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BIBA
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November 13-19, 2008
editorial@boulderweekly.com
Chicks and
the city
Longmont debates allowing backyard hens
as the interest in urban farming surges
by Pamela
White
You could say that humanity is a victim of its own
success when it comes to food. Not so long ago, our ancestors lived
their lives tied to the seasons, toiling to grow and preserve enough
food to feed their children through another winter. Droughts,
insects and blights could lead to hunger, malnutrition, even
starvation. Families were only as secure as their food supply, and
so humanity searched for better ways to grow and store
food.
Today, most of us fill our cupboards by driving to the
grocery store, where we find a global harvest on the shelves
regardless of the season — blueberries from Chile, tilapia from
Honduras, lunchmeat and breakfast cereal from China. Hunger is no
longer an issue of failed crops, but one of economics. But, even as
Americans experience an abundance of foods never before seen in
human history, we face new problems.
Few of us are
malnourished, but many are misnourished, overweight from bingeing on
processed food products that include hydrogenated fats,
high-fructose corn syrup, hormones, pesticides, herbicides,
antibiotics and artificial flavors and colors. We’re forced to
question not only the nutritive value of what we eat but also its
purity, with multinational corporations manufacturing products that
contain ingredients from countries where food-safety standards
result in dead pets and babies with kidney stones.
The same
food system that brings us heart attacks, high blood pressure and
cancer, also consumes fossil fuels, contributing to global climate
change, as forests are felled to graze cattle and harvests are flown
to markets far from the soil that produced them.
It’s no
exaggeration to say that what we eat is killing us.
But we
pay another price for our corporatized system of manufactured food,
one that’s far more difficult to measure: We’ve become disconnected
from the land and the natural process by which food is grown,
harvested and brought to the table.
In response, a greater
number of Americans are trying to put the back 40 — that’s feet, not
acres — to work growing a portion of the food they eat. From kitchen
gardens to full-blown urban cooperative farms, people are getting
their hands dirty in an effort to clean up their health and the
environment and to regain local control over food. Some are even
keeping chickens — hens, to be specific — in order to have a ready
source of fresh eggs.
Although it’s legal to keep chickens in
the city of Boulder and in many other communities along the Front
Range and across the country, you’re likely to get a citation if you
try it in Longmont. But this might soon change, as the city of
Longmont is scrambling to review and perhaps change its codes in
response to citizen demand.
Sowing hope
Having a
garden in one’s backyard is nothing new. A century ago and through
the Great Depression, kitchen gardens helped families keep food on
the table. During World War II, it became part of every citizen’s
patriotic duty to grow food. Hippies of the 1970s found earthy
satisfaction in planting and harvesting food, but by then backyard
gardens had become little more than a hobby.
However, faced
with the uncertainties of a globalized food-production system — a
single processed food product might contain ingredients from 20
different countries — as well as concerns about pesticides,
herbicides and the truthfulness of food labeling, people are turning
in increasing numbers to farmers’ markets, community-supported
agriculture (CSA), and home gardening.
Kipp Nash left his
corporate job in 2000 in search of a better way of living and found
himself working on an organic farm.
“When I got to the farm,
I realized this is what I wanted to do,” he says. “I felt very
connected to that kind of living, where it’s just basic, simple
living and growing food and sharing food with the
community.”
By 2004, he’d made his way to Boulder, where the
high price of land prevented him from buying his own farm. Still, he
wanted to work the soil.
“I had to do something,” he says. “I
just didn’t feel like I had a choice. The only resource that really
seemed available to me was my backyard.”
So he grew veggies
in his backyard, but it wasn’t enough. He decided to check with his
neighbors to see if they’d let him use part of their backyard if he
shared the harvest.
“It very quickly in my head spun into
this really beautiful multiple-backyard project where we also have a
community-supported agriculture piece to it,” he says. “So I got
really excited right off the bat and went to work.”
He
founded Community Roots Urban Gardens of Boulder, a program that
combines the concept of the back- or front-yard garden with the CSA,
in which people buy a share of the harvest in advance to support the
farmer.
Nash quickly found several neighbors who were willing
to see their lawns transformed into gardens in exchange for a share
of the produce. Rather than wasting water on grass, the water went
to kale and broccoli and beans. He also found local residents who
were eager to purchase shares of whatever he grew, their investment
helping to cover the cost of seeds, fertilizer, supplies and Nash’s
labor.
This past year, Nash worked 12 gardens, 11 that were
located in someone’s front or backyard and one at a church —
equaling about 1/3 of an acre. From that small amount of land, he
grew enough to provide 24 families with the bulk of 20 weekly
distributions of fresh, organic produce.
“We did cooperate on
the CSA program with a grower out on Baseline who has an acre,” Nash
says. “He grew some of the crops that require more space, like corn,
squash and pumpkins and melons.”
The benefits of Nash’s
program, and urban farming in general, include not only reducing the
environmental impact of growing food by eliminating both chemicals
and food miles — Nash transports the harvest in his bike trailer —
but also growing community.
“The idea around CSA is that it
truly is a community,” he says. “It’s not just these people who show
up, pick up vegetables and go home. It’s people who get to know the
farmer, and people who experiment with eating seasonal foods. It’s a
lot more participatory than going to the grocery store and picking
something up off a pile. It brings everything so much closer. You’re
eating food that you might even see when you’re taking a walk down
the street. It’s bringing everything closer to home.”
Nash
has watched as the interest in urban farming has expanded beyond
fruits and vegetables to fresh eggs. He thinks the idea of owning
hens is wonderful.
“I’ve been able to watch as the buzz has
been created and people have jumped on board,” he says. “It just
makes a whole lot of sense. Chickens aren’t dirty animals. They
aren’t obnoxious and loud, unless you have a rooster. Probably like
gardening, it’s not an economic choice, because buying the chicken
food may cost as much or even more than buying eggs, but you’re also
able to recycle some of your household waste by throwing it to the
chickens, and you get fresh eggs. And you get a really special
education experience and a connection experience.”
It may be
this need for connection that is driving both urban farming and the
interest in backyard chickens.
“It’s giving people a lot of
hope about maybe feeling more in control of our lives,” Nash says.
What the cluck?
Mary Marsden lives with her
teenage daughter in a single-family home in Boulder. This past
April, she bought nine female chicks from a Longmont feed store.
Then she built a coop and set about raising chickens.
“We’d
been thinking about getting chickens for about eight years,” Marsden
says. “Learning about the horrors of factory farming, chickens
included — that influenced us. The whole relocalization movement has
really influenced us a lot. And we’ve just always wanted to have
chickens. I don’t know exactly why, but it’s really satisfying to
have them.”
Despite her concern that her backyard might not
be the ideal place for a flock of hens, it has worked very well, she
says. Marden and her daughter let the hens out at dawn and make sure
they’re locked in their coop at dusk to protect them from predators.
They provide food and clean water and keep the coop clean. When they
can, they give the hens free run of their yard.
“We have a
chicken run that’s fenced top and sides and about one foot down
under ground around the perimeter just in case some foxes might take
a shine to the chickens,” Marsden says. “But we generally just open
that up as well, because they’re much happier if they’re out and
able to flap their wings and run around and scratch and everything.
They are so busy.”
In return for a relatively small amount of
work, Marsden gets fresh eggs daily. How many eggs she gets depends
on the season and the amount of daylight.
“The past few weeks
we have been getting four or five eggs each day,” Marsden says.
“Yesterday we got seven. Five seems to be the average as it’s gotten
colder and the days are shorter.”
The eggs never see the
inside of a refrigerator. They go from nest box to kitchen counter
to tummy within a few days.
“You should see these eggs,”
Marsden says. “They have the most golden yokes. When we fry them in
a pan, they actually have form. They’re pert. They don’t just spread
out really flat in the pan.”
In addition to eggs, there are
other intangible benefits — like being more in tune with the sunrise
and sunset and the changing seasons. Plus, they feel the same
affection for their chickens that many Boulder residents feel for
beloved pets.
“I have to say, our chickens are really
beautiful,” Marsden says. “I laugh out loud daily just watching them
— the way they run with their arms out. It’s really
ridiculous.”
But does keeping chickens save them money?
Marsden isn’t sure.
“I haven’t kept really good records about
how much we spent getting the project set up,” she says.
But
that’s not really the point for Marsden and her
daughter.
“For us, it’s about so much more than that,” she
says.
Meanwhile, across town, Boulder County Commissioner
Will Toor is suffering from chicken envy.
“I want chickens,”
he says. “I’ve been arguing with my family about it. There are all
these men in our neighborhood who are in their 40s who want
chickens. None of our families will let us have chickens in our
backyards.”
Toor’s interest in raising chickens stems from
his college years.
“When I was in college, I lived in a co-op
house,” he says. “My house job was that I was a chicken manager. I
just think it would be really neat to have chickens producing eggs.
That whole notion of having more of our food production right at
home… ”
Though his wife chalks his chicken fixation up to
midlife crisis, it’s his kids who are popping his poultry bubble.
They want to keep the backyard for themselves.
But, although
he may be unable to satisfy his yen for hens at home, as county
commissioner he’s working to find out what it would take to produce
more of the county’s food locally and to see to it that more of the
food grown in Boulder County is sold in local markets as opposed to
the national commodity markets. The Boulder County Board of
Commissioners, which includes Toor, Ben Pearlman and Cindy Domenico,
created the Boulder County Food and Agriculture Policy Council, an
advisory board authorized to look into that very
question.
It’s an issue of long-term food security, Toor
says, as well as a need to reduce the “food miles” — the amount of
miles food is transported from field to table — associated with
feeding county residents.
From his point of view, raising
hens in one’s backyard addresses both of those concerns. He also
thinks chickens rock.
“What’s not to like about chickens?” he
asks.
A growing number of city slickers agree with him, both
in Boulder County and across the nation. Books on backyard chickens
are hot sellers on Amazon. Blogs and websites on raising urban
chickens abound. Several cities, including Madison, Wis., and Fort
Collins, have revisited their ordinances to make backyard chickens
legal.
But Longmont residents are, for the moment, out of
luck when it comes to keeping hens.
Ruffled
feathers
Ben Ortiz, a planner with the city of Longmont, says
the issue of backyard chickens surfaced this year after a Longmont
couple approached City Council members and asked them to review city
codes to see if they could be amended to allow the owning and
keeping of chickens in residential zoning districts. The couple had
recently lost a flock of hens after city officials learned that the
couple was keeping them in their North Longmont yard.
Ortiz
was charged with researching the issue and found that a significant
number of communities allow residents to keep hens in their yards.
He learned that both New York City and San Francisco — far denser
urban areas than Longmont — permit city residents to keep hens.
In communities where hens are allowed, cities tend to ban
roosters, which can be loud and aggressive, and regulate the number
of hens allowed in a yard, as well as the conditions in which they
are kept.
Ortiz presented his report to City Council on July
22, and City Council voted six to one to allow the project to move
forward.
On Wed., Nov. 12, Ortiz met with the public to
discuss people’s concerns, most of which center on the fear that the
chickens will be noisy or stinky and the belief that chickens are
farm animals that don’t belong in the city.
But Ortiz says
his research indicates that most complaints regarding chickens stem
from roosters, not hens.
“Chickens are capable of making
short bursts of flight, and sometimes they’ll clear a privacy fence
and people complain about that,” he says.
If chickens are
allowed in Longmont, Ortiz said the regulations would ban roosters
and limit the number of hens a family can have in their yard.
Regulations would also likely include requirements for the care of
chickens, predator-proof coops, the cleanliness of coops and where
coops can be located on a person’s property.
Ortiz says he
hopes to take a proposal to Longmont’s planning and zoning
department on Nov. 19 and have a first reading on ordinance changes
before Longmont City Council by Dec. 9.
But support for this
idea is not universal. An online poll by the Longmont Times Call
showed that a little more than half of the city’s residents support
the idea of city chickens, while a little less than half oppose it.
The accuracy of the poll is questionable because the wording is
somewhat leading. The “No” option reads: “No. I don’t want roosters
crowing my neighborhood awake.”
“It’s interesting to see the
responses of the folks that are opposed,” Ortiz says. “A lot of them
are really similar. A lot of them are rooted in a veiled
racism.”
Or perhaps a not-so-veiled racism.
“If you
want a chicken move to a farm, or go back to Mexico where they run
free,” wrote one respondent.
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!!!”
wrote another. “People don’t even take care of their lawns. Cars on
the front lawn don’t bother them a bit. They have 12 people living
in a two-bedroom house, and you think they’ll keep a hen house
clean??? Dream on. Chicken coops require a certain amount of regular
maintenance to keep them from smelling. Want chickens? Move to the
country. Better yet... move south. Way south.”
Ortiz says he
thinks a lot of the fears are irrational and based on preconceived
notions about chickens.
“One of the things I keep hearing
over and over again is that chickens belong on farms,” he says. “But
New York City allows people to own and keep chicken. San Francisco
allows people to own and keep chicken… So urban areas — very dense
cities — allow people to own and keep chickens. I think it’s just a
reflection of some preconceived ideas that aren’t rooted in reality.
Chickens are not bad animals.”
Cynthia Torres, manager of the
Longmont Farmers’ Market and a member of the Boulder County Food and
Agriculture Policy Council, says she thinks urban farming and
backyard chickens are a great idea.
“I think that backyard
chickens and ordinances to promote at-home gardening are really a
way to build community and a connection to the place where food
comes from,” she says.
As someone who is familiar with
chickens and their behavior, she sees no inherent reason why a small
flock of hens can’t be kept in the average backyard. Not only are
chickens easy to care for, but the benefits of having fresh eggs
would no doubt help many Longmont families. Plus, she finds chickens
entertaining.
“They make chicken buddies. They run around.
They do their chicken things,” she says. “They’re really interesting
animals to observe. They’re living animals. You start to question
some of the conditions in which chickens are factory farmed. You
start to get connected to what animals are like outside cats and
dogs.”
Torres isn’t surprised to have the topic of racism
surface in a discussion about chickens and healthful eating.
“Healthy food is definitely a class issue. It’s a race
issue,” she says. “If you’re African American, you’re three times
more likely to die of diabetes than a white person. If you’re
Latino, Hispanic, Mexican, you’re twice as likely to die of
diabetes.”
Torres cites an agriculture/economics report based
on a study of the Denver-metro area done by the Crossroads Resource
Center that included a look at human health.
“One of the most
astounding statistics in that report was that in the Denver-metro
area, which includes Boulder, from 1990 to 2006 deaths from diabetes
have increased by 97 percent,” Torres says. “It’s because there are
so many people who don’t have access to whole foods, to real foods
that are nutrient dense.”
Poor families turn to food banks,
where there are shelves filled with manufactured food and a dearth
of fresh fruits and vegetables, she says.
She sees urban
farming, including backyard chickens and the tilling of vacant urban
plots, as a way to get good food to people who need it. City and
county leaders can have a real impact by developing policies that
facilitates growing more food locally.
“When we think about
agriculture, we rarely think about health,” she says. “On a policy
scale, we don’t think about how agriculture and food production —
the processing, the manufacturing and the distribution — has on our
health.”
Nor do we think about the social implications of our
current food system, one in which people have no connection to the
hands that grew their food and too many people eat things that do
not benefit their health, she says. Taken altogether, our society
could stand to gain greatly from some serious reconsideration of the
issue.
“When you consider those three big components of
sustainability — the economic, the social and the environment — you
get a better sense of what it takes to move toward a sustainable
system when you have an intimate connection to those three parts,”
she says. “The social component is the one that’s overlooked a lot.
You hear about global warming, and you hear about our economy going
to pot, but the social part of it is often the one that gets
overlooked. Growing food in your backyard and really getting your
community connected to growing food, is the way to support that
social one. You’re talking to your neighbors. You’re talking to your
community about different recipes. You’re building that local
culture around local food.”
For more information about
Community Roots Urban Gardens of Boulder, go to
www.communityrootsboulder.com/.
For information about classes
on urban farming offered by the Colorado State University Extension
Office, call Joel Reich at
303-678-6386.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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