Benefits of Chickens

Apr 12

Welcome back to part 2. In the first blog, Chickens – Debunking Myths, we talked about some common complaints to owning chickens and explained how they are mostly untrue. In this blog post we are going to talk about the benefits of owning chickens. I have a caveat though; this post is not to convince you to own chickens. If you are interested in owning chickens please do your research into caring for chickens before you decide to own chickens. This post is to explain the benefits of chickens to a person, a community and even the environment. My goal is to convince you that even if you aren’t interested in owning chickens you are ok with your neighbor or community allowing others to own chickens. I genuinely believe that everyone should have the right to decide if they want to own chickens, this decision should not be decided for you.

Great Pets

First and simplest, chickens make great pets. They are excellent companions and provide great entertainment. Chickens are social animals and have their own personalities. This means they can be very affectionate to humans. This can also lead to amusing quirks within an individual bird or within the flock as a whole. Chickens make such great pets and companions they can be approved as emotional support animals. For example from Indiana University, the Silkie breed can be an excellent breed of chicken for comfort and companionship. The breed tends to be on the calm side, not easily startled, they’re soft and fluffy, can’t fly and they tend to enjoy interacting with humans.

Nutritional Boost

Another benefit of owning chickens is providing a more nutritious food source to your home or community. When chickens are allowed to hunt and peck along with their chicken feed they have a more nutritious diet. When chickens are healthier they lay healthier eggs and for those that are interested in the whole package they provide healthier meat as well. Studies have shown that “pasture-raised eggs, from chickens given space to peck for food, are more nutritious than industry-sourced eggs, with pasture-raised eggs containing two to three times more omega-3 fatty acids and one-third the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs.”

Food Sources

Another benefit of the nutritious food provided by chickens in the community is that it reduces the distance and time that food travels. In a world that needs to reach net zero carbon emissions it is important where we source our food. It is estimated that food travels about 1500 miles before it reaches our table (here in the United States). By providing local eggs you can dramatically reduce the distance that your food travels down to a few feet or to a couple of miles. The other side of this is that it can also dramatically increase the freshness of your food. Did you know that the eggs you purchase from the store can be up to two months old by the time you purchase them? An egg can be sold up to 30 days after they are put in the carton but farmers are given 30 days before they have to put their eggs in a carton.

Food Waste

We’ll just keep going with the amazing benefits of owning chickens in a community to the food chain. In the United States approximately one pound of food is wasted per person per day. In 2017 there was 103 million tons or 81.4 billion pounds of food waste created. That equals about 30-40 percent of the total food supply. This also means that on average each person wastes about 300 pounds of food a year. This is a huge problem that definitely needs to be solved. In the meantime chickens can help solve the problem of some of the waste created. A study showed that on average a backyard chicken can eat approximately 1.6 pounds of food waste a week which equals 83 pounds a year. If you happen to have a flock of 4 chickens they will eat about 330 pounds of food waste or the same amount of waste a person creates each year. A change like this can drastically reduce the amount of waste that goes to the dump, lowering the amount of ethane gas created, minimizing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere and turn it into protein rich eggs. In Austin, TX they decided to try a public program using chickens to reduce waste management costs. They found that a flock of 4 chickens would save $27.04 a year. They offered citizens $75 to purchase a coop. Their return on investment was less than 3 years. Even if the flock ate only 50% of what they expected their payback period would still be at five years. Another city located in Belgium has been able to lower their waste by 30% by employing chickens to deal with their bio-waste. This change has helped to lower the citizen’s taxes and helps prevent unnecessary waste going to the landfill. “From the city manager’s perspective, the chickens’ production of eggs, topsoil, and fertilizer are irrelevant to their uses in the community.”

Topsoil Loss

When you have chickens eating all of that food, you know what they say, what goes in must come out. What are we supposed to do with all that waste? Well, what if I told you that chicken waste is actually a good thing? Each year 36 billion tons of topsoil is lost. It may not seem like it but topsoil is not a renewable resource in the traditional sense. It takes approximately 100 years to develop one inch of topsoil, depending on a lot of variables. Chickens can help with the preservation of topsoil through their waste. Chicken manure adds organic matter, beneficial biota, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to the soil and helps increase the soils ability to retain water. One thing to take into consideration is that chicken manure does need to be aged or composted before using directly with plants. In its “raw” form chicken manure can burn plants and their roots.

Pesticide and Herbicide Use

Over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used every year in the US. Chicken ownership can also help with lowering the amount of pesticides used. Have I mentioned yet that chickens are little eating machines? Chickens, besides eating kitchen scraps, also enjoy hunting and pecking. In doing this they will eat insects and weeds (ok, you do have to be careful because they will eat more than just weeds, make sure to protect the plants you don’t want them to eat). This will help limit the amount of pesticides used. Arguably you shouldn’t really use pesticides or herbicides when you have chickens anyway, but we will focus on a larger scale than just on one specific property. Chickens are not picky, they love to have high protein snacks of insects, and they will eat a lot of the bugs that you don’t want such as: mosquitoes, ticks, Japanese beetles, grasshoppers, flies, crickets, and so on.

Education

We’re falling into another really long blog post. I will try to keep this section short. Chickens are a great education source. My first example, how much have you already learned just reading this blog post and the previous one? Second, chickens are great educational material for children, and adults. You can learn so many different topics by studying chickens. These topics can be: the legal system, changing laws, speech, persuasive writing, math, science, food safety, hygiene, life-skills and so much more.

Update

I already have an update for you. This past Tuesday was a local election date. On the election ballot there was an advisory referendum about chickens. Unfortunately we lost, there were more no votes, 1970, than yes votes, 1682. I am really excited because I still think that it was a pretty close vote and we had a better turn out than I expected. Rumor on the street is that a decent portion of the no votes were because they believed that the city should be focusing on human issues and not chickens. There is also the assumption that people just don’t like change, especially if they don’t understand it. The third problem, a lot of people are not voting in general, but more specifically in local elections. They estimated that approximately 15% of our population voted during this local election year even with the excitement of voting for mayor. I’m frustrated by pretty much all of these excuses but mostly the first one. People don’t seem to understand, that by voting no, even more time and energy will be spent talking about chickens rather than on human issues. The thing about people and government is that they can work on more than one thing at a time. I feel pretty confident that this is just one small set back in getting chickens approved and that eventually the city will approve chicken ownership. Until then we will take a break, regroup and then finally get this approved.

Again it’s time to say goodbye, but I have to know, are you for or against allowing citizens to own chickens on their property? Have I changed your mind one way or the other? What was it that changed your mind? I would genuinely like to know; maybe it will help in the next phase of our battle. ;) With so many benefits to our environment alone, how can someone suggest that it’s not important at this time? Allowing residents to own chickens on their property is not complicated, continuing to fight against this is unnecessary and a waste of resources.

As always, stay positive and much love