To most people nowadays, a chicken is four skinless breasts in a shrink-wrapped package, and eggs appear in cartons in a cooler several aisles away. But if you listen closely, you may hear the soft clucking of real, whole, live chickens where you might least expect it—in suburban and even city backyards.
Over the last couple of years, keeping chickens at home has become in vogue. It’s largely in reaction to the mass production of those supermarket chickens in vast factory farms and to safety scares in the complex chicken distribution chain.
Backyard chicken lovers say they want to know where their eggs come from and be sure they’re healthy—the same reasons many have undertaken growing their own vegetables. Often chickens have caught their imaginations through best-selling books that wrestle with an urbanized lifestyle dependent on mass-produced food, in particular Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Raising chickens allows people to grow what they eat and feel part of a circle of life, they say. Chickens convert kitchen waste to manure and eat lawn pests. They also put scarce urban land to good use beyond ornament and recreation. Baby chicks are, let’s face it, drop-dead cute. And there’s no egg fresher than one laid in your backyard.
The combination of chickens with gardens can be complicated, however.
Chicken manure is indeed full of nutrients; it’s a major ingredient in many organic fertilizers. Chickens do help dispose of kitchen waste, including watermelon rinds and tuna fish sandwiches, according to Della Brown, 12. Her mom, Jill Ridell, and sister, Jackie, 8, keep four hens—Tweety, Zippy and Chippy and Big One—in their backyard in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood.
And hens do eat many insect pests. The trouble is that they gobble up a lot of other things too, including prized perennials. And earthworms. “Worms are like soda” to a chicken, Jackie says.
Chickens “go where they want to and they can be really destructive,” Ridell notes. Not only do they eat omnivorously, but chickens like to roll in the dust and they tend to create a dusty place to roll.
In Hyde Park, Ridell’s friend, Pam Birnie, a longtime perennial gardener, decided to raise her first fluffy chicks to hen-hood last spring as she was learning to grow vegetables.
By September, her beds were all surrounded by chicken-wire fences to protect them from her two Rhode Island Reds, one elegant Araucana and one Isa Brown. “All the green leafy things they just adore,” she says. “I haven’t lost as many vegetables as I have perennials.”
She’s hardly alone: the Internet is alive with gardeners seeking advice on chicken-resistant plants, which seem to be as rare as deer-proof plants.
Birnie loves her birds: their companionable presence, their self-important airs, their individual personalities and, of course, their delicious eggs. But, she says, “I have to find some common ground with my chickens so I can still have a garden.”
Organic farmers often use moveable coops called “chicken tractors” to spread out the birds’ manure and their other effects, but in a small yard, that may not be practical.
In Birnie’s yard, the hens’ home is a snug nook built in a crawl space beneath her back deck. A coop is necessary to keep the birds warm and protected from predators such as hawks, cats and raccoons, but it need not be elaborate. Ridell and family insulated a grown-out-of playhouse. Both coops have heat lamps, straw for bedding, perches, water and nest boxes (where the hens lay eggs unless they decide to lay them somewhere else).
All that bedding must be changed frequently. Since fresh chicken manure is “hot” (so biologically active that it can harm plants), it must be composted before it is used in the garden. The resulting compost is a splendid soil amendment, far richer than what comes from a plant-matter-only pile. But a few chickens produce a lot of soiled straw, more than Birnie’s small city-yard compost heap can handle so the surplus goes in the garbage bin.
Raising urban chickens is not inexpensive. “There are very few people who think this is going to be a cheaper way to get eggs,” says Martha Boyd, who teaches workshops on urban chickens for the Angelic Organics Learning Center, a Woodlawn-based nonprofit that encourages local food production and consumption.
True, Jackie Brown found she could command enormous prices from neighbors for fresh-laid eggs. But she gave up the business because, at about one egg per hen a day, supply could not approach demand.
Apart from straw, the chickens need fresh, clean water and grain-based feed, of which the Feed Store (at 5408 S. Harlem in Summit) sells a wide variety. And sometimes they need legal representation, because chickens may be outlaws.
In the 19th Century it was common for city-dwellers to keep chickens as well as geese, goats and cows (think Goose Island, Bucktown, Mrs. O’Leary). Today, six lanes of truck traffic roar past the Feed Store, but the business began in 1948 to serve neighboring families who kept chickens and other farm animals, according to owner Joe Bestwina. He still sells chicken supplies and a variety of baby chicks in the spring for about $2.50 each.
But laws passed in the later half
of the 20th century in the city and
its suburbs largely assume that agriculture belongs somewhere Downstate. Chickens, if mentioned at all, may
fall under laws about pets or be banned entirely. Noisy roosters are barred by nuisance laws in any place that has city limits, but fortunately you don’t need a rooster to get eggs from your hens.
It’s wise to check with your local officials and talk over your plans with the neighbors before you start building a coop or picking a breed of chicks. Better to anticipate problems than to end up with a fight on your hands.
In Chicago, the law says nothing specific about keeping chickens but bans the slaughter of animals for food by anyone other than a licensed butcher.
Backyard chicken lovers may shrink from the very idea of chicken slaughter. But sooner or later, they must confront what Boyd delicately calls “end-of-life issues.”
The hard fact is that though hens can live more than 10 years, they only lay eggs until they are 18 months or two years old. To farmers, a hen too old to lay is just the right age to sell as a roaster. But the question may be more complicated for backyard chicken keepers.
“People have to decide what they are going to do,” Boyd says. “Is this animal a pet that you are going to feed forever? Or is she something else?”
And if she’s something else, what do you do? Legally, one option in Chicago is to take the chicken to a live poultry store, where a butcher will charge a few dollars to kill it for your dinner table. Or you can turn it over to Angelic Organics “for someone else to eat,” Boyd says.
Such issues are one reason that Angelic Organics holds its seminars. Boyd is all for home chicken-keeping, but she wants people to be realistic about the amount of work and bother they are in for: daily chores; bedding disposal; legal and odor issues; the potential for conflict with neighbors and perennials; the limited egg horizon.
Though the Brown girls do some feeding, watering and herding, much of the chickens’ care has fallen to Ridell. She is thoroughly aware of
the downsides, especially now that
the hens are coming to the end of their laying days. “I’m in the humiliating position now of having to buy eggs,” Ridell says. “When you deal with that much poop you shouldn’t have to buy eggs.” As much as she detests the cruelties of factory farming, she says, she’s come to understand why larger chicken farms “are more efficient and practical.”
But Ridell doesn’t regret having chickens among her family’s accumulation of pets. “There’s a lot about
it that’s really wonderful,” she says.
“It’s the most peaceful thing to look out of the window on a summer
evening and see chickens grazing on your lawn.”
