It sounds like a joke: Why did the chicken live in the back yard?
The answer, it turns out, is no good for a laugh, but is good for business, good for gourmets and good for kids who help learn to care for the creatures.
Backyard poultry raising is a growing part of the local food movement ”“ aka “eat the view” ”“ with consumers appreciating the fresh eggs and enjoying the challenges of keeping chickens. Suppliers of birds, feed and equipment are surfing the wave of interest, both on local and national levels.
“Chickens are a big business around here,” said Leigh Williams, manager of Agway stores in Red Hook and New Paltz. “A lot of people are raising chickens.”
Those two stores as well as the Agway in Pine Bush hosted Andy Schneider, “The Chicken Whisperer,” an expert in raising backyard flocks and a Purina-Mills “poultry ambassador” who ended his national speaking tour with three engagements in the Hudson Valley April 9 and 10 providing insight into raising birds successfully and healthily.
While numbers are not available nationally or locally on the numbers of backyard flocks, the website Backyardchickens.com reports that their members list grew from 13,000 to 35,000 between 2008 and 2009.
“There”™s a growing movement,” said Schneider, addressing a small crowd at Mac”™s Agway in Red Hook April 9. “It”™s about getting back to basics.”
Having organic free range eggs available for harvesting from the chicken coop is appealing to many people. “These days, people really want to know where their food is coming from,” he said, adding: “The eggs are delicious,” being ultra fresh and laid by chickens fed only ingredients that the backyard farmer provides.
The attraction is more than food, however. As Schneider spoke about how children learn responsibility by helping their parents care for a backyard flock, several families arrived with children from toddlers to teens and selected chicks from the brooding cages that kept them warm, watered and fed until taken to a new home. At the New Paltz Agway the next day, the brooders were empty, all sold out.
There are challenges, primarily, keeping the birds safe from predators including owls, hawks, coyotes and raccoons, and neighborhood dogs. Neighbors have been known to have issues with roosters who crow not just once at sunup, but whenever the mood strikes.
There are rewards as well, chickens are natural composters who adore pecking up table scraps and whose waste is a potent and efficient fertilizer.
Schneider said that chickens are hardy birds that don”™t need a lot of help to stay alive and laying. Netting over their chicken run and fencing around their yard will thwart most of the dangers, although he noted that fencing needs to be buried or anchored well enough to deter determined digging. There are also gadgets available that will help deter predators with varying degrees of effectiveness.
The “roost” can be as simple as a recycled doghouse, (well sanitized with Clorox) or as complex as a chicken coop on wheels, that can be moved to various places on one”™s property to keep the grass growing evenly.
And chickens are not the only fowl proving attractive to Hudson Valley homeowners, said Williams, the manager of Agway, who said chickens, ducks and guinea hens are all selling well. The guinea hens, she said, are voracious and roam as a flock, consuming bugs including ticks.
And she said that between sales of the birds, the feed, the fencing, the housing and the other necessaries such as warming lamps and water trays, the local chicken movement is providing a welcome addition to their sales. “It”™s definitely a business that”™s profitable for us,” said Williams.