Urban chickens top green pecking order
Chickens beat dogs in sustainability, make locally produced food
Naomi Montacre's chicken, Lima, checks out a recent egg laid in the chicken coop in her North Portland front yard. When it comes to sustainability, chickens make better pets than dogs and cats, and you can eat their eggs.
Mayhem and Dio are great layers.
PJ, Lima and Mille Fleur are entertaining pets.
So says Naomi Montacre, their master or owner or farmer – or whatever it is people are to backyard chickens raised in the city.
Montacre, who lives on Portland’s North Williams Avenue and keeps her chickens in a homemade front-yard coop, says the birds are pets first and foremost. However, Montacre and her husband Neil originally bought the chickens – then chicks – for the eggs they would lay.
“They’re excellent pets,” Montacre says. “They’re a lot less expensive than cats and dogs, as far as their feed, and they’re easy to take care of. I love my cats, but (the chickens) are more sustainable.”
Kat West, Multnomah County sustainability manager, says Portland has the highest urban chicken population in the country per capita, so it’s a good thing the birds are an environmental bonus and not fowling our city’s landscape.
“I think Portland is the perfect incubator for this sort of thing,” says Glenn Nardelli, who works at Pistils Nursery in North Portland and keeps three chickens behind his house in the nearby Overlook neighborhood. Pistils sells supplies for chicken farmers and holds workshops for people considering raising chickens. The workshops have been steadily growing in popularity.
“People are really sustainability-minded here,” Nardelli says.
But are urban chickens really sustainable?
They definitely are as producers of food, say West and others, because local production is a critical component of sustainability.
“In terms of egg harvesting, it doesn’t get any closer than walking out your back door,” Nardelli says. Not only do home-produced eggs mean Nardelli doesn’t have to expend gasoline on a trip to the supermarket, but the eggs don’t need to be trucked to the supermarket from a factory farm, where they likely would have been raised with hormones, antibiotics and pesticides.
Portland code allows city residents to keep up to three chickens without needing a permit. No roosters – with their morning wake-up calls – are allowed. But hens produce eggs without roosters.
Other area cities, including Forest Grove, ban raising chickens inside city limits.
Nardelli says he can “free-range” his chickens in the back yard, where their excrement helps fertilize his plants. And the chickens peck around for insects, so they double as natural exterminators. In some cultures, Nardelli says, farmers keep their chickens in a mobile pen that they move each day, letting the nitrogen-rich poop settle on different crops. But Nardelli warns that the nitrogen content is so high it needs to be mixed with straw or other materials for use as fertilizer.
Clearly, urban chickens, which lay about one egg per day, provide a sustainable upgrade over store-bought eggs. But most of Pistils’ customers keep their chickens as pets. So it only seems fair to compare their sustainability to other pets. Dogs, for instance.
Dogs, unless you’re counting certain Asian countries, don’t produce (or become) anything you can eat. So score one in the sustainability column for the chickens.
You can’t use dog poop as fertilizer because it contains organisms capable of causing disease in people.
“Definitely a positive for the chickens,” Nardelli says.
That accounts for outflow. As for intake, dogs generally need store-bought dog food. Chickens consume a diet heavy in vegetable scraps. Some local grocery stores give away vegetable scraps to chicken farmers. For protein, the chickens can find backyard bugs on their own.
“They’ll eat just about anything,” Nardelli says.
If there aren’t enough vegetable scraps to go around, organic chicken feed costs about $25 for a 50-pound bag, says Rodney Bender, garden program manager for Growing Gardens, a Northeast Portland nonprofit that helps low-income people grow their own food. That’s about half the price of dry dog food. Either way, it’s another sustainability point for the chickens.
And even with store-bought feed, homegrown eggs are a bargain.
Fifty pounds of feed will sustain three backyard chickens for about three months, Bender says. The math comes out to $8.34 for about six dozen eggs over a month’s time. Store-bought organic eggs cost $3 to $4 per dozen.
Measuring sustainability always involves finding hidden costs. Maybe a trip to the pharmacy for iodine to put on cuts produced by sharp chicken claws? And if you eat enough of those eggs, there may be a monthly bill for cholesterol medication.
Dogs, on the other hand, are so companionable they have been proven to lower blood pressure and depression in their owners and to reduce anxiety episodes in Alzheimer’s patients. Walking the dog is frequently prescribed as a form of exercise for people with too sedentary a lifestyle.
There are no studies indicating a physician has ever counseled a patient to take up walking his chicken.
So if you factor in long-term health care costs, score a point for the dogs.
Then there’s final disposal – a key element when measuring sustainability. Dogs, upon their demise, are buried or incinerated. Backyard chickens present a more appetizing and sustainable alternative.
A chicken’s egg production begins to drop after two or three years, though their lifespan is about seven years, Nardelli says.
However, by the time hens quit laying eggs, Nardelli says, most have become valued pets. And for those who are not, the soup pot isn’t such a viable final resting place.
“When they’re that old, they are not that appetizing,” Nardelli says.
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