Our North Berkeley neighborhood is a haven for chicken fanciers. I’ve counted at least six coops within a three-block radius of our house! And we’re fortunate enough to live right next to one of them. Our lovely back neighbors, Fran and Chip, have three young hens in their backyard. In addition to entertaining Will, who now says “buck, buck” and heads for the back door whenever we say “chicken”, we also receive delicious eggs with brilliant orange yolks from the girls next door.After seeing how much Will enjoys watching the girls scratch, peck and flap their wings, I started thinking about maybe getting some chickens of our own. But how to begin? Fran was kind enough to answer some questions about her experience raising the birds. I’ve included our little “poultry talk” below in case you’re thinking about starting your own little backyard flock.

Q: How long have you been raising chickens?

A: We got our first chicken about 20 years ago. The daughter of our neighbors across the street had received a chick for Easter. Once the chick became a chicken, they realized that this was not what they’d signed up for, so we took it. We’ve had at least one chicken and, sometimes as many as four, though I prefer to have just two or three at a time, ever since.

Q: What kind of birds are these?

A: These three are Rhode Island Reds, they’re known for being reliable layers. We got them in early January and they just started laying their first eggs a month or so ago. I’ve also had success with Araucanas (they lay beautifully colored eggs) and have had a lot of different breeds, including the fancy ones with the fluffy feet.

Q: How many eggs do they lay?

A: They lay roughly one egg a day — I usually collect 2-3 each evening – about 18 eggs a week.

Q: Where did you get them from?

A: I got these from Lucky Dog pet shop on San Pablo Avenue. I used to get them from Mike’s Feed & Pets in Hayward until Lucky Dog changed hands and the new owner started selling chickens about 5 or 6 years ago.

Q: What do you feed them? Is there special feed that makes for better eggs?

A: Yes, there is. They eat a mix of things:  I give them two commercial products – chicken scratch which is a mix of whole grains, and laying mash which is a more protein-rich feed that helps them produce good eggs. I also give them lots of vegetable scraps from our house and our neighbors’ and I will also stop by Monterey Market when they’re getting rid of greens that are too wilted to sell. The chickens love whole grains, especially, although they’re not interested in bread.

But their favorite things to eat are worms. I spoil them sometimes by digging in the compost bins to turn up the worms for them. They get right in there — they’re so enthusiastic that they are literally under the shovel so I have to be very careful. They come running when they see me pick up the shovel — they’ve developed a Pavlovian response to the shovel; to them, it means worms.

Q: Do they also need a source of calcium?

A: Yes, I give them ground oyster shells and we also crush up the shells of any eggs we eat for them – that is the best source for them – their own eggs! Funny, isn’t it? The commercial feed usually contains oyster shells or other sources of calcium for them.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your coop design?

A: Oh sure, there is a square footage requirement – a coop should be at least 4 square feet for each chicken to make sure they won’t be stressed by being too on top of each other. The funny thing about this batch is that they all huddle together in one small box every night – three of them trying to fit in there is pretty tight but that is what they like. And then they use the other small box to lay in – they take turns. They never poop in the same place as they lay – very smart!  But none of them use the big box at all. The other important factor for a coop is to make sure it is secure. We’ve had chickens just decimated by possums. Now the floor of our coop is made of brick lined underneath with wire since possums and raccoons can and do burrow under the ground to get in – they’re very determined. And you must remember to lock the door once they’re all in at night, of course.

We also have a light in the coop that we use during the winter months to extend the daylight hours for them a bit since they lay fewer eggs when there is less daylight.

Q: It looks like you use shredded paper to line the boxes?

A: Yes, though I will also use hay when I have access to it. The only downside to hay is that they tend to eat it so you need to replace it more often – they don’t eat the paper.

Q: How often do you have to clean out the coop?

A: I clean it out about once a month. I could do it more often, of course. I put their droppings right into the compost – it makes great fertilizer.

Q: How much time do they spend out of the coop?

A: They are out twice a day for a while, which gives them time to scratch and peck and find bugs and eat greens and other yummy things from the compost bins. I let them out for about an hour in the morning before I leave for work, and then again when I get home.

Q: What sort of hours do they keep?

A: They are right in sync with daylight, they wake when it’s light and they go to sleep when it gets dark.

Q: After they’ve laid an egg, do they sit on it or do they get up and go about their business?

A: These hens don’t sit, I don’t think. When I come to collect the eggs in the early evening, they’re never sitting on them and the eggs are also cold by that time which makes me think they’re not sitting on them.

Q: What are their relationships like with each other?

A: They’ve got a clear social hierarchy. Although I’ve tried, I’ve found that it’s basically impossible to introduce new birds to a flock because their pecking order has already been established. The new birds just get pecked mercilessly. But this batch is fairly harmonious – they don’t have a scapegoat. They follow the leader, who is the smartest one of the three.  She’s also the most assertive. One of them is clearly dumb – she’s named Moe, the other two are named Meeny and Miny. I had two birds before these who were named Pooh and Lay (“Poulet”) because that is all they do.

Q: How long will they lay for?

A: Once they’re mature they’ll lay all year round, though they lay less in the winter – it’s all tied to the number of daylight hours. They need roughly 8 or more hours of daylight to lay – that is why we have the light in their coop. They will lay eggs for 2-3 years.

Q: What do you do with them once their laying days are over?

A: I’m not interested in killing them so I give them away either to people who will keep them as pets or who want to use them for the soup pot. Every once in a while if I have a particularly ornery bunch, I’ll take them up to Tilden park and release them – I figure they’ll either survive or make a great meal for a coyote.

I used to feel guilty about this but I have gotten over it. I figure they have a very nice life while they’re with me – they’re happy and well-fed and cared for, which is more than you can say of what they’d experience in a commercial environment or in the wild. And then they either become pets or come to a quick end.

Q: Do you have any advice for people interested in starting their own flock of chickens?

A: I’d caution people to be aware that chickens are destructive to yards – they’re designed to scratch and turn up earth and eat greens so you have to fence them out of anything you want to keep safe – your garden, your lawn, etc.

And it’s something you should only do if you really want chickens, of course! But I love it. I find them interesting and entertaining to watch. They’re also a great conversation starter. I get wonderful fertilizer for my garden. And, of course, delicious fresh eggs all year round. Store-bought eggs really don’t taste that good, in comparison. You should do a blind taste-test – it’s impressive.

Originally published on The Garden of Eating

On a recent Sunday afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, over a hundred people gathered at the 6000-square foot Eagle Street Rooftop Farm to talk about the farm’s newest addition: six laying hens.

The farmer, Annie Novak, put together a panel that included Bronx urban gardener Karen Washington, Owen Taylor from the non-profit organization Just Food, and a thirteen year-old chicken enthusiast from Massachusetts named Orren Fox.

“I pretty much planned the event so that Orren would come down and see the farm,” Novak said. This comes as no surprise since she runs an organization called Growing Chefs, which educates youth about food on the farm and in the kitchen.

Fox has twenty-seven hens and four ducks in Newburyport, 35 miles north of Boston. Last year, he started O’s Eggs, a small farm business selling eggs for $5 a dozen.

That Sunday, he held one of Novak’s hens, which he used to discuss chicken anatomy. He pointed out the crop, where food goes to be digested with the aid of swallowed rocks, the comb (he suggested using Vaseline in winter to keep it from freezing) and tail, where the hen produces wax that she uses to clean her feathers. “If your hen looks like she doesn’t have a head, she is probably just cleaning herself,” he said to laughter.

His love of chickens started early. At age nine he was a volunteer cleaning chicken coops at a local farm, learning all he could about the birds. Then he adopted his own flock. After choosing chickens as the subject of a school research project, “I found out how horribly most hens in this country are raised,” he said. “I know chickens are smart, they have personalities, and opinions. I am not ok with what I consider mistreatment of these cool birds for cheap meat and eggs.”

Fox is one of a growing number of young people taking on big projects with the aim of changing the food system. Author Michael Pollan last year released a young reader’s edition of his bestselling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, to reach this growing audience.

“Food is a uniquely empowering issue, it’s something you can change without waiting for government to act, since you’ve got those three votes every day, and this particularly appeals to young people,” Pollan said. “I also wanted to reach them before they went out on their own and took control of their food choices.”

No longer satisfied with blindly eating chicken nuggets, middle-schoolers are raising backyard chickens instead. Or making movies.

New York City thirteen-year-olds Sadie Hope-Gund and Safiyah Riddle made the movie “What’s On Your Plate?” with filmmaker (and Sadie’s mom) Catherine Gund to explore how food gets from farm to plate. What inspired this jaunt through the farm fields of upstate New York, New York City school cafeterias and the Borough President’s office in Manhattan? A tomato.

Tasting that fresh tomato from a farmer’s market, said Hope-Gund, “made me realize that there was better stuff out there than what most people were getting, which didn’t make sense. If there was something better, everyone should get it.”

“We’re in the awkward position because we don’t have as much power as adults but we’re eating just as much as adults,” said Riddle. “I think we need to be more aware of where we stand in the food chain.”

The movie had a professional crew, but was largely directed by Ms. Hope-Gund and Ms. Riddle’s questions, for which they sought out experts to answer on film. In one scene, the girls are speaking to Jorge Collazo, executive chef of school food in New York City. Ms. Riddle starts by asking, “What was school food like when you were growing up?” a question that could only come from a young person, softening a hard conversation about changing school food.

The film also features the Angel’s, a Latino family renting land in Goshen, NY and selling their pesticide-free produce at the Greenmarket in Manhattan. After the film came out last February, Hope-Gund and Riddle helped the Angel family start a Community Supported Agriculture program, in which twenty-eight families paid in advance for a weekly box of produce from the farm. This year, the Angel’s will have three CSAs across the city, and have saved enough money for the down payment on ten acres of land. Their oldest daughter, Lizbeth, is now planning to study agriculture at college.

The internet has empowered this generation of young people with a platform and endless data: they maintain blogs, tweet, and consult Google for information on things like starting non-profits. Thirteen-year-old Koa Halpern, from Denver, Colorado, decided to start Fast Food Free, a non-profit with the goal of reducing the consumption of fast food, after researching the environmental and health impacts of the McDonald’s food chain.

“In twenty or so years kids will be in charge,” he said. “If we choose healthy habits at a young age, we are much more likely to choose healthy habits when we are older.  It all starts with kids getting the right message.”

That message might be coming from miles away, conducted over Twitter, which has become a new form of mentorship. In fact, it was through Twitter that I met Orren Fox, and that Fox came to know a circle of farmers, beekeepers and chicken owners in Brooklyn, and to be a panelist at the farm.

Like most of the other young people I spoke with, for Fox, taste was the bottom line. This past year, he started a Farm Club, which was the most popular extra-curricular activity at his school. “We all plant seeds, grow veggies and I take my birds to school so that kids understand what they are eating,” he said. “I always tell kids that good food just tastes better, forget that it is better for you.”

But one thing the egg industry likely won’t trot out in its PR effort is its sordid animal welfare record.

Arguably the most abused animals in all of U.S. agribusiness, nearly 280 million egg-laying hens live in barren, wire battery cages so restrictive they can’t even spread their wings. Each bird has less space than a sheet of letter-sized paper on which to live for eighteen months before she’s slaughtered. The birds can’t nest, dust bathe, perch, or walk—they endure lives wrought with suffering.

Dr. Bernard Rollin of the Department of Animal Science at Colorado State University states that “virtually all aspects of hen behavior are thwarted by battery cages….The most obvious problem is lack of exercise and natural movement….Research has confirmed what common sense already knew—animals built to move must move.”

But common sense doesn’t always prevail in the world of animal agribusiness, and it’s generally the animals who pay the price. Not only are these birds often abused in ways that would result in criminal prosecution if they were dogs or cats rather than hens, they have almost no legal protection from cruelty. No federal laws regulate the treatment of hens on egg factory farms. And most states’ cruelty codes exempt common agricultural practices, no matter how abusive.

There’s some movement in the right direction, however. In November, Californians made their state—number one in the country for agriculture—the first in the nation to ban battery cages. Demand for animal welfare improvements is now causing some egg producers to literally rip out their cages and convert to cage-free systems. In fact, one national egg producer, Radlo Foods, recently announced it’s getting rid of all its battery cages and becoming completely cage-free.

The trend is increasingly clear: The confinement of hens in battery cages is simply out of step with the moral sentiments of the American public, and the demand for change will only continue to grow. Food retailers—such as McDonald’s—would be wise to take notice and start improving animal welfare in their supply chains.

In honor of “National Egg Month,” egg producers should accelerate this trend and retire their battery cages to make way for cage-free hens. These birds’ lives will be much better than those who would have suffered from permanent immobilization in their barren cages.

It’s hard to imagine a better way for the egg industry to celebrate this month it’s dedicated to itself.

Rain is pounding San Francisco when I visit Kate’s house. We connected online, through a neighborhood group, and I’m stopping by to check out her hens because perhaps foolishly I’m considering getting some of my own. I’ve been puzzling over whether urban hens are pets or part of a living pantry. I have no idea what to expect. But visiting real birds seems like a good enough start.

As a beginning, it’s not that auspicious. When we step into the backyard the clouds open up even further and we’re pelted with hail. Four hens, bobbing about the garden in a loose group, seem unfazed.

The entire lush and green backyard is on an upslope and looks out across the Castro district and a San Francisco panorama to Bernal Heights, a semi-suburban neighborhood in the city’s geographic center. As I stand in the yard, two hawks circle overhead. The lawn and the neat, framed garden beds are smattered with chicken poop.

Kate has four birds. Two planned, two unplanned. The first pair came to her last year, from a science program at the school her young kids attend. Families from the school often adopt a couple of birds once summer rolls around, she says. The second pair were adopted later. A family who’d also taken in a couple of chicks asked Kate to babysit their birds for a week. She agreed. But soon after, they called, hoping she would keep them — their deck, they realized, didn’t offer much space for growing chicks.

The hens now roost and lay eggs in a spacious, two-room coop Kate’s husband designed and built and have a free run in the garden during the day. Given that each hen typically lays at least an egg a day and that they’re not particularly expensive to feed and house, I’m not sure I’d have given up on young chicks so quickly. Of course, at this point I’m also no more than talk.

Later, when the rain has subsided, I wander back outside with a couple of slices of American cheese for the hens. I’m trying to take this seriously, because it’s my first unchaperoned encounter with hens, and so I suppress the urge to eat cheese and trudge through the light rain to the coop. The hens crowd me, wheezing and clucking and snapping up the torn-up slices, and then wander off when it’s clear I’m no longer useful.

Yet they’re more sociable than I’d expected. And expressive, too, as they flick their heads from side to side and wobble around the yard in search of food.

Kate agrees. If she’s working outside the hens come and sit near her. Hang out. Cluck. “They’re creatures of habit,” she says. “The easiest pets I’ve had.”

Uh-oh. Pets? She’s hit upon the very question that’s been nagging me.

***

Across the city, in Bernal Heights, Maureen’s three hens scratch in a low wire and molded plastic coop filled with paper scraps, carrot tops and a fair scattering of poop.

Sustaining the chickens and garden is full-time work, and Maureen’s full-time job. But this is no pastoral whimsy. Her urban garden also cuts her family’s food costs. In fact, she’s a little embarrassed at having paid for the coop, an ocean-blue Eglu, because virtually everything else in her yard is salvaged, reused, or donated. The birds muck about in torn-up phone books, gleaned from nearby streets. They eat kitchen scraps. And they aren’t coddled.

“They’re not pets,” Maureen says. She doesn’t name her hens, doesn’t let her son name them, and is adamant that the three birds will be processed.

Processed? For a second I’m thrown by the term and think of Foster Farms, Pilgrim’s Pride, Oscar Meyer… Like “harvest,” it’s one of those apt but elusive terms commonly used by people who spend a lot of time cheek-to-jowl with the food they eat. It’s a clever term, too — it masks the fact the hens will be slaughtered while also serving as a reminder that some hens aren’t pets, but rather animals walking a slow road toward the dinner table.

Maureen is calmly matter-of-fact about her birds. She’s clearly deeply committed to transforming her yard in to a self-sustaining garden, to transforming her young son’s understanding of the life cycle of food, upending her family’s entire pattern of consumption. Her small garden was little more than a concrete slab until she went at it with a cement buster a year-and-a-half ago. Now, blueberry stalks grow in wine barrels. Peas climb a small trellis in a corner of the yard. Broccoli, kale, carrots, garlic and leeks are patches of green amid old planks, torn-up newspaper and rabbit droppings, a garden-ready fertilizer.

Gutting the chickens isn’t easy, she says. It’s dark inside the bird and you’re in there with your hand feeling your way around, trying not to bust the gall bladder because the spilled bile spoils the flavor of the meat. You have to tug the organs to get them out.

Once I found a whole line of eggs inside a hen, she adds. “It was like one of those Russian dolls.”

Oh babushka! Could I do this — gut, drain and pluck a dead chicken? Would I have to? Can’t I just hang onto the birds until they’re doddering around and die of their own accord?

Maureen’s comments are a wake-up call. She is utterly practical and I’m realizing I’m not. I’d figured I could probably take a deep breath and kill a bird — if I had to. But in my fear of harvesting a hen I hadn’t thought beyond the chopping block. I remind myself that I don’t particularly like chicken meat. Part of me, I realize, is bothered by the thought of the work that goes into raising — and eventually processing — hens. But another part of me is bothered at being bothered about the responsibility of it all. I’d clearly been thinking of chickens as egg dispensers, not pets. Harvesting them was the elephant in the room.

Later that afternoon, I step outside alone to take another look at the Eglu. The hens scatter nervously as I approach. Maybe I’m imagining it, but these birds don’t seem like pets.

As I leave, I backtrack to a poster hanging on Maureen’s kitchen wall, an original and a gift from her husband. “Plant a Victory Garden. Our Food is Fighting. A Garden Will Make Your Rations Go Further,” it declares.

***

Over at Bernal Beast, a nearby pet supply store, I talk about the full monty hen kill scenario with Abe, a store coworker. “I think it’d be kind of tedious,” he remarks, of having to pluck and prepare a bird. He has a point. The chicken is likely to be tough. A soup bird. No more than a meal or two.

Tony, the store’s owner, is more circumspect. He doesn’t own chickens himself but calls his customers “forethinkers.” “They can see that not only nutritionally but economically it’s the way to go,” he says. “It also goes along with having a garden.”

He thinks he’s onto something too. Demand for hen supplies has been rising over the past one-and-half to two years, if his sales are anything to go by. He now stocks 50-pound bags of scratch and crumble chicken feed. Customers come in from all over San Francisco, he says.

He seems wistful when he remembers the hens his extended family raised when he was growing up. “They just have the whole world to themselves. They’re just hysterical.”

***

I’m getting the sense this sentiment is pretty widespread. Dana, a friend of a friend, raises hens on a small urban lot in Gardnerville, near Lake Tahoe.

Her two 11-month-old Rhode Island Reds and her dog hang out — supervised — in the backyard together.

“I let them in the yard as they enjoy eating grass and bugs and if they can’t get back into their coop, they come up onto my deck and come to the window and holler at me,” she writes in an email.

But processing them? She doesn’t see herself killing unproductive hens. She’s considering retiring older birds to a friend’s 2-acre property on the other side of town.

***

So am I back to square one? Can I get out of harvesting my hens? Or am I just lazy and reluctant to face up to what farming is really about? I call up the first person I’d spoken to about chickens.

“I can’t imagine killing them,” Jeannine says. Her young daughters helped raise the soft, fluffy pullets in their home this winter and while the hens, now outside, don’t have names, the family knows each one by the quirks of its personality.

Raising birds, she says, is a fantasy of living in a rustic setting that can’t ever be played out. But it’s practical too, she adds. After all there are the eggs. And raising hens has inspired her to think about making other things, like a victory garden.

We are old friends and it’s her three hens, a Wyandotte, a black sex-link and a Buff Orpington, that have inspired me to try raising my own. One afternoon we sit on an old, salvaged cast-iron bench at the top of her yard watching the chickens go about their business. We’re inside an enclosure that crosses into her next-door neighbor’s yard, and which is shared between six hens in all.

Eric, Jeannine’s husband, tells a story about his grandfather, who as a young man immigrated to the California from Germany by way of a sponsorship that attested he could farm chickens. He had no idea how to raise hens, Eric says. He was busy reading chicken farming books on the ship. The older generation, he adds, are not caught up in the new urban romance of chicken-rearing.

It occurs to me that raising hens is a different way of being “practical” about food. If picking up a dozen from the supermarket saves time and money, how practical is it to build a coop from scratch, to commit to cleaning birdshit from a coop, to be OK with slowing egg consumption as the hens get older or the weather colder? I’d probably be happy to build a coop, to clean it, to wait for eggs. But chickens as pets? Is that practical? If I get attached to the hens, harvesting them at a year old seems unlikely. So when egg production tapers off within a year or two, then what? I’d hate to see my new hens as broken egg machines. I realize I’m still pretty entrenched in the rigid efficiencies of food production. Keeping old hens as pets might not be going the whole urban egg hog, but it seems the most practical path for now, a cautious reality of this generation’s new urban farm.