There’s everyday unsustainable and then there’s completely off-the-charts unsustainable.
In the latter category we can quickly place the worldwide move to a Western-style meat-centred diet relying on low-cost livestock fed corn and soybeans. To give the 9 billion carnivores expected by 2050 regular steak dinners would mean doubling global grain production and converting entire rainforests to grain monocultures.
Then there are reasonably modest alternatives like livestock raised on grass and bugs in managed wildernesses. Or we may eventually resort to completely out-there options like raising animals for meat in the city.
Of course, the over-the-top alternative is an everyday matter for garden-variety city food producers. According to Toronto-based food analyst Diana Lee-Smith, a leading figure in the booming African urban ag movement, heavy-duty city food production becomes normalized mainly during crises. In the UK, for example, where wartime rationing continued into the 1950s, “pig bins” for food scraps that could be fed to animals, both in town and out, were the norm in many urban neighbourhoods, she says.
So we can expect North Americans to embrace urban livestock at just about the same time oil runs out or hell freezes over from climate chaos.
In Nairobi, Kenya, home of the world’s biggest slum and the place where Lee-Smith co-founded the Mazingira Institute to promote women-led urban ag, raising animals is part of both feeding families and managing urban waste.
City livestock consumes human food scraps, saving cities from smothering in waste.
This is part of the vision of Toronto’s leading urban agtivist, Lorraine Johnson, author of City Farmer and several classics on naturalizing urban wastelawns.
“Backyard chickens are the best little compost machines you can have,” she tells me. They bring back the natural and holistic food cycle: humans throw out veggie scraps and stale bread, chickens peck at them, feeding themselves and aerating the earth, flies and larvae dig into chicken poop, chickens eat the larvae for protein and leave the remaining poop to add rich nitrogen to otherwise depleted compost that’s overdosed on plant carbs. It’s a closed loop in the big city – true chicken poop for the soil.
The economics of such a cycle go like this: instead of paying waste handlers to haul away trash, people provide a coop for chickens to manage the waste and produce gourmet fare for free, pay local butchers instead of garbagemen and sell robust compost to professional composters. A chicken in every garage.
As Johnson points out, you can buy baby chicks for 25 cents in rural Ontario, and a laying-age hen goes for only $25. The full set-up for an insulated coop and run area costs $150 to $250. Three chickens, she says, lay three eggs a day and produce about a shopping bag of waste per week.
The Toronto Environment Office is currently drafting a report for the Municipal Licensing and Standards Committee, due in February, aiming to change the prohibited-animals bylaw so locals can legally keep chickens.
Even Ontario’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs portrays urban livestock as natural and normal, with portals on its website to info on the kind of critters that do well in cities: bees, rabbits, poultry, tilapia, yellow perch. Livestock and poultry can be a source of meat, milk, eggs and fibre. Add aquaculture and beekeeping, dwarf goats, ducks and pigeons into the mix and the list of products gets even longer.
As well, Johnson notes, the small scale of backyard animal husbandry keeps problems that fester in factory farms – overuse of antibiotics and cruel suppression of instinctive animal behaviours are just two examples – at bay.
June Komisar, an architecture professor at Ryerson University and co-author of Carrot City: Creating Places For Urban Agriculture, is a vegetarian. She gulps when I ask about urban meat production but quickly points out that it’s the norm throughout the global South, where all manner of livestock have the run of the street, and “ir’s a trend that’s developing here as well.”
Tending animals is part of gaining respect for food, she says. “We’re so divorced from the sources of our food that people are queasy when they see the animal they’re going to eat,” she says. A common commitment to mindfulness may bring urban livestockers and animal welfare supporters together on this one.
Though T.O. is a world leader in many aspects of food policy, it’s behind the curve on mixed urban ag, likely the legacy of Toronto the Good and uptight. Staff are still paid to concoct blanket prohibitions against all non-conforming uses.
But animals are the “mixed” in mixed farms, and will be part of the urban ag mix of tomorrow.
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