Anne C. Bellows, Verdie Robinson, Jennifer Guthrie, Troels Meyer, Natalie Peric and Michael W. Hamm

In: UA Magazine 2 - Livestock in and around cities

Urban livestock agriculture (ULA) in the USA is a constructive, yet largely unknown, underground, and unevenly regulated activity. Livestock encompasses multiple meanings for practitioners in the urban environments: economic buttress, tradition, cultural and/or religious endurance, and community cohesiveness. Research on and policy development for urban livestock (as for community food security generally) is lacking and needed. However, because livestock in the city is kept under diverse legal, illegal, and quasi-legal conditions, and because practitioners tend not to be part of the dominant culture, care must be taken to raise the issues under circumstances of support. In this article it is argued that issues of invisibility, distrust, and/or animosity between regulators and practitioners of urban livestock are founded more in the lack of attention paid by policy makers to food systems and food security generally, than in insurmountable challenges of urban livestock as a positive urban land use.