Assignment: Backyard Farming

Backyard farming
Backyard farming is a growing trend throughout the United States. Urban âfarmersâ have introduced a number of different aspects of farming to their local neighborhoods, including raising bees for honey production, chickens for egg production, rabbits for meat production, etc. There is a wide range of rationales supporting the backyard farming trend, such as, access to healthier, more sustainable and cheaper food sources, solutions to issues of food injustice and food insecurity, reduced ecological footprint, and the desire to produce and consume âlocalâ food from trusted sources. You may know someone in your own neighborhood who has introduced chickens or other small fowl to their backyard, or secretly keeps a goat on hand for milk, cheese and mowing chores!

After reading the assigned article, share your reactions and thoughts on this issue. Is this a positive trend, or are there negative aspects, dangers or environmental risks lurking nearby? Would you approve of your neighbor raising chickens or small animals for food consumption? Is this a practice that you think communities should support and facilitate through zoning changes? Support your answers with your rationale and available evidence!

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Assignment: Backyard Farming

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.