As enthusiasm for urban farmingcontinues to spread beyond its established stronghold in the West, hundreds of New Orleans residents are now growing their own produce, keeping backyard chickens, and even experimenting with other livestock in a city whose laissez-faire regulatory environment and long hours of sunshine make ideal conditions for a new breed of urban pioneer.
“There’s a huge amount of enthusiasm for urban farming right now,” said Alicia Vance, project manager at theNew Orleans Food and Farm Network, a nonprofit group established in 2002 to improve access to fresh food throughout the city.
Vance’s organization leads community gardening classes, works with would-be urban farmers to establish raised beds and proper backyard growing conditions, and demonstrates animal husbandry techniques.
“It would be great if everyone on this block had some kind of animal and grew vegetables. We could be almost self-sufficient,” said Frank Carter, an engineering technician who trained with the farm network and keeps 12 chickens with his wife, Laura Reiff, in a 60-by-50-foot foot pen in their backyard in Algiers. Their chicken breeds include Rhode Island Reds, Brown Leghorns, and even a Buff Orpington — ordered via the U.S. Postal Service from a breeder in Texas.
“The post office called us at 8 o’clock in the evening and said, ‘We have your live chickens,’ ” Carter said. ” ‘They’re peeping.’ ”
As well as the chickens, Carter and Reiff grow peaches, grapefruit, peppers, watermelons, blueberries, tomatoes, persimmons, figs and bananas. They also have a bee hive that produced 50 pounds of honey this year.
The chickens are “very entertaining to watch,” Reiff said, although there is still some resistance among the couple’s friends to taking the eggs. Some say they’ll eat only white eggs, not the blue eggs from the Brown Leghorns. Others are concerned about cracking an egg open to find a chicken embryo, which is impossible unless a broody hen has sat on a fertilized egg for at least a month.
‘The ideal backyard garbage disposal’
“They’ll eat weeds, table scraps, over-mature vegetables, they’re the ideal backyard garbage disposal,” said Philip Soulet, an art gallery owner who keeps a handful of chickens on a plot overlooked by Interstate 10, just north of St. Charles Avenue.
Soulet works with Parkway Partners, another urban farming nonprofit group, teaching classes on raising chickens and growing vegetables to local students.
“My grandfather raised chickens,” Soulet said. “As long as I’ve lived here you’ve been able to drive through the city, especially the poorer neighborhoods, and see chickens. It may be a new idea to keep chickens in places like Portland and San Francisco, but it’s not new here. We’re just re-focusing on that tradition.”
As people become more aware of the conditions that many commercially grown chickens have to endure, Soulet thinks there’s a growing sympathy and interest in having more control over one’s food. His birds have been laying eggs for about two years, and are starting to slow down. Eventually, they’ll stop laying altogether. What then?
“Well, their names are Dumpling, Kiev, Rosemary and Gumbo,” he said, although he may have to outsource the task of slaughtering the birds to someone who has grown less attached to them.
