I HAVEN’T HEAR OF A SINGLE incident of city slickers building barns in their backyards and raising cows. But cows are not the only mammals that produce milk for human consumption, only the most common. Of the all animals I could have in my backyard, personally, I would prefer to split the rent with a couple of goats. Nigerian dwarf goats can get by on a small lot, and you can handle them without needing someone else’s help. Few things make me happier than starting off the morning with some pita and labane, with a little bit of olive oil and za’atar… mmm… I could easily get used to a couple slices of goat cheese on a foccacia with roasted red peppers and eggplant later in the day… Think I’m kidding? Here is a short film shot by Time Magazine about a woman who raises several goats — and chickens, and rabbits, and pigs! — in her own backyard, not four short blocks away from my former home in inner-city Oakland, California! I am seriously jealous!

NOW WE TAKE IT TO the next level: aquatic animals. Who would have imagined that you could turn your aquarium into an actual fishing pond? Indoor fishbowls are too small to produce anything substantial, and most freshwater fish will die off very quickly in stagnant still waters. But as a number of innovative urban fish farmers have found out, some species like perch and tilapia will still thrive even when confined to tiny tanks, as long as aquaculture plants are grown in conjunction with the fish. The plants feed off of the nutrient-rich poop that the fish produce, and the fish benefit from the water filtration services that the plants provide. True, for them to survive in cold Canadian winters, you would have to build a small greenhouse on top of the pond to maintain a temperate climate under the bubble. But our neighbours to the west in Milwaukee, Wisconsin experience winters that are harsher than ours, and they harvest 10,000 pounds of fish food in the middle of the city! Watch this clip to find out how they do it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qZPwBPAqks

AND NOW WHAT MAY BE the most radical form of urban farming: beekeeping! Yes, apery is still practiced in downtown Toronto, as it has been for at least a century; the Toronto District Beekeepers’ Association was founded in 1911, and it’s still going strong. Bees are so important to the entire food chain, because they pollinate all of the other plants that you grow in your outdoor garden. And the honey that you could produce by maintaining a healthy hive that feeds off the flowers in your own backyard would be better for you than any other honey, because it would naturally inoculate you from any allergic reaction to local hay fevers. The biggest challenge that beekeepers face in the urban areas is reassuring their neighbours that homegrown hives don’t pose a threat to them or their children. It’s no easy task to overcome those phobias. But as the video clip below makes plain, even an area as urban as New York City can boast of its busy beekeepers. And as the song goes: If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KSTYtS6c3E

IN THE FIRST GREEN APPLE PIE trilogy on urban agriculture, we laid out the problem in detail: the population of the planet is growing exponentially, and even factory farms can’t keep up with the rising demand for more food. The solutions being touted by agrobusiness corporations are either catastrophic for our planetary support systems or else they are scientifically impossible. The population of the planet will eventually decrease to a fraction of its current figure — it has to, at some point, we are only experiencing a temporary unsustainable overshoot that will rectify itself in a matter of decades. The only question that remains is whether that descent into a world of far fewer humans will be a slow, measured one, or a rapid, frantic one? Will the transition to the food distribution systems of the future be marked by consensual belt-tightening and right-sizing, or will it be fraught with nightmarish sectarianism and ruthless class war?

I REALIZE THAT THESE WORDS may evoke hostility and even anger in some readers of the blog. Yes, it is absolutely frightening to come face-to-face with the realization that our exceedingly comfortable way of life, based on the hyper-exploitation of finite natural resources and socio-economic pyramid schemes, is drawing to a close. But please, please, do not shoot the messenger. We cannot avert our eyes and stick our heads in the sand until the very moment that the tsunami washes away everything that we care for. But there is good news. The good news is that humans have lived on Planet Earth for literally millions of years, quite comfortably, giving as good as they got. The corkscrew roller-coaster ride of population-boom-and-bust is merely an anomalous spike in course of human history, and it certainly does not prove that humans are incorrigibly cannibalistic — only that the prevailing culture of reactionary capitalism categorically is.

SO WHERE DO WE GO from here? Well, the good thing about local food solutions is that they are all win-win solutions. Yes, they use less precious resources. Yes, they are healthier for you, your family, and for the watershed that quenches our collective thirst. Yes, they ensure our political and physical security in a world in which there are no more guarantees. Yes, they tear us away from the A.D.D.-infecting Sega systems that alienate us from our own friends and families, and bring us back to real life, back into our beautiful bodies. Yes, they make everyday activities like eating much more romantic. And heck, yeah: local food just tastes better. Period. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it sure isn’t going to fall in one day, either. But we’ve got to start sometime, and the sooner the better. For every step that we take towards the Earth, the Earth will take two steps towards us. And she’s going to feel so good to come home to.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGbnG0nH3n4

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzXDWz4BZ0U

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScKnopsrT0s

I SHOULD BE FORTHRIGHT and explain here that I have some personal experience with chickens, myself. Three years ago, I was living on a modest permaculture plot in a small town. Our next door neighbours were conventional chicken farmers, and they raised what must have been several thousand chickens at a time in a concrete coop that is apparently considered to be the industry standard for housing fowl nowadays. From right up close, I could see that their living conditions were absolutely atrocious.

I DON’T WANT TO ENGAGE in provocative hyperbole, but it’s hard to not make the comparison between these cruel cages and genocidal concentration camps. Certainly, from the chickens’ own perspective, they would not be able to see many major differences between the two. True, chickens may not be capable of making calculations in advanced trigonometry. But you know what? Neither am I… And in their ability to experience physical and emotional pain, there is no measurable difference whatsoever between a chicken and your Great-Aunt Shirley.

I AM NOT GOING TO USE this forum to advocate for a vegan lifestyle. Certainly, there are a thousand and one industries that cruelly use animal products when non-living materials would clearly suffice. But there are so many competing philosophies around human food consumption, and it seems that almost every other week another doctor or dietician comes up with a new regimen that purports to grant its practitioners maximum human health. So I definitely won’t tell you not to eat animal products, but I definitely will ask of you, that if you do so, to try to do it ethically and morally.

UNFORTUNATELY, FROM MY OWN perspective, there are not really any store-bought ethical options in the City of Toronto. Now of course ethics and morals are purely subjective, and not everyone is going to agree on how other species should be treated. But the point is that the industry is dominated by only a couple of massive agrobusinesses, who grow their chickens in horrid conditions. And the laws that strictly regulate the industry are tailor-made for these faceless corporations, so even if you wanted to band together and create an eco-alternative, you can’t!

AND FROM THIS SAD STATE of affairs emerges the backyard chickens movement. Historically, city slickers have peacefully co-existed with non-human animals for as long as there have been cities. It is only in the last sixty years or so that a sanitized version of suburbia has been pre-packaged and sold to the North American people, one in which there is a complete disconnect from our food sources, and our kitchens bear no evidence as to the origins of the animals we eat. And so nowadays our children have come to believe that slabs of meat are born already stuck onto styrofoam and wrapped in plastic… (and if Biotech has their way, they soon will be)!

BUT I REMEMBER YEARS AGO when I was looking for a place to rent in downtown Toronto, I saw a first-floor apartment in Little Portugal. The landlord took me on a tour of the house, and I was startled to discover a chicken coop in the backyard, with real live chickens in it! Apparently, this was not an anomaly; lots of Italian immigrants came over to this country and maintained their traditions of raising chickens for fresh eggs. Many continue to do so till this day. It’s officially illegal, but as long as the neighbours don’t complain, it remains unreported and everyone is happy.

IN THIS CRAZY, MIXED-UP WORLD we live in where food prices are rising all the time and we can’t trust the household-name big businesses to provide us with healthy and ethical food, it’s starting to make more sense for more people to think about raising chickens on their properties. And this has not gone unnoticed by the bureaucrats at City Hall. In a couple of months, they will be rolling out a backyard chicken pilot program in a number of neighbourhoods, to see how people react to it. Just like city-wide recycling services and compost collection: if it’s a success on a small scale, then they’ll expand it to the entire city.

AND TORONTO IS NOT THE ONLY city in North America that is considering amending its by-laws to officially permit small-scale urban egg farming. Dozens of American cities have already given the green light to backyard chickens: from San Francisco to Phoenix, Portland to Pittsburgh, Seattle to St. Louis, Chicago to Boston, Atlanta to Miami, Denver to Dallas, Los Angeles to Las Vegas; even the biggest metropolis on the continent, New York City, has A-okayed raising chickens in residential neighbourhoods. Even closer to home, in Brampton to the north, Guelph to the west, and Niagara Falls to the south, town councils have spoken with one voice: Legalize it!

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? If you support the idea of legalizing backyard chickens, then please call you City Councillor and encourage them to co-sponsor a bill. If you’re open to the idea of raising chickens in your own backyard, then get educated, learn everything you need to know. And if you live in one of the neighbourhoods that gets the go-ahead to bring the chickens out from the underground, and if you’re ready to accept the responsibility and reap the rewards of having backyard chickens, then give us a call, and we’ll happily design and build you a backyard chicken coop!

For more information about raising chickens in Toronto,
check out TorontoChickens.com.

For more information about industrially-manufactured animal products, two excellent films are Fast Food Nation and Food Inc.