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Backyard Chickens in Massachusetts

Raising your own chickens in urban or suburban neighborhoods is becoming more and more popular.

For those who eat eggs and meat, there is no fresher, more healthy and nutritious source than organically fed poultry raised under the personal attention of the owner.

The additional benefits of poultry-raising are also attractive:

• Nutrient-rich manure, once composted, grows healthy garden and landscape crops,
• The normal diet of chickens is rich in insect protein, helping eliminate ticks, grubs, and other unwanted bugs.
• The educational result of raising and caring for your own food is a better understanding of our food system

In order to promote backyard poultry raising we have accumulated a number of resources:
• A database of many towns in Massachusetts (excel) and their poultry-keeping laws and regulations
• Talking points for keeping poultry - a one-page flyer for educating your community
• An article written by a lawyer about how best to comply with town rules, or to change them
• An answer to common myths about why raising chickens (pdf) is a bad idea
• An explanation and revival of the World War II era "have-more" plan based on home chickens (pdf)
• An article by a 15-year old girl in Athol, Massachusetts on raising birds in a city (pdf)
• A narrative about trying to change zoning laws in Amherst, Massachusetts to accommodate poultry
• A partial list of resources (pdf)you can use for further research, study, and inspiration

If you discover or create items which would help people wanting to raise backyard chickens, we would be pleased to add them to our website. Just contact Jack@nofamass.org.

This page was last modified on July 23, 2011 at 7:23:00 AM.     Translate this page: