City chicks: What's happened since the backyard birds became legal?
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Chicken Ordinance Comes Home to Roost
Insurance executive Charlie Digges Sr. and his wife, Kathy, had a surprise waiting for them last weekend when they migrated back to their home in the genteel Grasslands neighborhood after spending the winter in Florida.
Charlie didn’t want to be quoted about the chicken coop nearing completion, but leaders of the real estate community who fought the ordinance and predicted it would lead to property devaluation might be surprised by Kathy’s reaction after getting a tour from the Koenigs.
“I think the structure is darling,” she said. “It looks like a child’s playhouse. I don’t see this as a detriment to the neighborhood, and if everybody does it like this, although I don’t know that they will, this will be OK.”
That’s the reaction the Koenigs were hoping for when they set out to be pioneers of Columbia’s urban chicken initiative after living in the Grasslands for 10 years.
“We wanted to make a good impression,” said Ann Koenig, an urban forester who works for the Missouri Department of Conservation and is a champion tree climber.
The Koenigs designed the 4-foot-by-6-foot coop themselves after reading library books and Internet sites such as backyardbirds.com.
Ann Koenig grew up on a farm in Gasconade County, and her husband’s family has been operating a farm in adjacent Maries County for more than 100 years.
Her father came for a 10-day visit to help with the construction the fenced pen was buried six inches deep to keep the raccoons out. The door has a large viewing window “so we can see in from the deck” and the nesting box has a lid accessible from the outside so their children can easily collect eggs.
“I’ve been wanting chickens for years,” she said. Their sons, ages 5 and 8, “like collecting eggs when they go to the farm,” and it will be good for them to have egg collecting as another chore at their city house. “We’ll invite the neighbor kids who don’t have the opportunity to visit a farm.”
Fred, the statewide editor of United Methodist Church publications, said the clucking and chirping from the three or four hens they plan to purchase in the coming weeks at about $6 apiece “won’t sound much different than the (wild) birds in the neighborhood.” The noise will often be drowned out by kids playing in the yard, which includes a sand box with a wooden fort, rope swings and a zip line connecting a tree house to a nearby tree that Ann uses for climbing practice.
While the Koenigs were talking, their dog, a Scottish terrier named Amos, bolted to the edge of the yard to confront two dogs being walked down the street on leashes. Fred Koenig scooped him up to quell the barking.
Although barking dogs are louder than clucking chickens, “People are more used to dogs,” Ann Koenig said.
Koenig said she was surprised by the debate over the urban chicken ordinance and the continued references to the City Council’s decision during the recent local campaigns, when incumbent candidates were criticized for spending valuable time on the issue.
“It’s more of a hot-button issue than I expected it to be,” she said.
Highlights of the chicken ordinance
The ordinance decriminalizing backyard chickens was passed on Feb. 1 following efforts started in 2009 to repeal or replace a 1964 city ordinance, which required a half acre for every chicken. (Hindman, Sturtz, Hoppe and Skala voted in favor; Thornhill, Nauser and Wade voted against.)
- Chickens must be kept in an enclosure or fenced areas at all times.
- Only six female chickens are allowed per tract of land (no roosters allowed).
- Chickens must be protected from predators at night.
- Chicken dwellings must be 10 feet from the property line and 25 feet from adjacent residential housing, schools, churches or places of business.
- Commercial chicken operations are prohibited.
- Chicken odors must not be “perceptible” at the property boundary.
- Chicken waste is the responsibility of the owner; no more than three cubic feet of chicken manure can accumulate.
- Dogs or cats that kill chickens will not be considered dangerous or aggressive animals for this offense alone.
- Lack of care, illness issues and abuse complaints will be handled through animal control and protection ordinances.
Urban chickens popular? Not initially
Despite fears of wayward chickens, crowing roosters and foul odors destroying real estate values, the chicken industry in Columbia hasn’t exactly, well, taken flight.
Mary Stilwell, one of the forces behind changing the ordinance to allow backyard chickens, estimates there are currently only 50 or so chickens within the city limits. Stilwell, who teaches the hen classes sponsored by the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, doesn’t foresee a huge increase in the number of chickens and predicts the chicken population to increase to 100 by the end of the year.
Her first class since the ordinance passed drew about 50 students, and the second on March 13 attracted only a handful of potential chicken farmers.
Even in Portland, Ore., a metropolitan area of 2 million people where chickens have been legal for years, only 500 or so families are raising chickens, Stillwell said. (In Missouri, cities that allow chicken coops include St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, Branson and Joplin.)
But not one aspiring urban chicken “rancher” attended Orscheln’s first ever “Chick Clinic” on March 6. The Saturday morning class, overseen by Jones, provided tips for people raising chickens.
In fact, the class and Orscheln’s new chicken e-mail club, which will provide customers with quarterly newsletters, were not in reaction to Columbia’s new chicken ordinance, said Becky Honey, Orscheln spokeswoman. With stores throughout nine Midwest states, Orscheln has been selling chicks for years and has recently started offering the chick classes, along with bird-feeding events and pet clinics. It’s simply a marketing effort to better serve customers, she said.
The one change in sales policy at both Orscheln’s and at Bourn Feed & Supply is due to the change in the law, which now allows Columbia vendors to sell one chick at a time. Prior to the passage of the new chicken ordinance, the law in Columbia required vendors to sell a minimum of 12 chickens.
My hen Harriet
When I was a kid living in another city, we had a pet chicken named Harriet and a rooster named Harry. They lived in the garage and ate out of an old dog food bowl.
Our dogs, a black mutt of an indistinct lineage and a collie mix, never bothered the birds, though the collie would herd them back into our yard when they wandered over to the neighbor’s. The neighbors never complained. (But then again, we never complained when they mowed their lawn at 6 a.m. on Sundays and sang opera in Italian.)
Harriet laid one brown egg a day for several years, despite the obvious lack of scientific care and feeding.
Harry’s life span was shorter but only because he drew my mother’s wrath. Not because of his crowing (not just at daybreak, by the way) but because one day he chased my 6-year-old baby brother all the way from the front yard to the backyard and threatened to peck the heck out of him.
My mom, who grew up on a farm, caught up with Harry, took him out of sight behind the garage and wrung the old boy’s neck.
Then she cleaned and plucked him and put him in the freezer with the frozen chickens purchased from the local grocery. That way, when we bit into our former pet, no one was the wiser.
Raising backyard birds “kind of fun”
“I thought it would be kind of fun,” he said, adding that he liked the idea of having fresh eggs every day.
Nappe said Stilwell’s class answered a lot of his questions and also gave him a heads up on potential problems and local resources for supplies.
So how difficult is it to raise a chicken in your backyard?
It’s easier than raising a big dog, answered Daniel Soetaert, one of the founders of the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, a nonprofit dedicated to helping city folk practice organic gardening. He and his housemates live at the site of the organization’s demonstration gardens on St. Joseph Street in north central Columbia and are raising chickens.
Stillwell raised her chicks inside her home. Once the chickens got old enough to be moved outside, she found it was easy to get someone to care for them when she needed to be away from home for a day or two. They get to keep the eggs, Stilwell said.
Yet everyone agrees that, at first, chicks will need extra care, such as warmth in their first few weeks, which can be provided by a heat lamp.
For those who want to avoid the chick rearing, Dave Todd of Todd Farm is offering hens for sale at the Columbia Farmers Market.
Outlaw chickens
In the first two months since the chicken ordinance passed, there were only two substantiated complaints about violations, according to the Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services.
Gerry Worley, an environmental health manager who is in charge of animal control for the city, said one involved the Hong Kong Market. The business had ducks — which are illegal — mixed in with chickens, but the fowl were all gone when it came time for the two-week follow-up inspection.
Two complaints in two months isn’t too bad, said Worley, who is also working on a plan to address what to do with “unwanted” chickens.
But what if someone mistreats his or her chickens, abuses them, fails to feed or water them or does what one man said he’d do when he tired of his chickens — turn them loose for the neighborhood dogs to dispatch? Worley said such issues would be addressed under the city’s animal abuse statues, which state the animals must be adequately cared for. If not, the city can impound them and, if circumstances warrant, dispose of the animal.
Columbia Tour de Coops?
In Portland every year, an organization dedicated to helping people develop home-scale organic gardening called Growing Gardens sponsors a fundraiser called Tour de Coops. People can walk, bike or drive by 25 homes that have chicken coops and see for themselves what their own backyard could look like with chickens. The organizations sells booklets for the self-guided tour and last year made roughly $16,000 from the event, which drew about 1,000 people.
Columbia might not rival Portland in its chicken population yet, but interest and sales in chickens are up roughly 20 percent, said Haley of Bourn Feed, a trend that started a few years ago. She attributes this surge to people’s increasing interest in knowing where their food comes from and growing it themselves, including eggs and poultry.
It’s like the upturn in the past few years in the sales of seeds and gardening supplies, which, said Haley, “is a good thing.”
Of course, until this spring, the sales of chicks and chicken-related items were to people raising chickens outside the city limits, Haley said. Last year, she estimated they sold roughly 7,000 birds. This year, she’s busy fielding calls from people who are considering raising chickens in their backyards — and she’s even considering it herself.
“Chickens are hardy birds and make great pets,” Haley said. “They make a nice family-type project, and they’re easy to raise.” She grew up on a farm with chickens and said that once chickens are tame, they’ll follow you like a dog.
“The bonus,” Haley said, “is you get the eggs.”
One thing Haley has noticed, if not a huge increase in buyers, is how people are educating themselves before making a poultry purchase.
“People are actually studying this, which is really good,” Haley said.
Planning for coop poop and predators
Stillwell said chickens will keep their litter turned (she recommends pine shavings or fallen leaves), but owners eventually will have to deal with what she calls “the manure responsibility.” This means composting it, bagging it up for trash collection or using it as garden fertilizer. The ordinance forbids keeping more than 3 cubic feet of chicken manure on hand and states the odor of chickens shall not be perceptible at the property limit.
There are also coops called “chicken tractors,” which have wheels so you can move it around your yard and keep the buildup of waste at a minimum in any one spot, which allows you to fertilizer your yard one spot at a time.
The biggest problem backyard chicken farmers face, according to Stilwell and others, is predators, which is why chickens need to be protected at night. Stray dogs, said Stilwell, are the greatest threat, but raccoons also prey on the egg-producers, as do hawks and, conceivably, coyotes.
Are chicken coops cost-effective?
Although the argument was made during the City Council debate that low-income residents could save money by raising egg-laying hens, the project is hardly profitable when the coops can cost more than $1,000.
Chicks cost between $1.29 and $2.69 each at Orscheln and $1 to $3 at Bourn; the cost depends on whether the chick was sexed, which means categorized by male or female with some certainty. The more expensive, the more certain it is that you are buying a female chick.
There are even chickens that are color coded by sex, which means if it is the correct color, you know you have a hen.
At Bourn, Haley said if a hen turns out to be a rooster, customers can return it to her, and it will end up at the store owner’s farm.
Soetaert said he and his colleagues avoided the rooster issue by buying their hens from a local farmer, which means he also didn’t have to wait the four to six months before his hens began to lay eggs.
Other necessities include feed, feeders, watering devices and, if you start with chicks, smaller feeders and watering devices, a heat lamp and special chick feed. The total could easily top $250 if you buy a rabbit hutch or more than $1,000 if you buy a basic backyard coop. Stilwell, however, noted that some costs can be reduced by building your own coop, perhaps even using lumber from former home renovations as she did.
Chickens can lay roughly 300 eggs a year for several years, so the costs can be amortized over time.
Do vets treat sick chickens?
Jones, who held Orscheln’s chicken clinic, said someone buying 25 chicks can expect two or three of the birds to die for reasons no one will ever know. “You’re going to lose some,” he said.
But Jones and others said if the chicks survive the first few weeks, the birds are pretty hardy, especially if their living quarters are kept clean.
But if chickens do get sick, who do you call?
Veterinarian Greg Chapman of Noah’s Ark in Columbia said they started treating ailing chickens from outside the city limits long before the ordinance passed.
“We have quite a few clients with one or two chickens, exotic breeds and so forth,” Chapman said. Some are pets, and others are the result of 4-H projects. Chickens “are kind of fun. … I have people who love their chickens.”
End of life issues
Hens can produce eggs for more than 10 years, according to backyardchickens.com. What can urbanites do when they want to get rid of their chickens and are squeamish about neck-wringing, gutting and plucking?
One option is to take them to Herb Backes, who slaughters them at his state-inspected facility in Loose Creek.
But people tired of their chickens needn’t bother calling the Central Missouri Humane Society. The front page of the Humane Society Web site states clearly they will not take any unwanted chickens. Nor is it recommended that you take the advice of one man who attended Orscheln’s chick class. He planned to just let his chickens loose when he didn’t want them anymore and let the neighborhood dogs solve his problem. He, of course, wouldn’t give his name.
The Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture plans to provide either a safe sanctuary for any unwanted chickens, a chicken placing service or turn them into dinner. The center is looking into the possibility of developing a workshop on processing chickens for eating.
As Stilwell put it, harvesting a chicken — or any animal — isn’t pleasant, but it is part of the process if someone eats meat. “I eat meat; I eat eggs, cows and chickens,” she said, and slaughtering them is part of the responsibility of eating meat.
As for Nappe, he said as a former worker at a restaurant, he knows nine different ways to use eggs, so he’s not worried about being overwhelmed with the product of his six chickens. When it comes to the end of their egg-producing lives, he’s set for that, too. His grandparents farmed, so he’s familiar with the fate of animals, from cows to pigs to chickens. And he’s taken precautions about that, too.
“We haven’t named them yet,” Nappe said, “in case there is harvesting in the future.”