Nuisance Issues

Odor - Chickens themselves do not smell. Any possible odor would be from feces, but five small hens generate less manure than one medium-sized dog. The poop is not likely to accumulate because it’s a source of free fertilizer for the garden. According to Oregon State University Extension Poultry Specialist Jim Hermes, small flocks do not present an odor problem. Once tilled into the soil, poop no longer causes objectionable odors. Dog and cat feces cannot be used as fertilizer or composted because they contain pathogens that can infect humans. Therefore, dog and cat waste is more likely to accumulate and smell.

Unsanitary conditions can result in a buildup of ammonia in large operations, which is why commercial poultry facilities often smell bad. This is not the case for small backyard flocks.

Noise - Hens are quiet; it is only roosters that crow loudly. Fortunately, roosters aren’t needed to get eggs. The proposed ordinance amendment does not permit them. This is typical of what others cities have done. Jim Hermes, states, “As urban pets go, a barking dog is far more annoying than cackling hens.” (Appendix A)

According to 2008 City of Monona Police Department incident reports, there were 69 calls for dogs disturbing neighbors, 12 for bites, and 102 for stray animals. According to the Zoning Administrator for Madison, Madison has fewer than ten complaints per year and “the enforcement burden of managing this ordinance is fairly minimal. (See Appendix B.))

Hens are extremely unlikely to create enough noise to qualify as a valid noise nuisance. Hens remain inside their coop, perching at night in complete silence. During the day they venture out into their enclosed pen to scratch at the ground, hunt for bugs and munch on weeds. They occasionally cluck to announce the arrival of an egg, but this noise is short-lived and much quieter than barking dogs, lawn mowers, wild crows, children playing, or other common neighborhood sounds.

Pests - Chickens do not attract insects; they eat them! They love to eat all types of bugs, including those that can carry human diseases like mosquitoes and ticks. They also eat slugs that would otherwise harm garden crops and bedding plants. They do not attract flies. In fact, they eat fly larvae (maggots) before they can grow up to become adult flies. (Appendix A)

Rodents and other animals - A chicken pen is not likely to attract rodents or wildlife unless chicken feed is spilled or not stored properly. This same thing holds true for dog or cat food.

Code Enforcement & the City Budget

This proposed ordinance amendment will not only save your constituents money, it will result in fewer complaints and less cost to the city. Eugene, Oregon, a city where hens are allowed, received eleven chicken-related complaints in 2008. The City of Madison receives just ten complaints a year and describes the enforcement burden as minimal (Appendix B).

When clear and specific chicken policies are available, cities experience fewer problems. Madison, Wisconsin reports “The chicken keeping community does a good job of caring for and restraining their chickens” (appendix C). Commissioner Randy Leonard in Portland states “We have not experienced any significant problems relating to reduced property values or threats to public health as a result of hens co-existing with city residents.”

Water Quality Issues

A 4-pound laying hen produces 0.0035 cu ft of manure per day. According to the FDA, an average dog generates 3/4 of a pound of manure a day that cannot be composted because of the harmful bacteria and parasites (hookworms, roundworms, and tapeworms) that can infect humans. This waste is considered a major source of bacterial pollution in urban watersheds.

Dog waste contains higher concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus than cows, chickens, or pigs and is a major contributor of excessive nutrients that flow into ground and surface waters through runoff from city sidewalks and lawns.

Not only do chickens produce less waste, most people who keep chickens in the city also have a garden and therefore compost their chicken manure. If composted and added to the garden, the water quality impact would be virtually nothing. Chickens also reduce the need for pesticides because they eat bugs and weeds, further reducing the potential for water pollution.

Chickens Play an Important Role in Sustainable Living

More and more people are interested in living a sustainable life style. Government, utilities, and non-governmental organizations are encouraging citizens to reduce their consumption of resources. A small number of backyard chickens allow us the opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint and support the local food movement.

People who have backyard hens are less likely to use harmful chemicals and pesticides in their gardens. Instead, they desire their yard to be healthy and environmentally-friendly. They consider chickens a natural extension of their garden because they eat weeds and bugs and provide fertilizer.

Organic gardeners seek natural fertilizer to enhance their garden soil as they grow fresh fruits and vegetables. Chicken manure is one of the most efficient natural fertilizers providing essential nutrients to build the soil. Backyard hens provide the most local source of fertilizer available. It is easily composted, without any transportation costs. Chicken manure is a great addition to sustainable urban gardens.

Backyard chickens eat grass clippings and food scraps, thus keeping these products out of the local landfill by reusing them on site.

We are encouraged to eat locally, reducing the need to transport food long distances. What better place to start than the availability of food right in the back yard. National and local news media have given the 100 mile diet (eating only food grown within a 100 mile radius of your home) substantial coverage over the last year.

Backyard hens can help promote a 100 yard or even a 100 foot diet. Imagine the lowered gas consumption as trips to the store are made less frequently.

Becoming a more sustainable community becomes easier with the availability of eggs from backyard hens. Local citizens can contribute their surplus eggs to the St. Stephen’s food bank or neighbors, feeding the hungry with healthy, locally produced food.

Chickens Are Educational

Kids can purchase a chick for about $2 and keep it in a box under a heat lamp for the first few weeks until it develops its adult feathers. Then they move the chickens to the coop they helped build and watch them grow into affectionate, entertaining pets.

Not only will they learn about the responsibility that comes with caring for a pet, they will learn where their food really comes from, something a dog or cat cannot teach them. Children will see first-hand how eggs are made and take an interest in eating healthy, nutritious food produced by their own pets.

They will also learn about sustainability and recycling. Children will see how grass clippings, bugs, weeds, and kitchen scraps fed to chickens are recycled and turned into a delicious egg that they can eat. They will also see how straw bedding and waste from the chickens improves their garden soil that, in turn, produces fruits and vegetables. Instead of just hearing the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle,” they will experience it.

City kids will be able to participate in 4-H or FFA programs like their more rural friends. It is not practical to raise a steer, a sheep, or a pig in most city yards but a 4-pound hen is very practical because it is small, inexpensive to raise, and very easy to raise.

Chickens Give Consumers Some Control

As consumers, most of us have little or no control over what we eat. Food recalls have become common and people are becoming increasingly concerned with food safety and animal welfare.

A few backyard hens provide a free protein-rich, nutritious food source that can help feed hungry children and combat child obesity and diabetes.

Home-grown eggs taste much better than store-bought eggs and are more nutritious. A study shows they have 1/3 less cholesterol, 1/4 less saturated fat, 2/3 more vitamin A, 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids, 3 times more vitamin E, and 7 times more beta carotene than store bought eggs (http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/2007-10-01/Tests-Reveal-Healthier-Eggs.aspx).

It is estimated that 4.5 million eggs are infected with Salmonella each year (http://www.cspinet.org/nah/eggs-ja.htm). Salmonella sickens up to one million people a year and 80% of those cases can be attributed to contaminated eggs. Home-grown eggs are far less likely to contain Salmonella than store-bought eggs (http://www.naturalchoices.co.uk/Salmonella-levels-over-5x-higher?id_mot=7).

Health experts recommend eating eggs within 14 days (http://www.cspinet.org/nah/eggs-ja.htm). However, store-bought eggs often come from out-of-state and can be sold when they are as old as 45 days  (http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Factsheets/Focus_On_Shell_Eggs/index.asp).

Please do not underestimate the satisfaction of knowing where your eggs come from, how old they are, what went into making them, and how the chickens that laid them were treated.

Chickens Do Not Increase Methane Gas Emissions

Last summer the city of Fort Collins, Colorado changed their city ordinance to legalize backyard hens at its citizens’ request. At that time, a thorough investigation was conducted which included the possibility of increased methane gas emissions. It was concluded that backyard hens would not significantly impact methane gas emissions.

Chickens and Emergency Preparedness

 Government officials encourage us to be prepared in the event of an emergency. Whether it’s a fire, flood, earthquake, civil unrest, or economic crisis, having a source of high-protein, nutritious food like eggs readily available can provide critical food in a time of need.

During heavy snow storms and floods like we have in Wisconsin, there could be damage to buildings and infrastructure such as bridges and highways that could hinder transportation. As a result, it can be difficult to get to the store and scarcity of food items on store shelves can occur. Local egg-producing hens will help our community be more food self-sufficient year-round.

The American food system is dependent on centralized processing plants and transportation. A more diversified food system can provide more security by letting citizens grow crops and raise animals they know and enjoy. That way, if the food system should fail, we will be able to feed our selves and our neighbors (Backyard Poultry, vol. 3, no. 6, pg 16).

Chickens Do Not Pose a Public Health Risk

The type of Avian Influenza that is contagious to humans has not been found in North America. Bird flu is spread by contact with the contaminated feces of wild birds, primarily migratory waterfowl. Unlike rural farm birds, which might co-mingle with migratory birds or drink from a shared pond, “backyard chickens” will be kept in an enclosed pen with no contact with migratory birds. OSU Poultry Extension Specialist, Jim Hermes, states “bird flu of the type noted in the media has not been diagnosed in the whole of the Western Hemisphere and may not ever find its way here” and that “chickens are relatively healthy animals” (Appendix A).

The infamous factory farms we have all heard about create ideal conditions for diseases like Salmonella and avian influenza; small backyard flocks do not.

Overcrowding and stress reduce a chicken’s immune system, predisposing them to infection and facilitating the spread of disease. This is not the case for small backyard flocks where chickens are kept as pets in well-maintained coops cleaned regularly (http://birdflubook.com/g.php?id=5).

Unlike cats and dogs which are prime vectors for rabies, parasites, and tick-borne diseases, pet chickens actually keep your yard healthier by eating ticks and other insects.

The Urban Chicken Movement

According to the Worldwatch Institute, “… an Urban Chicken Movement has swept across the United States in recent years.” Some people want organic eggs and garden compost, others are concerned about food security, others want to “eat local” to save resources, and others wish to enjoy the entertaining, fun pets hens can be. There have been lots of news articles written about this growing trend, which is increasing primarily in upscale neighborhoods.

The ordinance amendment is not unreasonable or unusual. Cities like Portland, Boise, Denver, Madison, Seattle, and Fort Collins (just to name a few) have relaxed their zoning laws to allow for a few backyard hens. In fact, according to Newsweek Magazine, more than 65% of major U.S. cities now allow backyard hens.

Appendix B:

News reports:

City Folk Flock To Raise Small Livestock At Home

by Megan Verlee

 

 

All Things Considered, January 10, 2009 ·

If you picked up a carton of eggs at the store this week, they probably set you back about $1 or $1.50. The organic, cage-free kind costs more like $3. But some urban and suburbanites are skipping the store entirely when it comes to things like eggs and honey and turning instead to their own backyards.

Whether from tighter food budgets or local-eating ideals, more and more people are petitioning their cities to allow small animal husbandry.

City dwellers are accustomed to being awakened at night by the occasional siren or the roar of a low-flying jet. But the nocturnal disturbances in a Denver neighborhood have a slightly more agrarian feel.

Cutting-Edge ‘Locavores’

A rooster belts out a cry from one of the yards, where the homeowners also keep a pair of geese in a converted sun porch. What they don’t have, however, are any permits for their minor menagerie. Denver does allow chickens for an annual fee. Roosters, though, are entirely outlawed.

So it’s understandable that the homeowner, Brad, doesn’t want his last name used.

Many of the folks pushing for urban livestock ordinances do so because of trendy modern ideas about sustainability and local food. They’re known as “locavores.”

Brad says he simply loves chickens.

He says he had them as a boy in the countryside and just kept on raising them even after moving to Los Angeles as a teenager.

“So I was walking around L.A. streets with a Rhode Island Red and people would say, ‘Whoa, my god that’s a beautiful bird! What is it?’ ‘Oh, it’s a chicken.’ ‘A chicken?!’ You know, city folks, never seen ‘em before,” Brad says.

That seems to be changing. Forget growing your own vegetables — cutting-edge locavores are now pushing backyard honey, eggs and milk. Researchers with the American Planning Association say that in the past six months they’ve fielded more questions about livestock ordinances than almost any other topic.

Chickens As Rock Stars

Colorado zoning consultant Christopher Duerksen is trying to simplify some of the answers. He’s putting together a model sustainability code for cities trying to green up their rules.

Asked how city planners tend to react when they hear the word “chicken,” Duerksen quips: “They tend to squawk. I think most planners, like most people, don’t think of urban areas as food producing areas, but that’s changing with the cost of food and questions about the health of food. And so we’re seeing a real change in mindset among urban planners.”

This means residents can now keep bees in Denver or raise a mini-goat in Seattle. But the real rock stars of this movement are chickens.

Urban livestock researcher Jennifer Blecha says that in recent years a dozen or more cities annually have joined the pro-chicken flock. And she says chicken advocates are starting to get more organized.

“When I over the last year or two have done presentations at various conferences on urban agriculture,” Blecha says,”a swarm of people comes afterward and says, ‘I’m from Cleveland and we need to get our regulations changed, can you please help?’ ‘Oh, we’re from here and we’re trying to get our regulations changed, could you give me some advice?’”

Some municipalities have bucked the agrarian trend. Just north of Denver, the planning board for the city of Longmont, Colo., recently gave the thumbs-down to a chicken ordinance. According to Jon Van Bentham, the board chairman, concerns ranged from unsightly chicken-coop construction to noise and smell, to slightly more dire topics.

“Avian flu came up,” Van Bentham says. “Again, that’s maybe kind of a nightmare scenario, but that’s one of the places where folks are concerned that it comes from.”

But backyard farmers seem to have one ace in the hole for answering any local objections: bribery. Plenty of Brad’s eggs, for example, end up on his neighbors’ breakfast plates.

“I ask them every now and then if it’s bothering them and they say, ‘Oh no, it doesn’t bother us at all and besides, you wouldn’t mess with the one that feeds ya,” Brad says.

For the record, no eggs — goose, chicken or otherwise — changed hands in the reporting of this story.

Megan Verlee reports for Colorado Public Radio.

 

Cost of Eggs Leaves Consumers Clucking

  

By Michael Laris

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 23, 2008; Page C01

 

In the race between her family’s two incomes and four hungry sons, Norma Jean Young says the boys are beginning to win.

The cost of the five loaves of bread and four gallons of milk that her three teenagers and 11-year-old churn through in a week has increased 11 to 17 percent since early last year. The price of eggs is up even more, jumping 30 percent to its highest point since 1984, according to federal tracking data.

“It’s ridiculous, and my kids eat them by the gallon,” said Young, an occupational health nurse from Annandale. “They’ll routinely make three-egg omelets when they get home, for a snack. . . . It’s a quagmire that I never step out of.”

Lee Rathbun, meanwhile, has cut trips to the meat aisle by half to save money. So when he saw a special on eggs during a recent visit to the Safeway in downtown Fairfax, he grabbed three dozen. They were on sale, “a two-for-one deal,” he said. “That means there’s going to be potato salad this week.”

And at the national average of $2.17 a dozen, the 15,200 eggs set to be dyed and rolled on the White House’s South Lawn tomorrow would cost $697 more than last year. Luckily for Uncle Sam, he gets them gratis from the American Egg Board and the Virginia Egg Council.

This Easter, even the humble egg can’t escape the nation’s economic angst. A surge in egg exports, the weak dollar, pricey grain, oil at more than $100 a barrel and cuts in the national chicken flock have contributed to the fortunes of the region’s farmers and to supermarket sticker shock.

“Nobody ever thinks about what all goes into that product they purchase and how tied into the world you are,” said Bill Hibberd, who has been raising chickens for 30 years in New Windsor, Md. “It just amazes you. Where do these eggs go when they leave us?”

But first, the chickens.

The 103,000 white hens pecking at feed troughs in the mechanized barn of one of Hibberd’s fellow producers in nearby Westminster, in Carroll County, started their harried lives 15 months after a shipment of embryos arrived in Canada from a breeder outside Hamburg, Germany. Two generations later, the female chicks from the resulting flock were rumbling toward Maryland’s Sunnyside Farms.

The females, beaks clipped so they don’t tear one another apart, are fattened up and start work at 18 weeks. (Male chicks are sent to a high-speed grinder or fed to zoo animals; the breed isn’t considered meaty enough to raise for drumsticks.)

In a henhouse at Sunnyside, the chickens are placed in 13,920 cages stacked four high, above a large manure pit cleared twice a year. Chains drag a crushed-corn mixture to the birds, and a conveyor system with white rubber fingers eases the eggs — 22 dozen per hen per year — out to be processed for consumers at Chevy Chase Supermarket, Sam’s Club in Woodbridge and Giant Food in Mount Pleasant.

“You take care of the hens, get the eggs out and try to feed the world,” farm manager Jeff Shanks said.

Sunnyside’s 430,000 hens lay about 8 million dozen eggs a year, part-owner Donald Lippy said, describing the market as “way high.”

“If that goes for a while, you make good money. You make real good money,” Lippy said. “But then you go to the other side of it, and you give it back. It’s another typical farming deal.”

Prices have gone in cycles, with farmers sometimes unloading their eggs below cost. Such losses squeezed many out of business.

“It gets to be survival of the fittest,” said Gabe Zepp, an agriculture official in Carroll, which produces 10.6 million dozen eggs. In 2005, Hibberd trimmed his flock from 160,000 to 4,000. “You couldn’t justify operating it,” Hibberd said.

Sunnyside’s operation is the largest still standing in the county. In Hampstead, distributor Sauder’s Eggs stays busy washing eggs and using glowing lights and ultrasound to check for cracks.

Many big U.S. producers made cuts for strategic reasons. Fewer eggs equals higher prices. At the same time, most U.S. farmers, feeling pressure from animal welfare advocates at home and in Europe, have been voluntarily cutting the number of birds kept in a typical 24-inch by 20-inch cage. Together, the cutbacks resulted in 5 million fewer hens nationally.

Feed costs are up, too, pushed by overseas demand for grains and corn-hungry ethanol producers. And bills are higher for the fluorescent henhouse lights and fuel.

But energy costs affect everybody, said Dave Harvey, a poultry and fish farming analyst for the U.S. Agriculture Department. “Eggs have gone up a lot more than most other things,” he said. “It’s a combination of lower supplies and high export demand — those are the big things right there.”

Jörgen Fuchs, an international egg trader based outside Frankfurt, Germany, whose father started the business to fill shortages after World War II, watches world markets and relies on timing and connections to buy low and sell higher.

In January 2007, a dozen eggs were selling in U.S. stores for $1.55, cheaper wholesale. The eggs that Fuchs bought last year from U.S. producers went to diners in Hong Kong and the Middle East. That helped push up U.S. prices by taking eggs off the local market.

Now, “your producers are doing so well they don’t need us,” Fuchs said. “Nobody can pay these prices.”

Seizing the opportunity, Hibberd, although still in debt, added 20,000 hens in October. He enjoys working with the birds, which bob and squawk all day like scratchy chorus singers. “At night, there’s no sound. I always loved that,” Hibberd said. “You walk in after dark, and they’re sleeping. They purr.”

Norma Jean Young is still buying three to four dozen a week, but she is changing the way she manages the family’s food. With her husband’s income as a lawyer and her nurse’s salary, the family is comfortable but careful about spending. Their prescription co-pays are higher, their oldest son starts college in the fall and a recent trip to BJ’s warehouse in Alexandria for groceries hit $450.

“Our food bill has climbed, and our bag count has gone down,” Young said.

So if her four boys want frozen pizza, and it’s not on sale, they must track down the coupons. She has stopped taking the kids to the food aisles with her because she feels uncomfortable saying no. She’s trying harder not to let produce go bad and points out leftovers on plates. And she is quietly holding back a few eggs on big Sunday breakfasts for six.

“If you had a whole big smorgasbord, you would crack 14 or 16 for scrambled eggs, in addition to pancakes or whatever you’re making. Now I pretty routinely go about 10,” Young said. “I’m buying more at the need level than at the want level.”

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/03/22/AR2008032201933.html

 

Chickens given roosts in urban backyards

1/2/2009

 

By Martin E. Klimek for USA

 

By Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY

California Web developer and business consultant Rob Ludlow gets laughs when he tells people his pets make him breakfast.

It’s no joke. Ludlow, his wife, Emily, and their two daughters have five egg-laying hens living in the backyard of their Bay Area home in Pleasant Hill, Calif. “Can your dog or cat claim the same?” Ludlow asks.

He is among the growing number of city dwellers across the country choosing chickens as pets — raising them for eggs that proponents say taste fresher, for pest control, for fertilizer and, as the economy continues to struggle, for a cost-saving source of protein.

Enthusiasts have been pecking away at multiple local laws this year and have persuaded officials in cities such as Fort Collins, Colo., Bloomington, Ind., and Brainerd, Minn., to change the rules.

Ludlow, who began raising chickens five years ago, has become somewhat of an expert on the topic through his website, BackYardChickens.com, which, he says, has grown to a community of 19,000 members around the world the past two years.

Ludlow has tapped into what he and others say is a growing trend among residents from California, New York, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and elsewhere.

Their efforts, he says, are a sign of the tough economy and harken back to the victory gardens planted by Americans in previous economic downturns and during the two world wars.

“It’s like that saying, a chicken in every pot. Well, I think it should be a chicken in every backyard,” Ludlow says.

Longmont, Colo., city planner Ben Ortiz says elected officials in his city of about 85,000 near Fort Collins are considering whether to let residents raise chickens. Ortiz says many residents have cited financial sustainability as a major reason. “There may be some pent-up demand for this kind of thing,” he says.

New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., and Seattle all permit urban chickens, Ortiz says. Such cities generally limit residents to five or fewer hens, with no roosters, a review of their laws shows.

Sonya Chamberlain of Brainerd, Minn., is the only person in her city licensed to keep backyard chickens, after her successful effort this fall to change the law. But she still doesn’t have chickens, she says, and has been concentrating on building a coop in her city of about 14,000.

“In Minnesota, you don’t want to get chicks in December,” she says.

Chamberlain cites access to eggs produced without antibiotics, a fresher taste and a greater emphasis on locally produced food as benefits of backyard chickens. “For me, it’s primarily a local foods and sustainability issue. My whole front yard is vegetables, and this is a natural extension of that,” she says.

Ortiz says Longmont officials began considering the proposal after some residents noted that Fort Collins approved a similar law in September. “What precipitated this is the sustainability movement. That seems to be the rationale that a lot of these people are employing,” Ortiz says.

Ludlow says the chickens eat leftover food and provide a daily lesson for children about where their food comes from.

Chamberlain says she took her request to city hall, drawing inspiration from friends in Portland, Ore., and websites such as Ludlow’s and the Albuquerque-based UrbanChickens.org. Both sites discuss everything from the best types of food to how to answer neighbors’ concerns.

Ortiz says skeptics in Longmont worry that the hens will be noisy, smelly and dirty, attract rodents and predators, and pose health risks from disease.

“Who wants to be looking at a makeshift chicken coop and hens running around 365 days a year?” asks Longmont resident Stephen Donnellan, a retired insurance claims adjustor. “To me, it’s laughable. This idea of having fresh eggs — you can go to a nearby farm.”

Donnellan, who says he likes his eggs with bacon, calls backyard chickens a fad that will pass. “We live in a city. They belong on a farm,” he says.

Chamberlain says her experience in Brainerd shows that people who grew up in rural areas seem most opposed to the chickens, which they see as livestock. “They said, what happens if there’s chickens running amok?” she says.

Hughes reports for the Fort Collins Coloradoan

 

The New Coop de Ville

The craze for urban poultry farming.

By Jessica Bennett | NEWSWEEK

Published Nov 17, 2008

 

For Brooklyn real-estate agent Maria Mackin, the obsession started five years ago, on a trip to Pennsylvania Amish country. She, her husband and three children—now 17, 13 and 11—sat down for brunch at a local bed-and-breakfast, and suddenly the chef realized she’d run out of eggs. “She said, ‘Oh goodness! I’ll have to go out to the garden and get some more’,” Mackin recalls. “She cooked them up and they were delicious.” Mackin and her husband, Declan Walsh, looked at each other, and it didn’t take long for the idea to register: Could we have chickens too? They finished their brunch and convinced the bed-and-breakfast owner, a Mennonite celery farmer, to sell them four chickens. They packed them in a little nest in the back of their Plymouth Voyager minivan and headed back to Brooklyn.

The family has been raising chickens ever since, in the backyard of their brick townhouse in an urban waterfront neighborhood called Red Hook. Every Easter, Mackin orders a new round of chicks, now from a catalog that ships the newborns in a ventilated box while they are still feeding from their yolks. When they are grown, she offers up their eggs—and occasionally extra chickens, when she decides she’s got too many—to friends and neighbors, and sells a portion to a local bistro, which touts the neighborhood poultry on its Web site. She gives the chicken manure—a high-quality fertilizer—to a local community garden in exchange for hay, which she uses to pad the chickens’ wire-fenced coop. Occasionally, she kills and cooks up a chicken for dinner—though, she says, her chickens are egg layers and aren’t particularly tasty. “We joke and call ourselves the Red Hook Poultry Association,” says the former social worker, who at one time housed 27 chicks inside her kitchen—for six weeks. “Sometimes people are like, ‘This is really kind of weird’.”

As it turns out, Mackin is hardly an anomaly, in New York or any other urban center. Over the past few years, urban dwellers driven by the local-food movement, in cities from Seattle to Albuquerque, have flocked to the idea of small-scale backyard chicken farming—mostly for eggs, not meat—as a way of taking part in home-grown agriculture. This past year alone, grass-roots organizations in Missoula, Mont.; South Portland, Maine; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Ft. Collins, Colo., have successfully lobbied to overturn city ordinances outlawing backyard poultry farming, defined in these cities as egg farming, not slaughter. Ann Arbor now allows residents to own up to four chickens (with neighbors’ consent), while the other three cities have six-chicken limits, subject to various spacing and nuisance regulations.

That quick growth in popularity has some people worried about noise, odor and public health, particularly in regard to avian flu. A few years back in Salt Lake City—which does not allow for backyard poultry farming—authorities had to impound 47 hens, 34 chicks and 10 eggs from a residential home after neighbors complained about incessant clucking and a wretched stench, along with wandering chickens and feathers scattered throughout the neighborhood. “The smell got to be unbelievable,” one neighbor told the local news. Meanwhile, in countries from Thailand to Australia, where bird flu has spread in the past, government officials have threatened to ban free-range chickens for fear they are contributing to outbreaks. (In British Columbia, where officials estimated earlier this year that there are as many as 8,000 chicken flocks, an avian flu outbreak four years forced the slaughter of more than 17 million birds.)

But avian flu has not shown up in wild birds, domestic poultry or people in the United States. And, as the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute (an environmental research group) pointed out in a report last month, experts including the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production have said that if we do see it, it’ll be more likely to be found in factory-farmed poultry than backyard chickens. As GRAIN, an international sustainable agriculture group, concluded in a 2006 report: “When it comes to bird flu, diverse small-scale poultry farming is the solution, not the problem.”

Many urban farmers are taking that motto to heart. In New York, where chickens (but not roosters, whose loud crowing can disturb neighbors) are allowed in limitless quantities, there are at least 30 community gardens raising them for eggs, and a City Chicken Project run by a local nonprofit that aims to educate the community about their benefits. In Madison, Wis., where members of a grass-roots chicken movement, the Chicken Underground, successfully overturned a residential chicken ban four years ago, there are now 81 registered chicken owners, according to the city’s animal-services department. “There’s definitely a growing movement,” says 33-year-old Rob Ludlow, the Bay Area operator of BackyardChickens.com and the owner of five chickens of his own. “A lot of people really do call it an addiction. Chickens are fun, they have a lot of personality. I think people are starting to see that they’re really easy pets—and they actually produce something in return.”

York and Los Angeles. But it isn’t legal everywhere. According to one recent examination by urban-agriculture expert Jennifer Blecha, just 65 percent of major cities allow chickenkeeping, while 40 percent allow for one or more roosters. (Hens don’t need roosters to lay unfertilized eggs.)

Chicken slaughter, meanwhile, tends to fall under a separate (and generally stricter) set of regulations, though they’re not always enforced. Most cities that allow chicken farming limit the number to four or six per household, so many urban farmers aren’t raising enough chickens to slaughter and sell anyway—though they may cook up a meal or two at home. If they want to slaughter more, there are mobile slaughterhouses in places like Washington state that will do the dirty work for you: USDA-approved refrigerated trucks will pull right up to your doorstep.

Chicken farmers are finding each other on sites like TheCityChicken.com, UrbanChickens.org and MadCityChickens.com. BackyardChickens.com logs some 6 million page views each month and has some 18,000 members in its forum, where community members share colorful stories (giving a chicken CPR), photos (from a California chicken show), even look to each other for comfort. “I am worried that non-BYC people won’t understand why a 34-year-old woman would cry over a $7 chicken,” writes a Stockton, N.J., woman, whose chicken was killed by a hawk.

Over at UrbanChickens.org, which launched this year, founder K. T. LaBadie, a master’s student in community planning, provides updates on city ordinances, info about local chicken-farming classes and coop tours and has been contacted by activists hoping to overturn chicken bans around the nation. In Albuquerque, where she lives with her husband and four chickens—Gloria, Switters, Buffy and Omelet—residents can keep 15 chickens and one rooster, subject to noise ordinances, as well as slaughter the chickens for food. In July, LaBadie wrote in detail of her first killing: she and her husband hung the bird by its legs, slit its throat, plucked its feathers and put it on ice. Then they slow-cooked it for 20 hours. “It’s not pretty, it’s kinda messy, and it’s a little smelly,” she writes. “But it’s quite real.”

Meanwhile, at MadCityChickens.com, the Web site created by the Madison Chicken Underground, chat-line operator Dennis Harrison-Noonan has turned his chicken love into a mini-business: he’s sold 2,000 design kits for his custom-made playhouse chicken coop, which retails for $35. “It’s really not that crazy to think that people are doing this,” says Owen Taylor, the urban livestock coordinator at Just Food, which operates the New York Chicken Project. “Most of the world keeps chickens, and they’ve been doing so for thousands of years.”

Historically, he’s right. During the first and second world wars, the government even encouraged urban farming by way of backyard “Victory Gardens” in an effort to lessen the pressure on the public food supply. (Until 1859, there were 50,000 hogs living in Manhattan, according to Blecha.) “It’s really only been over the last 50 years or so that we’ve gotten the idea that modernity and success and urban spaces don’t involve these productive animals,” Blecha says.

There are a host of reasons for the growing trend. “Locavores” hope to avoid the carbon emissions and energy consumption that come with transporting food. Chicken owners and poultry experts say eggs from backyard chickens are tastier and can be more nutritious, with higher levels of supplements like omega-3 fatty acids. Their production cost is cheap: you can buy chickens for as little as a couple of dollars, and three hens will likely average about two eggs a day. You can also use their waste to help revitalize a garden. “There’ve been recalls on everything from beef to spinach, and I think people want to have peace of mind knowing their food is coming from a very trusted source,” says LaBadie. “As gas prices go up, and people realize how food is connected to oil and transportation, they are bound to realize they can get a higher quality product cheaper if they get it locally.”

Keeping a chicken is relatively easy, too—assuming you don’t get too attached. (That’s a talk Mackin says she had with her kids early: these chickens aren’t pets.) They’ll eat virtually anything—”pork products, string cheese, even Chinese takeout,” she laughs—and they feed on bugs and pests that can ruin a garden. They can withstand harsh weather conditions. (In one oft-told tale, a Maine woman lost her chicken in a blizzard and found it, a day later, frozen solid with its feet stuck straight in the air. She thawed it and administered CPR. The chicken made a full recovery.) And much like New Yorkers, not much bothers chickens grown in urban environments. “[Those] raised in a really controlled environment like factory farms are very fragile, both physically and emotionally,” says Blecha, who lives in St. Paul, Minn., with her partner and six chickens. “My chickens, I mow the lawn a foot away from them and they don’t even look up from their pecking.”

But even urban chickens, who can live more than five years, can die easily: from predators like dogs or possums, catching a cold or sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Once, one of Mackin’s chicks got stuck in a glue trap. She drowned it, to put it out of its misery. “That was really sad,” she says. (Mackin doesn’t name her chickens, for that very reason.)

But the overall experience seems to be positive for everyone. “We have people calling weekly to say, ‘This is really cool’,” says Patrick Comfert, a spokesman for Madison’s animal-services department, where the chicken ban was reversed in 2004. “Chicken people love it, the neighbors don’t care, we have no complaints.” Minneapolis enthusiast Albert Bourgeois sums up the appeal. “Chickens are really fun pets,” he says. His flock is named Cheney, Condi, Dragon, Fannie and Freddie. The next one, he says, will be Obama.

© 2008

 

U.S. City Dwellers Flock to Raising Chickens

by Ben Block on October 6, 2008 

 

In the backyard of a suburban home in Denver, Colorado, 22 chickens are hiding out from the law.

They arrived when a member of BackyardChickens, an online forum, ordered the birds in the mail this past May. “I actually get my chicks in today hopefully, and I am worried that animal control will be at the post office waiting for me with hand-cuffs,” the new poultry farmer wrote.

An underground “urban chicken” movement has swept across the United States in recent years. Cities such as Boston, Massachusetts, and Madison, Wisconsin, are known to have had chickens residing illegally behind city fences.

But grassroots campaigns, often inspired by the expanding movement to buy locally produced food, are leading municipalities to allow limited numbers of hens within city limits.

Cities such as Anne Arbor, Michigan; Ft. Collins, Colorado; and South Portland, Maine have all voted in the past year to allow residents to raise backyard poultry. “It’s a serious issue – it’s no yolk,” said Mayor Dave Cieslewicz of Madison, Wisconsin, when his city reversed its poultry ban in 2004. “Chickens are really bringing us together as a community. For too long they’ve been cooped up.”

Raising backyard chickens is an extension of an urban farming movement that has gained popularity nationwide. Home-raised livestock or agriculture avoids the energy usage and carbon emissions typically associated with transporting food.

“Fresh is not what you buy at the grocery store. Fresh is when you go into your backyard, put it in your bag, and eat it,” said Carol-Ann Sayle, co-owner of five-acre (two-hectare) farm in Austin, Texas, located within walking distance from the state capitol. “Everyone should have their own henhouse in their own backyard.” 

“Buying local” also provides an alternative to factory farms that pollute local ecosystems with significant amounts of animal waste – which can at times exceed the waste from a small U.S. city, a government report revealed last month. In the United States alone, industrial livestock production generates 500 million tons of manure every year. The waste also emits potent greenhouse gases, especially methane, which has 23 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Meanwhile, advocates insist that birds raised on a small scale are less likely to carry diseases than factory-farmed poultry, although some public health officials are concerned that backyard chickens could elevate avian flu risks. 

Chicken: The ‘Buy Local’ Mascot

After the trend first gained popularity in London, England, with the invention of the “eglu” chicken house about ten years ago, large numbers of city dwellers began to raise chickens in the U.S. cities of Seattle and Portland, said Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network. “It’s no longer something kinky or interesting,” Smit said. “The ‘chicken underground’ has really spread so widely and has so much support.”

Within the past five years, the trend has expanded to cities where raising hens was already legal, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. “Chicken has become the symbol, a mascot even, of the local food movement,” said Owen Taylor of New York City, who knows of at least 30 community gardens that raise poultry, mostly for their eggs. One Brooklyn home has raised upward of 50 hens. “We’re the biggest city in the country, so to have it here I think blows people’s minds.”

K.T. LaBadie, a University of New Mexico graduate student, was born into a family that grew its own fruits and vegetables. So when she moved to Albuquerque and met a friend who was raising his own chickens, poultry was a logical progression in her own home. She began with two hens, and now she has four.

“It felt like a good compliment to our backyard gardening. We get compost from the chickens that goes back into the vegetable beds,” LaBadie said. “And there’s really nothing better than harvesting tomatoes and peppers from your garden and being able to make an omelet with it using a meal that was based in your backyard.”

The spread of backyard chickens has promoted spin-off businesses that cater to the local market. Some communities are relying on mobile slaughterhouses to manage and distribute the poultry meat, according to Smit. “It’s no longer huge slaughterhouses doing millions [of birds]. It’s a guy driving around on a truck, visiting neighborhood to neighborhood,” he said. “And it’s not chickens only…. Duck, turkey, and quail are particularly attractive.”

In Portland, Oregon, residents have organized a farming cooperative [video] to raise hens for egg production. “The money is used to maintain the cooperative. It’s not necessarily organized to be a profit-sharing venture,” said Debra Lippoldt, executive director of Growing Gardens, a Portland urban agriculture advocacy group.

Public Health Concerns

If avian influenza eventually evolves to infect humans, experts fear that backyard chickens will be vectors of the disease. Government officials have threatened to ban free-range chickens in cities in Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong, where bird flu has spread in the past. Governments around the world are also concerned that wild fowl will infect backyard chickens, leading to calls for similar bans in the Canadian province of British Columbia and in Australia.

But several public health officials argue that homegrown poultry are not a disease threat if the chickens are properly maintained. “Make sure the roof of the pen has a solid cover to protect birds from fecal matter that may drop from birds flying overhead,” said University of California at Davis poultry specialist Francine Bradley in a statement released in 2005, at the peak of avian flu concerns. “We always tell people, don’t let anyone near your birds who doesn’t need to be there [due to fears of people carrying the virus].”

Sustainable farming advocates insist that backyard chickens are less of a concern than factory-farmed poultry, which the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production has said poses serious risks of transmitting animal-borne diseases to human populations, especially due to the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance.

“When it comes to bird flu, diverse small-scale poultry farming is the solution, not the problem,” the international sustainable agriculture organization GRAIN concluded in a 2006 report.

For urban poultry farmers, a more relevant health issue is whether the chickens, which many owners consider to be pets, can survive urban wildlife, even in New York City. “It’s awful how often flocks are decimated by raccoons or hawks or possums,” said Owen Taylor, who runs the City Farms livestock program, an extension of the sustainable food organization Just Food. 

As the backyard chicken movement spreads, urban farmers are finding new ways of experiencing city living, whether their chickens are pets or dinner. “Raising chickens on a backyard stoop, especially if you have children, is agreeable,” Smit said. “How you convince the kids you’ll cut its neck and eat it is another thing.”

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.