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Backyard chickens


An urban chicken or backyard chicken is a chicken kept on a residential lot.

The primary reasons for keeping chickens are the food and income made by selling the eggs and meat. Other reasons include use in ceremonies and as gifts.

Keeping chickens in an urban environment is associated with the "urban agriculture" movement, which is the growing practice of cultivating, processing and distributing food in or around a village, town or city. According to National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service and experts in backyard agriculture, there are a host of personal benefits associated with urban agriculture and keeping chickens in one's own backyard.

Keeping in cities has been common throughout history and is still practiced in many parts of the world. For example, 50,000 pigs were being kept in Manhattan in 1859. But local ordinances were created to limit this, owing to the noise and smell nuisance, and these were relaxed only in times of war when the urban populace was encouraged to provide food for itself.

Urban relief gardens played an important role in sustaining large populations of Americans during economic depressions. War gardens played an important role in the nationwide effort to help win both World War I and World War II. These victory gardens made gardening a patriotic activity and introduced gardening as an activity for everyone, not just those too poor to buy their own food. Later, in the late 1960s and 1970s, community gardening started to make a comeback as a hobby. Organic gardening, urban animal husbandry, and community farms became popular and many cities around the country started community gardening programs for their residents.

In Canada and the United States, the raising of chickens on urban, suburban, and small town residential lots has become increasingly popular. For example, in Madison, Wisconsin, citizens formed a group called the Chicken Underground, overturned a ban upon domestic chickens and there are now 81 registered owners. A film titled Mad City Chickens was made about their campaign. More and more cities that had previously banned urban chickens are removing old regulations or making permits easier to obtain.


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Wikipedia

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