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April 24, 2004

Urban farming: Starting from scratch

By Karen McCowan
The Register-Guard

It's a trend most fowl: More and more city dwellers here are keeping backyard chickens.

Eugene neighborhoods don't get much more citified than staid - and spendy - College Hill. Yet Cindy Douglas and Dan Jones have had hens behind their house here for five years. For Douglas, 34, an urban coop is nothing new. She grew up in the thick of suburban Los Angeles. Yet she had chickens as a girl.

"I was in a 4-H poultry group in Fullerton, California," she recalled. "We lived right in the middle of the city, and I had a blast."

Cindy Douglas and her partner, Dan Jones, raise hens, including Buffy I, at their home on Eugene's College Hill to provide a steady supply of fresh eggs. Photo: Chris Pietsch / The Register-Guard

Nor do city chickens run afoul of Eugene's land use code - so long as they're hens and not racket-producing roosters.

The city's farm animal standards allow up to two hens in any residential zone, said Mike McKerrow, land use management supervisor. "And you can have more than that if you have more than a 20,000-square-foot lot and meet certain fencing and setback standards."

Local and national poultry experts say the Pacific Northwest is leading revived national interest in "backyard flocks," mostly as a source of fresh eggs.

"We sell chickens to just about every ZIP code in the United States," said Bud Wood, owner and manager of Murray McMurray Hatchery, a Webster City, Iowa, mail order business that caters to noncommercial poultry owners.

"We even have customers in downtown New York City," Wood said. "Orders are up all over, but especially in your area and up in Seattle. I think there's a couple of things driving it. First is the natural food movement - more and more people want to know where their food is coming from.

"But it's also economical - chickens are fairly easy to raise and very inexpensive. Even our most expensive breed is only $4.28 for a female chick."

Douglas pointed out an even more compelling reason: "Have you ever tasted a really fresh egg? The color, the texture, the taste - it's all 100 percent better."

Mary Koepfle, owner of Farmhand Feed and Home in Cottage Grove, agreed.

"Once you have a fresh egg, you'll never go back to the pale eggs at the grocery store," she said. "If chickens are moving around, getting fresh greens and eating bugs, they're going to lay more flavorful eggs."

Koepfle got a big taste of the strong local interest in keeping chickens two years ago, when Farmhand hosted its first annual "Coop DeVille" tour of unusual area chickenhouses. As part of the event, the family feed store hosted a free class, "Your Backyard Flock."

"It was swamped," Koepfle said. "We probably had 40 or 50 people there, most of them from the Eugene area."

The class will be offered today at 3 p.m. as part of this year's Coop DeVille, and response is again strong. This time, the store has fielded calls from as far away as Salem and southern Washington.

"I would say the majority are people who don't have the luxury of having a farm, but still want to have some connection to their food," she said. "A lot of them tell stories about going to visit their grandmothers as children and getting to throw out the scratch for her chickens. And, especially in this time of poultry and mad cow disease, people want to know where an animal has come from and how it's been treated before they eat the eggs."

For Ira and Judith Shapiro, keeping chickens behind their home in Eugene's South Hills is a natural extension of the organic gardening they've done for years. Their garden scraps make up part of their hens' diet, and the hens' manure, in turn, helps sustain their garden.

"We get between three and six eggs a week from each hen," Ira said. "We eat them for breakfast and use them for baking."

Douglas, the College Hill resident, has also seen evidence of increasing interest in the backyard layers.

Because she'd had such a good experience with her 4-H poultry group as a girl, she trained with the local 4-H organization to become a leader last year.

"For six, eight months, nobody called," said Douglas, an organic food processing certifier for Oregon Tilth.

"But in the last two or three months, I've probably had 10 calls and hope to start a group this summer."

She called chickens "the perfect size" to teach children animal care.

"And they're super easy," she said. "All you need is food and water and a coop."

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