Like a lot of you, I live in the city, where food miles are measured by how many blocks away the nearest pizza parlor is, and growing one’s own food is often limited to a windowbox of parsley, sage, rosemary, or thyme. But a burgeoning subculture of city-bound agrarians are changing the urban landscape, back lot by garden plot, planting fruit trees, cultivating crops, and even raising livestock. Not livestock as in horses and cows perhaps, but livestock as in chickens, ducks, and bees.

The rationale behind raising your own food in the concrete jungle is as timeless as it is timely. After all, the DIY impulse is deeply rooted in the urge for self-sufficiency on every level, not just mechanical ones. Engaging in the food chain as an active participant inspires new (or rather much older) ways of thinking about food and its source. And as the justification of shipping food thousands of miles to be sold as pre-packaged processed “product” becomes less easy to stomach, the more conscientious, not to mention delicious, eating locally appears.

Of course raising urban livestock, particularly fowl, does require certain considerations of space. Apartment and condo-dwellers without yard access might have to forgo the “to-raise-or-not-to-raise” discussion altogether. Many cities and counties have regulations in place as to how many feet away from a housing unit urban livestock must be kept, and how many animals are allowed per household. But once such criteria are satisfied, it can be surprisingly simple to proceed.

Beyond protection from predators, stable housing, and daily feedings, chickens and ducks require little day-to-day attention and the tangible rewards of compostable manure, pest control, eggs, and perhaps an eventual chicken dinner (or at least a good soup stock), make them an eminently pragmatic pet choice. Bees, too, require very in little in terms of daily upkeep or space, and the yield from a single bee box can be as much as sixty pounds of honey per year. It might not be milking your own cow or shearing your own sheep, but small-scale animal husbandry can still put you back in touch with your environment, not to mention your food chain, in a significant way.

Photo courtesy of thomas pix.