Pet mini-pigs and backyard goats

For a student living in an urban state capital, I know a pretty fair amount of people with typical farm-like livestock. For example; I know a woman who works for the university who sometimes rides to campus with a carton of peeping chicks in a box on the back of her bike. She calls herself the “chicken dealer” because she seems to have started a hot demand for chicken husbandry within her department. Another college student down the street from me has a pet goat- I’m pretty sure he just treats it like a domesticated pet rather than a livestock animal. A few times last year, I saw a girl walk her adorable pink mini-pig down Honor’s Way on campus. Although my interest in farm animals has mostly only stretched to domestication like the mini-pig girl or the goat boy, I could completely see my huge backyard here in Tallahassee being the home to a few happy laying chickens.

Money and time constraints are the major obstacles to this vision, but none the less it’s plausible. I know from my experience that there is something more intrinsically rewarding about growing your own food, and I could see this being ten times as true with regards to raising chickens for eggs. Not only do you get to enjoy the experience of raising an animal, but there is the reward of the animal providing for you in return. I’m vegan for predominately ethical and environmental reasons, but I can’t honestly take much issue with locally, happily raised eggs. Of course not everyone in the world is able to have the space for livestock, even something as minimal as chickens. In a way, this comments on the ecological as well as social restraints of this practice as well as the privilege it is to able to do this.

The chapters from Farm City were so interesting to me, because that’s basically how I imagine ideal urban agriculture being. Here’s a woman who took an abandoned lot and made it a beautiful retreat for her hungry neighbors. Not only did she open the space to her eclectic peers, but she took on raising livestock in a way that was very thought-provoking to read. In some ways it was a more passive version of Will Allen’s story from Growing Power. By engaging her neighbors in the process of food production she, like Allen, was educating low-income families on the very practical skill of growing vegetables. These readings also made me think about how funny it is that people in a wealthy country like the United States are moving towards subsistence farming. A major portion of the world depends on subsistence farming, and it’s the wealthy who don’t need to grow their own food. But yet here is a couple from the reading, who specifically chose a low-income area to begin growing their own food.