Domestic animals in suburbia

Build genuine household resilience by integrating animals that produce food, manage waste, and regenerate soil—right in suburbia.

This 18-page chapter delivers hard-won garden farming wisdom covering:

• Working relationships with animals: Daily care rhythms that fit real suburban life, including strategies for avoiding conflict with foxes, neighbours, and your own schedule.
• Deep-litter chook systems: How to design yards and houses that convert weeds, scraps, and manure into rich compost—while keeping birds healthy and productive.
• Mobile and rotational systems: Practical options like chook tractors, poultry forage forests, and “holiday access” runs that let birds work your garden without destroying it.
• Integrating diverse species: Ducks for slug control, pigeons for manure, quail for small yards, rabbits and guinea pigs as lawn-mowers and nutrient cyclers, and goats for household dairy.
• Neighbourhood-scale fodder cycles: How prunings, green waste, and public-space vegetation become free feed sources that close nutrient loops.

Real examples throughout—Melliodora’s deep-litter yards, duck wetlands, quail systems at The Plummery, and EcoBurbia’s goat–chook integrations—show how ordinary households turn waste into fertility, animal care into daily rhythm, and small suburban blocks into productive micro-farms.