Figure out if you have what it takes to raise chickens—they're harder than cats but easier than dogs. If you do, choose location-appropriate breeds.

Coming soon to your neighborhood?

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—With the massive egg recall still in progress, you're probably pondering egg carton claims in search of the healthiest eggs. One surefire solution: raising a handful of your own backyard chickens, giving you complete control over egg quality. Home-raised chickens may not be an option for everybody, but they are more of an option than you may think. Even if you live in the city, once you realize the myriad benefits a small flock of three or more hens can provide, you'll start thinking of your non-chicken-keeping neighbors as the strange ones. "Most people are going to get chickens because they love eggs, but then they're going to find out how useful they are in other ways," says Patrician Foreman, author of City Chicks: Keeping Micro-flocks of Chickens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-reyclers, and Local Food Producers (Good Earth Publications, 2010).

Of course, you should first figure out if you have what it takes to own a chicken, which Foreman says falls in between raising a dog and a cat in terms of difficulty. Generally speaking, you should be able to take care of a small flock of chickens in a few minutes a day, less time than it takes you to take your dog on a decent walk.

Which isn't to say there's not a lot to learn. We can't even begin to detail all of the information crammed into Foreman's 459-page ultimate guide to raising urban chickens, ranging from lobbying your local government to make raising an urban micro-flock legal, and from choosing location-appropriate breeds and raising day-old chicks to feeding guidelines and coop design ideas. But we can tell you that Foreman lays out a strong argument for keeping a small flock on the premises (she suggests six to 10 feet of coop space per bird for a micro-flock).

Here are five reasons why chickens belong in the city:

#1. Urban chickens as bargain-basement backyard city workers.
Foreman concludes that the most economic and politically compelling reason to keep hens is to recycle food and yard waste, therefore keeping it out of landfills as it composts into an invaluable organic soil builder for your garden. The idea is that you feed your chickens kitchen scraps, they poop out a nitrogen-rich fertilizer, and you compost it with leaves and other untreated yard waste.

In fact, in Belgium, one city is actually giving three laying hens to 2,000 homes in an effort to reduce landfill costs. City officials expect to recover a significant portion of the $600,000 a year the city spends on dealing with this type of household "trash." According to Foreman, a single chicken can biorecycle about seven pounds of food residuals in a month. If just 2,000 households raise three hens, it could divert 252 tons of waste from landfills annually.