Sustainable Urban Farming: How Raising Backyard Chickens Can Benefit Your City Life
Sustainable urban farming is not a fad; it is the answer to many of today’s urban problems. If there is one particular practice that will reduce waste and promote environmental sustainability, it will definitely be raising backyard chickens.
This article discusses all the good aspects of keeping chickens in urban settings and guides city residents through this practice.
Source of Fresh Organic Eggs and Meat
Eggs from backyard chickens are naturally rich in Vitamins A and E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 fatty acids, which makes them deep yellow or almost orange and hence more nutritious. You also don’t need to worry about the shelf life, processing, and shipping of these eggs ensuring what you consume is fresh and untainted.
You can also process your backyard chickens for meat. This will reduce your dependency on store-bought produce, which might have come from unethical farming practices.
Keeping your chicken flock allows you to control their diet and living conditions. You can keep your flock in the best condition with a chick incubator, from the very start.
| Tip: Regularly inspect your chickens for signs of early illness or parasites. Treating diseases early is essential to keeping your flock healthy. |
Reduce Waste
Chickens can be fed a whole lot of food scraps that would have otherwise gone to waste. This includes vegetable peels, leftover grains, bread, and dairy products.
When a household feeds such scraps to chickens, it considerably reduces the amount of waste sent to landfills. In doing so, this reduces the decomposition of the food waste in landfills, which ultimately reduces methane emissions.
Improve Soil Fertility
Chicken manure, once viewed as sticky and disgusting, is an excellent natural fertilizer containing high levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Its high ammonia content, though, can injure plants unless well-composted first.
Composting manure stops the creation of poisonous nitrites and changes them to good nitrates, creating an excellent nutrient-rich organic fertilizer perfect for use around flower beds and vegetable gardens.
| Did you know: You can use chickens to turn organic matter and prepare garden beds without tilling? Their natural scratching aerates the soil, making it much more fertile and ready for planting. |
Natural Pest Control
Problematic pests are a nuisance, spreading diseases to your plants and, in the long run, contributing to low crop yields. Chickens will help eliminate these pests by consuming various bugs, including mealworms, silkworms, earthworms, crickets, grasshoppers and slugs.
When chickens are put in the garden, they scratch the soil in search of larvae hidden in it, thereby not only finding food but also disrupting the life cycle of many pests.
Improve Urban Sustainability with Backyard Chickens
Backyard chickens help improve the city’s urban environment in a sustainable way. This practice provides people with fresh organic eggs and meat while reading kitchen waste by feeding scraps to chickens. This practice also aids city dwellers in enhancing soil fertility and controlling pests.