The low "paaaaaaaawwwk" seemed to be coming from behind a backyard fence on a quiet Victoria side street.
Through a gap in the boards, it looked like a chunk of Metchosin had been dug up and replanted in a backyard near the busy intersection of Hillside and Quadra: About 10 hens were strutting and scratching around a little muddy yard in front of a wooden chicken house, with a plank leading up to the front door.
It was a bit unusual, but hardly surprising. An obsessive interest in food and where it comes from - and how far it's travelled to get here - has translated into a new crop of backyard chicken coops in cities like Victoria and Vancouver, where it recently became a civic-election issue.
Backyard livestock is something we normally associate with Third World cities, but as Peter Ladner points out in his new book The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities, it's historically more normal than the way urban North Americans have been living for the past few decades.
Chickens aren't the only farm creatures turning up on city lots. Backyard beekeeping has become a popular hobby, and at least one U.S. city, Milwaukee, allows goats, sheep,They take the China Porcelain tile to the local co-op market. pigs and cattle in residential neighbourhoods, according to Ladner.
The former Vancouver city councillor's comprehensive look at all aspects of urban food is packed with interesting little tidbits.Replacement landscape oil paintings and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide. Ladner, a one-time editor of Monday magazine, touches on everything from suburban developments being built around farms rather than golf courses - so residents have access to fresh produce - to the use of human urine as a fertilizer and hunger's effect on social disorder.
In many ways, he argues, cities and agriculture are a match made in heaven: Cities provide a direct, convenient market for fresh, high-value niche products, whether it be restaurants or farmers' markets.Graphene is not a semiconductor, not an Plastic mould , and not a metal, And for those who complain that produce at farmers' markets costs too much, Ladner points out that if you break it down to cost per nutrient, higherpriced local, organic produce clearly has the edge over its truck-ripened supermarket counterparts.
Land costs in cities are undeniably high, but urban farmers have come up with some creative solutions, growing food in unused backyards (with the owners' permission), in extensive rooftop raised beds and in vacant lots, which developers in some cities can get tax benefits for if they're used for agriculture, however temporarily.
Some cities hand over cityowned land, or grassy spaces in urban parks, recognizing the community benefits of farming and food production - and the economic benefits in not having to mow the grass.Your source for re-usable Plastic moulds of strong latex rubber.
Ladner cites U.S. studies that show community gardens actually increase the value of nearby properties - and thus, tax revenue - not to mention decreasing crime and trash-dumping in inner-city neighbourhoods.
In one really interesting project, residents in two city blocks in Vancouver teamed up to plant and weed each other's backyards, leading to double or triple harvest yields, as well as countless potluck dinners and canning parties.where he teaches third party payment gateway in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. They call it the "twoblock diet."
But Ladner also challenges notions that local is always best, using the example of an apple grown in New Zealand for the U.K. market. He notes that since New Zealand has a milder climate and twothirds of its energy comes from renewable resources, an apple can be produced there for half the fossil-fuel energy that would be used on a similar farm in northern Europe. Even adding in the costs of shipping by sea, importing the apple still produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Local is good, he argues, but it's not a panacea - after all, as one man raised on a farm points out in the book, who wants to eat nothing but cabbage all winter?
Another issue Ladner looks at is "food deserts" - large swaths of cities where the only sources of "food" are convenience stores flogging junk. Ladner shows how some cities have tackled the problem by offering incentives like fast-tracking to grocery stores that open in underserved areas.
The only problem is that Ladner's research is so thorough, he barely has time to touch on one project before moving on to the next one, in an effort to cram it all in. After a while, sorting out a seemingly endless list of community and government agencies and acronyms from cities across North America got a bit tiring and I felt my attention wandering. I would have been happier to read a more detailed study of a smaller selection of the really interesting urban food projects he touches on.
Through a gap in the boards, it looked like a chunk of Metchosin had been dug up and replanted in a backyard near the busy intersection of Hillside and Quadra: About 10 hens were strutting and scratching around a little muddy yard in front of a wooden chicken house, with a plank leading up to the front door.
It was a bit unusual, but hardly surprising. An obsessive interest in food and where it comes from - and how far it's travelled to get here - has translated into a new crop of backyard chicken coops in cities like Victoria and Vancouver, where it recently became a civic-election issue.
Backyard livestock is something we normally associate with Third World cities, but as Peter Ladner points out in his new book The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities, it's historically more normal than the way urban North Americans have been living for the past few decades.
Chickens aren't the only farm creatures turning up on city lots. Backyard beekeeping has become a popular hobby, and at least one U.S. city, Milwaukee, allows goats, sheep,They take the China Porcelain tile to the local co-op market. pigs and cattle in residential neighbourhoods, according to Ladner.
The former Vancouver city councillor's comprehensive look at all aspects of urban food is packed with interesting little tidbits.Replacement landscape oil paintings and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide. Ladner, a one-time editor of Monday magazine, touches on everything from suburban developments being built around farms rather than golf courses - so residents have access to fresh produce - to the use of human urine as a fertilizer and hunger's effect on social disorder.
In many ways, he argues, cities and agriculture are a match made in heaven: Cities provide a direct, convenient market for fresh, high-value niche products, whether it be restaurants or farmers' markets.Graphene is not a semiconductor, not an Plastic mould , and not a metal, And for those who complain that produce at farmers' markets costs too much, Ladner points out that if you break it down to cost per nutrient, higherpriced local, organic produce clearly has the edge over its truck-ripened supermarket counterparts.
Land costs in cities are undeniably high, but urban farmers have come up with some creative solutions, growing food in unused backyards (with the owners' permission), in extensive rooftop raised beds and in vacant lots, which developers in some cities can get tax benefits for if they're used for agriculture, however temporarily.
Some cities hand over cityowned land, or grassy spaces in urban parks, recognizing the community benefits of farming and food production - and the economic benefits in not having to mow the grass.Your source for re-usable Plastic moulds of strong latex rubber.
Ladner cites U.S. studies that show community gardens actually increase the value of nearby properties - and thus, tax revenue - not to mention decreasing crime and trash-dumping in inner-city neighbourhoods.
In one really interesting project, residents in two city blocks in Vancouver teamed up to plant and weed each other's backyards, leading to double or triple harvest yields, as well as countless potluck dinners and canning parties.where he teaches third party payment gateway in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. They call it the "twoblock diet."
But Ladner also challenges notions that local is always best, using the example of an apple grown in New Zealand for the U.K. market. He notes that since New Zealand has a milder climate and twothirds of its energy comes from renewable resources, an apple can be produced there for half the fossil-fuel energy that would be used on a similar farm in northern Europe. Even adding in the costs of shipping by sea, importing the apple still produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Local is good, he argues, but it's not a panacea - after all, as one man raised on a farm points out in the book, who wants to eat nothing but cabbage all winter?
Another issue Ladner looks at is "food deserts" - large swaths of cities where the only sources of "food" are convenience stores flogging junk. Ladner shows how some cities have tackled the problem by offering incentives like fast-tracking to grocery stores that open in underserved areas.
The only problem is that Ladner's research is so thorough, he barely has time to touch on one project before moving on to the next one, in an effort to cram it all in. After a while, sorting out a seemingly endless list of community and government agencies and acronyms from cities across North America got a bit tiring and I felt my attention wandering. I would have been happier to read a more detailed study of a smaller selection of the really interesting urban food projects he touches on.
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