Real live Brooklyn chickens. Photo via Flickr's Kristen Bonardi Rapp.

Did you ever want to raise chickens in Brooklyn? Me neither, but the way people talk about it, a backyard coop must be some kind of homesteading fantasy like buying a country house or growing rooftop spuds. Now there’s “Victory Chicken,”  an e-commerce site that bills itself as  New York’s affordable answer to raising backyard birds. A Victory Chicken starter kit with three hens, a coop, two months’ worth of food, wood shavings and so on is $785. Assuming you even have a backyard, is that genuinely affordable? It certainly is if you move in too, but let’s figure out how long in chicken years would take you to recoup (recoop?) your investment. (more…)