Urban chicken farming is environmentally sustainable, but illegal

 

Kim Covert, Canwest News Service; With files from Global News

Published: Tuesday, February 26

Montreal Gazette – Montreal,Quebec,Canada

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=5e8ddb61-3657-455b-84c2-6f8253380c46

Three chickens were forced to fly their city coop in Halifax yesterday, depriving their owner of fresh eggs – but also reigniting the discussion about where our food should come from.

Some say that in the era of the zero-mile diet, urban agriculture is something that will have to be dealt with more constructively than by setting the government foxes on the henhouses.

The woman who owned the chickens, Louise Hanavan, says she believes people in cities should be able to grow some of their own food, and she wants the city of Halifax to change a bylaw prohibiting that.

“I’d really like to see the city take a more active position in promoting urban agriculture, and encouraging people to do creative things like this to promote sustainability in urban areas,” she said.

Mike Levenston agrees. He’s executive director of City Farmer, a small non-profit group of urban gardeners, defined as anyone who lives in an urban area who grows things to eat on a non-commercial basis, from the window sill herb garden to the big backyard – or rooftop – garden.

“In 1978, we put out a small newspaper called City Farmer, and our first cover story was ‘Chickens in Soup’ about a Vancouver woman in trouble with the municipality for raising chickens at home.”

He recently wrote a blog post called “Chickens Still in Soup” because of the number of stories that have come across his desk recently, including Hanavan’s.

Levenston says sympathy is growing, “around North America, certainly, around changing the bylaws. I think earlier on it was: ‘Hey, we’re urbanites, we’re not farmers, we’re not rural, there’s a difference.’

“But now, with the whole local food (movement) … people are thinking: ‘Hey, we want to get involved in our food.’ So I think it’s becoming ultra-urban chic now to have this take place in the city,” he said from his office in Vancouver.

Some urbanites worry about smell when it comes to livestock, others worry about noise, or about mice and rats being attracted to the feed. Levenston says the smart thing to do would be to work with experts – say at a university agricultural program – to set standards for housing livestock and storing feed, and then issue permits to keep livestock based on those standards.

People are now lobbying the Halifax Regional Municipality to allow limited poultry farming there, echoing similar movements across Canada, said Jayme Melrose, Community Garden Co-ordinator for the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group.

“Food (in)security is a massive impending issue that should be of serious concern to federal, provincial and municipal governments across the country!” Melrose said in an e-mail to Canwest News Service.

Marla MacLeod, Food Miles Co-ordinator for the Ecology Action Centre in Nova Scotia, says her group was surprised at the continuing public outcry over Hanavan’s chickens, which were moved yesterday to a farm outside Halifax.

There are at least two Facebook groups dedicated to Hanavan with over 600 members, and two petitions were presented to city council in February with more than 1,000 names demanding she be allowed to keep her poultry and that bylaws be amended.

Asked what she thought prompted the interest, MacLeod pointed to recent food scares.

“People are really worried about where their food is coming from,” MacLeod said. “Local food was the news item for 2007, ‘locavore’ was the word of the year in the Oxford English dictionary. … People are wanting to reconnect with their food. And I think that was part of why this story really took off.”