About Us - Updated

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This link will take you to a news report from 2009 on our three year effort to legalize chicken keeping in the city of Ypsilanti.

http://ypsiciti.com/section/News/Urban+chickens+in+Ypsilanti-article-966.html


A LITTLE HISTORY - The Thomason family has been farming in the same part of Richland Parish Louisiana for almost two-hundred years, but our 1/10th acre urban eco-micro farm is located in historic downtown Ypsilanti, Michigan. It is easily reached from I-94 or US-23. We are just a few miles east of Ann Arbor and thirty miles west of Detroit. We raise Mini-Nubian-Nigerian-Dwarf goats , Hubbard ISA Brown French hens, and Lionhead Dwarf rabbits.

We grow organic vegetables for our own use and sell our surplus through the Ypsilanti Downtown Farmers Market along with artisinal cheeses made by Aubrey Thomason
http://www.growinghope.net/projects/vendorprofiles.shtml

We plan to add mushrooms to our growing mix this year and will post more about that exciting development as it happens.

OTHER BLOGS - To read more about families coping with substance abuse click on this link http://hopeforourfamilies.blogspot.com

To read more of Peter's articles and essays on urban farming, Christian thought, home economics, coffins, and other topics click on this link http://notmyplans.blogspot.com

Stay tuned for more information and visit often!




Poultry in Motion - Why are There Chickens in the City?

August 2007 - When people ask me, and they frequently do, why we have chickens living in our Ypsilanti City yard, I usually answer, "for the eggs."

But the truth is, the main reason we have them is that it pleases my wife. And, if my wife is happy, most of the time, I am too.

What I’m referring to is the inestimable value of pleasure that philosopher-farmer Wendell Berry speaks of in, "Economy and Pleasure," an essay that should be required reading for anyone who refuses to accept the idea that a monetary bottom line is the only "real" bottom line.

There are many things about having chickens in the city that please us: gathering dew-laden forage for them early in the morning; neighbor children stopping by to feed them broccoli leaves or bugs from our garden; the cooing sounds they make when you stop for a few moments to watch them; the way they like to fly up and to sit on your shoulders when you go into the coop; the smile on our grandson Sam’s face when he sees the "chichens;" our grand-daughter Judah riding on the hood of a tractor in the Heritage Festival Parade pulling a mobile coop-float with all twelve hens inside; and of course, there are the eggs.

For several years we tried to sell our house, move to the country and start a farm but, the times and the market were against us and we finally accepted that, at least for the time being, we were going to have to stay where we were. Not that we had a problem with being here, we just felt a need to reconnect with our agrarian roots.

The thought that we were not going to be able to do that was depressing but we did our best to let go of it and to focus on growing as much of our food as we could on our one-tenth of an acre city lot.

Then one day it just got to her and she said, "I don’t ask for much. I don’t want jewelry or fancy cars, I just want to have some chickens."

My wife’s distress about this weighed on me for weeks until it finally occurred to me one day to check the city’s animal control ordinance. Though it did not specifically prohibit chickens - it allows keeping "common cage birds" and other pets – a call to the city attorney for clarification confirmed that, according to the city’s corporate and legal interpretation, they were not allowed.

This just made me more determined than ever so I decided to try to amend the ordinance by first getting the support of two city council members and then making a presentation to the public meeting of the whole council.

The members I approached had grown up in the city and remembered the days when chickens and goats were allowed to live in backyards. They supported my request for an amendment to the council but, when the mayor was dismissive of any real discussion on the subject, one of them backed down and helped "her honor" derail the prescribed process into a bureaucratic dead end.

I had not even been given the opportunity to present the details of the proposed amendment. It made me angry that a perfectly legitimate request by a tax-paying citizen could be summarily rejected on the basis of an elected official’s personal bias – she had made it known from the time I made my first presentation that she had no interest in allowing it to happen.

When I came home from the meeting the night of the vote, my wife asked how things had gone.

I answered, "we have chickens in the city!"

To which she, elated, replied, "You mean we can have chickens?"

"No," I answered tersely. "What I mean is that we already have them. They are roosting down in the city council chambers."

Later, I apologized to her for insulting the birds.

The Michigan Right to Farm Act of 1981 is little known among city dwellers because it doesn’t impact us much. That is, unless you happen to live on the outskirts of a town that has been developed through the acquisition of nearby farms.

Where farms are still operational and close enough to subdivisions to be smelled or heard, those agricultural activities are protected, and rightly so because we need them, as long as they follow GAAMPS – an acronym for Generally Accepted Agricultural Management Practices.

We need local farms, especially small family owned farms, for a whole variety of reasons which cannot just be described in economic terms.

Using the law to support having chickens in our backyard did not occur to me until I was being interviewed by Michigan Radio several months later and the interviewer suggested I look into the case of a suburban Michigan woman who had successfully used it in defense of her flock of goats. It is a surprisingly strong law, and, to my knowledge, all attempts to modify it have fallen flat.

Two recent Michigan Court of Appeals rulings - one involved a riding stable and the other a nursery - have upheld it to the extent that it trumps even local zoning requirements and ordinances.

The catch for backyard chicken keepers – or urban micro farmers like us - is that the law appears to be designed to protect those engaged in agricultural activities for commercial purposes.

We don’t have a problem with that because, as produce growers – we sell to a local food cooperative – we fit the IRS and the USDA description of farmers.

We file a Schedule F with our Federal 1040 and we also follow GAAMPS. I can imagine that the protections would be extended to subsistence farmers as well.

So, there it is. Why are there chickens in the city? It’s really all about the pursuit of happiness.

Peter Thomason is a part-time urban farmer and a carpenter. He has lived in the Ypsilanti area for 32 years with his wife Rebecca and nine of their ten children.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Grass-fed West Michigan Beef & Downtown Farmers Market

Be sure to check out the excellent grass-fed West Michigan beef we will start supplying to our beloved Ypsilanti Food Co-op beginning this week. The animals are lovingly raised near Hesperia (North of Muskegon) by our dear friends Bill and Patrice Bobier on their two-hundred acre farm.

One of the reasons grass-fed beef is more expensive is that the animals are not fattened in crowded, unhealthy feed lots with GMO corn. Grass-fed animals are healthier but they are leaner and smaller with a hanging weight per side of around 250 pounds as opposed to their much heavier conventionally-raised counterparts. Grass and forage is the main stay of their diet, as it is naturally for cattle. We think the meat has a better taste and consistency from this more humane and healthier way of raising them. Though it does cost more we think it is worth it - both for them and for us - so we eat less of it and use it more like a protein condiment! Try it, we think you will like it too. There will be ground beef, steaks, roasts, stew meat and even soup bones if you need them. The supply is limited so get it while it lasts.

We are also looking forward to the opening of the Downtown Ypsilanti Farmers Market in May. We will again have a stand there and be selling our fresh vegetables and Zingerman's locally made cheeses. By early May we will have our own locally grown greens for sale. See you there!
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Collective Urban Micro Farming

Here's a link to a new article in the Detroit Metro Times about our urban micro farm and what we are doing new this year.


http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=13878
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Sunday, April 5, 2009

Early April 2009

Wow, I just noticed that it has been nearly a month since my last post. We have been busy here and life has a way of getting in the way of blogging - so to speak. Rebecca has been off work since February on a medical leave so that has been a big concern. She has gotten some good care though and seems to be improving, plans to be back to work this month. She and Jil are making progress on the rabbit business, sales are up, especially through a local pet store, Pet City, owned by our friends Annette and Stuart Collins. We have some really cool Lionhead rabbits...

A big event this Spring was the coming of the greenhouse courtesy of Amanda Edmonds and Growing Hope. We got all of our March starts seeded with the help of a class of 1st and 2nd graders who have come to learn and to help for the last two weeks. Collectively they planted over 1200 seeds! We now have 50 or more flats and troughs going with 3000 - 4000 seeds started.

Other news is that we are the subject of a yearlong documentary / instructional film series being produced by Michael Peters of indiedibles http://indiedibles.com/ . One of the cool things they are doing is advocating for urban farming while providing "how to" segments on everything from building cold frames to how to plant really small seeds and a bunch of things in between. I will let you know when the first piece is complete and available for viewing, it will be very soon, we have already previewed the final rough draft.

What else? Our daughter Aubrey, a cheesemaker for Zingermans and a member of the board of directors of Growing Hope has agreed to take on the role of farm manager for the Thomason Family Farm. She is helping us to take the urban farming venture to the next level of growing enough fresh and storage crops for our 5 households. By utilizing unused urban yards (unused in the sense that they are just growing grass lawns) we expect to have about 1/4 of an acre or more under tillage this year. What we don't need for ourselves we will be selling through our co-op, the Ypsilanti Food Co-op, or the downtown farmers' market in the KeyBank parking lot. From our stand at the market we plan to be selling our veggies, Zingermans cheeses, and some other items so look for us there! It looks like it will be a fun season.

Let's see, we also thinned out our flock of hens, down from 37 to 24 this week. We decided that was a number we were comfortable with so we donated the extra pullets to Dawn Farm http://www.dawnfarm.org/index.html. Manager Rick Weirich graciously took them in to help their cause.

I will try to get some photos posted soon, way behind on that. Goat kids due in a few weeks, hope to get video of that for you and write more about our collective / cooperative approach to growing more food in an urban setting and restoring fertility to the soil.

More soon!
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