No chicken left behind!
June 3rd, 2009 by Philip Loring
As my wife and I got ready to mount a return trek to Alaska from our sojourn into the desert, I found that there was one final dispatch I wanted to record in my Ester Republic column, ‘Outpost Agriculture,’ one lesson that I had repeatedly missed, though it was regularly (and quite literally) staring me right in the face. (reprinted here from the April 09 issue of the Ester Republic).
“… That lesson is the practical elegance of raising chickens. Many people here in the Southwest raise their own chickens, especially across the border, where roosters generally roam free through the streets of the small Ejidos. And this is not a uniquely rural enterprise—friends here report that many people raise chickens in the dense residential areas of Tucson, keeping a small coop with two to four chickens behind a garage or beside a swingset in their humble backyards. Indeed, households with chickens were so common a part of my experience in Mexico that I completely overlooked the phenomenon’s relevance.
Why wouldn’t a family raise chickens? It is easy, cost-effective, and provides a degree of food security you certainly cannot obtain at Fred Meyer. Chickens plug right in to any home gardening or permaculture strategy seamlessly. They make amiable and entertaining pets, will quite happily call even the shabbiest of accommodations home (I’ve seen people nest a hen or two in old doghouses and the wheel-less remnants of an old trailer), and are virtually self-feeding during the summer. If you take the extra responsibility of keeping a rooster, they will even reproduce for you. What they won’t do is make you any real amount of money, beyond breaking even from the up-front cost of buying the chicks and building their accommodations. They will provide you with fine fertilizer for your gardens, more fresh eggs than you know what to do with, and hours of cheerful entertainment.
Of course, there are some additional costs and challenges to keeping hens in Alaska, at least if you intend to overwinter your birds, though this is an attractive solution for those interested in winter composting. You will need to come up with a reliable heating solution for their habitation, not a difficult task but one worth some forethought. There are many good designs, a rule of thumb being that you don’t sacrifice heat retention in the winter for important ventilation in the summer. If you do not wish to go this route, you could choose to butcher your birds each year, once they stop laying and the temperature at night starts consistently dropping below freezing. Personally I find this a bit too industrial, and prefer an option somewhere in between, butchering some but keeping two or three really good layers from year to year. The cost goes up, but come spring when you’re mixing the sawdust and manure from your coop into your compost pile, you’ll be glad that you did.
Depending on where you live, you might run into other unexpected barriers to raising chickens. There are codes and regulations for (or rather against) just about everything, and most tend to err on the cautious side when it comes to any kind of livestock. Such concerns are largely unwarranted, of course; many books on chickens, for example, make it seem like they are notoriously difficult to keep clean, and suffer from a myriad of intimidating parasites and problems, but the fact of the matter is that there really is nothing to keeping healthy birds, as long as you do your job right.
It is unfortunate that so many suffer from this belief that food and its production is so inherently unsafe. Still, resistance from your neighbors or local governments is a possibility you need to prepare for (though I would hope unlikely here in Alaska). To many, the systematic devaluation of all things agricultural by our culture has made acts like raising chickens not just undesirable, but dirty, unsafe, almost uncivilized, if you can get your mind around that irony. Having suffered residency in South Florida for years before my exodus north, I can imagine what some conservative homeowners’ associations would say about families erecting modest chicken coops in places like Boca Raton—communities where lawns, landscaping, and even the kind of vehicles parked outside are micromanaged in the name of property values. Roosters would surely be out of the question. They are a no-no here in Tucson, their calls apparently more disruptive than the ever-present din of traffic, sirens, trains, and children.
I cannot imagine a sustainable food future without a widespread re-adoption of practices like raising chickens. I’d suggest that the practice is just the kind of small-scale act of resistance called for in these times, acts of secession from the global agricultural system and of agitation against the many dysfunctional rules and regulations of our society that reflect little common sense and an insular world view that is simply out of touch with how life works on this planet. You will be surprised how dramatically a few birds can tighten, even transform, your household economy. They feed and enrich your home, eliminate a great degree of waste, and you can even let your kids make a buck or two by setting up a stand at the end of the driveway to sell surplus eggs along with lemonade to neighbors on our beautiful, late-summer days. “
