Mixed results for backyard hens at various city council meetings

It doesn't look to me like they'd need TWO acres...

Citizens trying to convince their townships and city councils to allow chickens have been handed some defeats and some wins today.  Other citizens are just getting started.

Meanwhile, major metropolitan areas such as New York City and Chicago seem to be having no problem with the issues raised by these councils.

We still have a lot of work to do in educating our elected representatives on the benefits of backyard hens and dispelling the myths about them as well.

Here is some coverage of those efforts and their results.

McHenry says no to backyard chickens
Northwest Herald
During the summer, Crystal Lake wrestled with the issue of allowing people to have backyard chickens and ultimately voted against allowing chickens. Under the proposed McHenry ordinance, people who wanted hens in their backyard would need to keep them …

McHenry votes not to allow backyard chickens
Chicago Tribune
Low says she thinks city lots are “too small for a chicken coop.” The issue came up on request of a resident who wanted to keep four hens in his backyard. The McHenry ordinance would have allowed residents to keep hens in backyard coops at least 10 …

Lower Township tells girl to ditch her 4-H chickens
Press of Atlantic City
Louise Sugar — whose daughter is in the same 4-H club and has agreed to take in Brianna’s chickens — said chickens are allowed in New York City and Chicago. “People all over the country with backyard chickens are fighting local ordinances,” Sugar …

Council scratches chicken farming proposal
Hometownlife.com
Archie Noon is starting a petition drive to change a local Milford ordinance that prohibits raising chickens in the village. He’s shown here posing in his chicken coop in the backyard of his home on Huron Street.

San Leandro To Legalize Backyard Hens And Bees
Patch.com
City Council votes 7-0 to draft an ordinance to change current rules prohibiting backyard coops and hives. But the devil is in the details as San Leandro grapples with what advocates call Urban Farming.

Related articles

• How-To: House Backyard Chickens in Style (casasugar.com)
• Tour de Coop to showcase Cedar Rapids hen houses (thegazette.com)
• Long Grove, IL blazing trail in Lake County for backyard hens (foxlakechickens.wordpress.com)
• Fowl play: Bronx neighbors are staging a coop (nydailynews.com)
• Couple keeps hens in 1-bedroom home (nydailynews.com)
• Backyard chicken supporter running for City Council in Iowa City (thegazette.com)

Long Grove, IL blazing trail in Lake County for backyard hens

The possibility that Long Grove may allow chickens
to be raised in residents’ backyards has prompted a Round Lake area
group to seek the same.

Petitions are being circulated in the Round Lake
area to allow residents to have chickens, according to Ed Fuhrmann of
Round Lake Beach, a prime mover for the change.

via Back yard chickens may come home to roost – Lake County News-Sun.

Related articles

• How-To: House Backyard Chickens in Style (casasugar.com)
• Lake Villa BSA Troop 274 visits Farmer Sam’s setup (foxlakechickens.wordpress.com)
• More chickens roosting, laying eggs in urban centres (ctv.ca)
• Baby Steps to Preparedness, by Holli S. (survivalblog.com)

Why backyard chickens?

Image via Wikipedia

The following is excerpted from a handout at a local backyard chicken information meeting. I’m not the author. If anyone claims authorship, let me know and I’ll attribute appropriately.

WHY?

By now most people have heard something about the growing popularity of Backyard Chickens (BYC). Many consider it to be the latest “fad”. Some think it’s “all about the eggs”. Yet others view it as another appearance of the “back to the land” movement.

In reality, it is all these and more. Eggs are an obvious benefit, something most people can immediately identify; there are many intangibles however…a little tougher for some to appreciate (or even understand).

Chickens have been (and still are) part of cities, towns and villages around the world. Unique to the United States is the idea that “only poor people raise chickens” and that the presence of food-producing animals means there HAS to be poverty in that household. The idea that chickens belong only on a farm or rural environment is fairly recent, and is more of an emotional “taught” reation than one based on fact.

As people came into the cities from the countryside (as well as immigrants to the US), they brought with experience and skills in raising their own food. Small urban gardens were extensive, with chickens and rabbits producing eggs and meat, fed from kitchen scraps and vegetation in the garden, producing valuable soil-enriching manure to help grow vegetables and fruit as part of a cycle which reduced living expenses and increased self-sufficiency (a mindset which used to be the norm).

We became victims of our own success however, with our present difficulties reaching back to choices made by both government and society beginning almost a century ago.  As we progressed through the industrial revolution and recovered from World War I, we became smitten with the idea that science and technology would provide all of our answers, that machines would do our work, and that there was less value in old-fashioned practices such as growing one’s own food. Our national love affair with the car influenced how our new suburbs (and their ordinances) were to be designed, presuming that if you needed food, you would hop in your car and drive to purchase it.

Some of the many reasons for considering Backyard Chickens:

food safety (re: recent findings of “system” produced food w/e-coli and salmonella	chickens DO make good pets for some people
food security(re: dependence on outside “systems” to work correctly, including inspection and transportation)	chickens process biodegradable garbage/waste at home, keeping it out of landfills
treatment of our food animals (growing awareness of inhumane conditions on factory farms)	chickens produce “ready to use” organic garden fertilizer, better for both soil and plants than chemically-produced store-bought products
the growing costs of shipping food as fuel prices increase	chickens LOVE Japanese Beetles! (reason enough!)
growing desires to “grow locally – eat locally“	the use of chickens to eat insect pests allows use of fewer pesticides, which is safer for our bees and less toxic to our environment
eggs from healthier bird are healthier for you	over 99% of the municipalities which decide to allow backyard chickens don’t switch back
the growing costs of food, especially after [recent] years’ multiple weather-induced impacts on food production and distribution	a desire by many people to get some control back into their lives, having seen enough consistent abuses of several of the major systems on which we have come to rely (incl. finance and energy) to no longer fully trust them to be safe/reliable
the poor economy, which results in the loss of a bread-winner’s income but provides the opportunity to grow food at home	very easy to sell (or give away) your chickens and supplies if you have to move (try THAT with a dog or cat)
the growth of “urban agriculture“, bringing back kitchen gardens and home-scale food production	…OK, the fresh eggs are pretty tasty too!
education of our kids, who with each passing year know less and less about where food really comes from

Next: WHY NOT? Myths and Misconceptions

Related articles

• How-To: House Backyard Chickens in Style (casasugar.com)
• Guide to Backyard Chicken Coops and Tractors (hanburyhome.wordpress.com)
• Backyard chicken supporter running for City Council in Iowa City (thegazette.com)
• Susan Orlean on raising backyard chickens : The New Yorker (myfanwe.wordpress.com)

Lake Villa BSA Troop 274 visits Farmer Sam’s setup

Here are some photos of our visit to Farmer Sam‘s hobby farm in Lake Villa. The boys learned about animal husbandry including how to feed, shelter, and protect chickens, the differences between various breeds and types, and the care of pigs and vegetable gardens. It was a lot of fun!

Later, we attended a meeting at the Round Lake Area Park District on Hart Road where Ed Furhrmann and Adrian Plante walked an audience through the process of owning chickens as well as how to approach and lobby their local municipalities to alter the animal control ordinances to be more favorable towards hen raising.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Another benefit of backyard hens is…

…sometimes you get a 2-for-1 deal!

Residents want backyard chicken raising to be legal — Round Lake news, photos and events — TribLocal.com

Round Lake residents want backyard chicken raising to be legal

This is getting much closer to Fox Lake. Hopefully this notion of needing “several acres” to raise a handful of chickens will be thoroughly answered and discredited.

Elkins said chicken raisers also need to be aware of predators — in McHenry County, weasels and raccoons sometimes took his chickens, he said.

He also speculates that you’re not going to save money by raising your own chickens.

It’s not so much about saving money as knowing where your food comes from. Besides, nobody’s going to be thinking much about “saving money” when the value of our money implodes in the coming months and years. This is about the simple practicality of having a nearly year-round source of protein in your back yard when your money is worthless (or at least worth less when you get to the store than when you left the house). This is about the “just in time” grocery store supply chain completely fails after fuel prices go up to $8-10 per gallon in a Middle East crisis that is currently brewing.

Come on, community leaders. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Related articles

• Talk me out of getting chickens. (ask.metafilter.com)
• Herding Cats: Unemployment Rate, Starz Ditches Netflix and…Chickens? (savings.com)
• How-To: House Backyard Chickens in Style (casasugar.com)
• Why all the interest in raising backyard chickens? ()
• Cooped Up: Chickens Come Home to Roost for Urbanites With a Yen for Hen (online.wsj.com)

Urban farming could nest with city chicken ordinance

Sacramento Press / Urban farming could nest with city chicken ordinance

Image via Wikipedia

The ordinance would only allow for hens to be kept in residents’ backyards so long as they are confined in a pen, coop, cage or other type of enclosure at all times

and the enclosures are maintained at a distance of 20 feet from a neighboring house.

Neither roosters nor the slaughtering of the hens are to be a part of the equation.

If passed by the council at next Tuesday’s meeting, the ordinance will allow residents in the city to raise up to three hens in their backyard under a permit that must be renewed annually.

Except for the annual renewal, this sounds like an appropriate compromise, though I’d prefer we could go back to the “old days” when government didn’t have its hand in my wallet for everything I do on my own property. Any renewal should really only be for “bad behavior”, i.e. people who have had a complaint lodged against them. That renewal should only happen in the calendar year in which the complaint was lodged.

Have you seen a model of compromise between local government and citizens on the issue of hen raising? Please share in the comments.

Related articles

• Backyard chicken supporter running for City Council in Iowa City (thegazette.com)
• Cooped Up: Chickens Come Home to Roost for Urbanites With a Yen for Hen (online.wsj.com)
• The Chicken (eclickwise.wordpress.com)
• Urban Chicken Trend Lays Egg Containing New Chicken Trend [Trendwatch] (gawker.com)
• More chickens roosting, laying eggs in urban centres (ctv.ca)
• City Kitchen: Chicken, Simmered and Chilled (nytimes.com)
• The state of urban gardening everywhere (foxlakechickens.wordpress.com)
• In urban centres, more residents keeping chickens at home (ctv.ca)

Chickens and Humans Coexisting! Perish the Thought!

Residents flock to support backyard hens in Brookfield

A former co-worker of mine is working hard to change the village ordinance in Brookfield, IL. Last night was a village council meeting to discuss the topic and the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark covered the story.

Here are the main points in summary:

• Alana Waters-Piper kept chickens in her yard for a year and nobody complained.
• At the end of July, as she was beginning to gather support for an initiative to change the “livestock” ordinance, the wife of a trustee distributed flyers in the neighborhood listing her address and complaining that Waters-Piper had chickens on her property. A day or so later, someone broke into her garage and did something to her chickens that caused their deaths.
• One of her neighbors at the meeting complained of the smell from the chickens, but another neighbor said he had no problems at all with noise or smell.
• One trustee pointed out that not everyone would opt for having chickens in their backyards if it was made legal but that chicken owners would have to operate within certain constraints.
• 22 out of 25 people who addressed the board supported backyard chickens.

In my opinion, though, something is wrong when the wife of a trustee distributes flyers complaining about something…anything…a neighbor is doing, listing that neighbor’s address. She’s lucky that whoever it was that broke into Waters-Piper’s home didn’t do something worse! Here’s the quote from the flyer distributor herself:

“I don’t know how you’ll be able to enforce this…You live in the city. You go to Chicago, it’s a certain lifestyle. You go in the suburbs, it’s a certain lifestyle. If you want to have livestock and whatever that entails, then you go to west DuPage, Kane, Will, Grundy counties. Those are places in my mind that those things exist.

With everything going on in our economy and in the world in general, is it really wise to cling to the Gated Community and Homeowner Association ideals of “lifestyle”? How about we take the long view and realize that very, very soon we are all going to be wishing we had alternative food sources closer to home.

Victory gardens: Remembering what “victory” stood for

When I was a kid, I remember watching a show called “The Victory Garden” on PBS. I didn’t understand what a “victory garden” was until I got older and saw some documentaries on World Wars I and II and how the people of America drew on their greatest resource…the bountiful land around them…to feed themselves with one hand while fighting a global war against freedom with the other.

Victory gardens became the symbol of self-sufficiency in trying times. But now the “victory” that gardeners are fighting for is the ability to use every inch of their land as a renewable resource. This battle is not fought against foreign governments, but against local ones. It’s not waged between entirely different cultures with different languages, but between friends and neighbors…or at least people who ought to be friends.

A former co-worker posted on her Facebook profile tonight that, upon arriving home this evening, she found her three chickens were slaughtered in her own yard.  A few days before, someone in the neighborhood had issued flyers all over the block criticizing her for having backyard chickens.  These chickens not only provided food for her family and for others she shared with, but were also family pets!  What has this world come to?

Will you lend your support to local initiatives to change restrictive ordinances on what plants you can and cannot grow in your own yard?  Start with the Victory Garden Initiative. It’s based in Milwaukee, but is applicable to all who want to not be tied to questionable food sources and contaminated food supply chains.

Related articles

• Dig for victory: how your garden can help beat climate change (ecoamerica.typepad.com)
• Does Your Kitchen Garden Save You Money? (billshrink.com)
• Victory Gardens: Now a Misdemeanor (blogher.com)
• Chickens coming home to roost, find henhouse foreclosed (kansasreflections.wordpress.com)
• Lose a lawn, gain a front-yard bounty (sfgate.com)
• A Call To Farms – Why America Needs A New Victory Garden Movement (buildingsustainablelifestyles.wordpress.com)
• Gardener Thretened With Jail For Gardening – July 15, 2011 – Update (survivalfarm.wordpress.com)
• ‘Food corridor’ brings urban neighbors together – The Olympian (mentalflowers.wordpress.com)
• What were four ways that world war 2 affected american life at home (wiki.answers.com)