My urban homestead Producing food on a city lot

One of the biggest steps in making an urban homestead is adding animals. Chickens are the easiest, and you can get Brett Markham’s book Mini Farming for info about how he integrates layers and meat chickens into a small operation. I have wanted for a while to add a dairy animal, and based on my past experiences with goats here are the pros and cons:
Pro: goats are small and easy to handle compared to a cow. They tend to be hardy. They will eat brush (they love Siberian elms.) They are intelligent and affectionate. They produce a lot of milk relative to body size, and the milk is easy to digest.
Con:they are unbelievable escape artists and require excellent fencing. They will eat all your shrubs and trees unless well fenced. You need to know their health and nutrition needs. Contrary to popular belief, they won’t “eat anything;” they are actually picky eaters who need very specific kinds of food. They need to be bred, and I do not recommend keeping a buck in a suburban area, so you will need to take them somewhere to be bred. If bred or in milk, they need supplemental food and it can get expensive. You need to have a plan for how to handle the milk and what to do with it, keeping in mind that unless you pasteurize it you may not be able to sell it legally (check your local ordinances, but it is illegal in many areas to sell raw milk.)
Get a good book on dairy goat raising and actually read it before deciding to get a goat. That said, they are lovely animals and I’m very happy to have one again. Magnolia is a yearling doe, purportedly bred. We’ll see. Meanwhile, she participates in homestead life by standing on top of her goat-house commenting on all yard activity and eating all the siberian elm cutting I bring her.