It currently isn’t legal to keep chickens in your backyard in Weyburn, so Majesta Malcolm recently created a petition for people to sign to encourage the City to change the bylaw. 

Malcolm was a delegate at last night’s meeting of Weyburn City Council, and she talked about the benefits of owning backyard chickens.  

“This creates some food, the manure is used for gardening,” she said. “Now you can grow your garden, they can help reduce the waste in our landfills and so on and so forth.”   

Malcolm said the health of the eggs from backyard chickens is better than from store-bought eggs.  

“From farm grown, we know they carry 25 percent more vitamin E, 75 percent more beta carotene, and are up to 20 times higher in omega-3 fatty acids.” 

She added there have been many pilot projects across the country and in the United States that aim to measure the long-term viability of urban chicken keeping. 

“The pilot program that we are interested in doing will probably be about two years before you guys will be able to sit down and re-evaluate, what are the pros and cons, and what are the bumps in the road that we would need to change.”   

Mayor Marcel Roy said they would take the information presented, let their administration go forward on it, and make a decision.