just a short list of sources for connecting with fellow urban chicken farmers:
Know of others here in the Bay Area? let me know, and I'll be happy to add them to the list.

Got a list of local resources of your own? Please share it in the comments below!

Photo credit: Daniel Miller/My Standard Break from Life on Flickr

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Oops! looks like the best link is to http://marbleheadhens.blogspot.com/ :)

Amanda said...

www.bellecitychickens.org

The Garden Coop said...

There's a large, active, and very helpful Yahoo group in Portland, Ore. We've gotten a lot of great ideas from the group. And because of its size, you can get answers pretty fast.

Susan said...

I am always glad when people take responsibility for their food. I don't think our chickens would like to live in town though.

Tom, Farmer Pirate

eyecontact said...

Helpful post! I am happy to report that more backyard hens are moving into neighborhoods around our area. It's great fun to chatter about details with like-minded folks. Merry hens to all and to all a good night!

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