Source: Post-Peak Living

After a tremendous amount of work, Harvey Ussery’s new book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers, is now available! Here is what people are saying about it:

“Harvey Ussery delivers all the practical information you need to grow your own eggs and meat birds, in a style and format that will keep you interested and amused. Plus, he raises the larger question: what kind of world do we want to live in? One that treats animals as units of production, or one that honors all life, especially that farmstead marvel, the domesticated chicken?”
— Sally Fallon Morell, President, The Weston A. Price Foundation

“Here’s the ultimate book for those who want to know everything there is to know about raising poultry. And every detail is backed up by the author’s own (and often entertaining) experiences. I could not find ”in this encyclopedic array of chicken knowhow” one detail that I would quibble with.”
— Gene Logsdon, author of Holy Shit and The Contrary Farmer

“The Small-Scale Poultry Flock is about establishing a free-range poultry flock fully integrated into a healthy homestead ecosystem. Based upon the author’s decades of hands-on experience with many breeds and species, it covers all the basics about raising poultry, and fills some important gaps not usually covered well enough elsewhere, including chicken behavior, poultry breeding, raising chicks with broody hens, managing free-ranging, dealing with predators, using electric net fencing, feeding poultry with home-grown feeds, and integrating the poultry with soil mineral balance, gardens, lawns and pastures, orchards, worm bins, and soldier fly (larvae) production. If you want to raise chickens and can afford just one book, I recommend this one.”
— Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener

Available at Indigo bookstores in Canada.

Source: Equiterre

A farmer’s basket full of healthy, locally grown vegetables, delivered directly to your workplace once a week? Find out how easy it is to host a drop-off point for the Quebec community supported agriculture (CSA) network.

Our family farmer program, started in 1995, provides food to an estimated more than 30,000 people each year. It helps Quebecers adopt a sustainable diet, and encourages local farmers.

Ingredients for a healthy workplace

We can help you set up a drop-off point in your workplace. Many hospitals, businesses and academic institutions already have a family farmer, including, in 2010, RONA, Standard Life, CHUL, Demix and Ubisoft.

Simply follow the steps outlined in our set-up guide to establish a relationship with a family farmer.

For more information, contact our community supported agriculture (CSA) team at 514 522-2000, ext. 295 (toll free, 1 877 272-6656) or by email at infoasc@equiterre.org

Sustainability is another word for “immunity from government tyranny.” We cannot possibly be “free” of something we despise, if we are still entirely dependent on it.

Source: Land Destroyer Report

Believe it or not, growing your own food or visiting your local farmers market is more revolutionary and constructive than burning down your own city and killing security forces…

They need us, we don’t need them. That’s the big secret. We get our freedom back as soon as we take back our responsibilities for food, water, security, the monetary system, power, and manufacturing; that is independence. Independence is freedom, freedom is independence. We’ll never be free as long as we depend on the Fortune 500 for our survival.

Fixing these problems unfolding overseas starts with fixing the problems in our own backyards. Boycott the globalists, cut off their support, undermine their system, and they lose their ability to commit these atrocities. That will be a real revolution and it can start today. Not burning cities and masked rebels waving flags, but communities no longer dependent and fueling a corrupt system we all know must come to an end.

Where are farmer markets in Montreal? Jean-Talon is the city’s largest farmer’s market, but there are others.

If local governments can’t support urban agriculture, then they need to get out of the way of these community gardens.

Source: Montreal Gazette

There are chickens laying eggs at community centres, volunteer gardeners sharing the work and the harvest in 45 collective gardens across the city, and vegetables growing on top of the Palais des congrès convention centre.

But the blossoming urban agriculture movement is running into municipal roadblocks, say proponents pushing city hall to consult the public about the future of farming in Montreal.

Existing city bylaws make it difficult for people who want to practise urban agriculture to get started. They forbid livestock within Montreal city limits, except for in very limited cases in Rosemont-La Petite Patrie where community groups can get permission to have chickens for educational purposes. People aren’t allowed to dig up their driveways to plant vegetables. Farmers delivering produce for community-supported agriculture projects try to stay on the good side of residents living around their drop-off points to avoid traffic complaints being made to the city. Even people who want to compost in their backyards have gotten into trouble with neighbours complaining to city officials that their compost piles are too smelly…

Montreal has no policy on urban agriculture, although it is included in the city’s sustainable-development plan as a way to help green the city and reduce heat-island effect between now and 2015, said city spokesperson Martine Painchaud.

To get more information about the Groupe de travail en agriculture urbaine petition, go to http://eng.agriculturemontreal.info/

This is the solution to reducing crime and “terrorism” throughout the world. May freedom reign for all.

Source: The Urban Farming Guys

Source: Montreal Work Group on Urban Agriculture

Many obstacles are slowing the development of urban agriculture in Montreal, including:

• Pressure on land occupancy and use due to real estate development projects;
• The presence of contaminants in certain soils;
• The sub-optimal financing of initiatives and the absence of strategies in favor of urban agriculture;
• The lack of availability of plots in community gardens in central neighborhoods.

In order to contribute to creating a green city, the Work Group on Urban Agriculture proposes a collective mobilization to demand a public consultation on the state of urban agriculture in Montreal.

The Work Group on Urban Agriculture invites all citizens to sign a petition which will support a public consultation on Urban Agriculture in Montreal. The petition must be signed by November 8, 2011. There are many locations around the island of Montreal to sign the petition. Find the location nearest you (n.b. The petition may be signed in NDG at Coop la Maison Verte – 5785, Sherbrooke street West).

If 15,000 Montrealers support this action within less than three months, the City of Montreal will be required to hold such a consultation.

Visit the Work Group’s website for more information or Join the Facebook group.

It is unlawful to keep chickens or raise them in a coop in the city of Montreal although it is legal in Westmount.

A new pilot project this summer in the Montreal borough of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie will test community interest and acceptance towards letting everyone on the island have the ability to raise chickens in their backyards.

Source: CTV News

The city of Montreal outlawed chickens in 1966, part of the era’s trend against livestock within municipal boundaries.

While the law is still on the books, advocates are hoping a pilot project launched this summer in one borough could be the beginning of its undoing within the municipality.

“We had a lot of demand from residents, especially because it’s now allowed in other cities,” says Francois Croteau, mayor of the Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie borough.

The project announced last month means the borough will operate a hen house open to the public.

The original proposal was to permit residents to keep a few hens in their backyard if they had a large enough plot, but not everyone was in favour of the plan.

There were concerns backyard chickens would make too much noise and attract pests, such as rats.

“After one year (of considering) the regulations we found the first step would be a project that would focus on education and environment,” Croteau said of the project.

Source: Farmageddon

The title is sarcastic.

New research has shown that when a cell phone is making or receiving a  call, it sends an emergency signal to the bees to evacuate the hive.

That’s why we have 50% fewer bees in the world since 1980, but I always like to see the positive in any situation

Source: Inhabitat

Research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland has shown that the signal from cell phones not only confuses bees, but also may lead to their death. Over 83 experiments have yielded the same results. With virtually most of the population of the United States (and the rest of the world) owning cell phones, the impact has been greatly noticeable.

Led by researcher Daniel Favre, the alarming study found that bees reacted significantly to cell phones that were placed near or in hives in call-making mode. The bees sensed the signals transmitted when the phones rang, and emitted heavy buzzing noise during the calls.  The calls act as an instinctive warning to leave the hive, but the frequency confuses the bees, causing them to fly erratically. The study found that the bees’ buzzing noise increases ten times when a cell phone is ringing or making a call – aka when signals are being transmitted, but remained normal when not in use.

A nice article featuring Marci Babineau and her urban farm. If you ever wondered how much food you could grow in a front or back yard, or how to keep urban chickens, this article is a good source of information.

Source: Montreal Gazette

On the sidewalk in front of Marci Babineau’s house, I craned my neck to see if I could spot the birds.

In the backyard, just beyond her root-vegetable garden and several fruit trees, a chicken stretched out a wing, then ruffled her black feathers back into place.

Not exactly what a passerby would expect to see on a quiet, tree-lined street minutes from downtown Montreal (I can’t say exactly where; more about that later).

But it’s what urban agriculture enthusiasts across North America would like to see – micro-farms where city dwellers could produce fruits, vegetables, eggs and honey, milk from goats, and meat from rabbits.

Some Montrealers have already enthusiastically embraced the growing urban agriculture movement, which took off after Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn two years ago.

Chickens are pecking away in Montreal backyards, bees are buzzing around hives in industrial areas, lettuce is growing in container gardens downtown, and the Lufa Farms rooftop greenhouse near Marché Centrale is producing enough fresh produce to feed more than 1,000 people a week.

It’s not easy, though. Municipal bylaws ban most island residents from keeping livestock, like chickens, and bees, and people are more used to seeing grass in front yards than tomatoes and peppers.

Still, if urbanites, who rely on food grown dozens, even thousands of kilometres away, want to try to become as self-sufficient as possible, how would they do it?

Using my own yard as a test case, I set about to find out.