Chickening out

My loss is urban farming's gain.

After two years and more than $5,000 spent, I’m letting go of my chicken-keeping dreams.

This might come as a shock to those of you who’ve followed my poultry obsession from the halcyon days of that adorable mobile coop called the 'chickshaw,’ to the tragic total loss of that first flock, and up through the trials and tribulations of my attempts to rotation-graze using electric fences. It’s been an adventure, hasn’t it?

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If you’re new to Brunette Gardens or just want a refresher, you can read/listen to all my chicken stories here.

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One of my chickens in our urban coop.

Gallus gallus domesticus as a species suffers a high mortality rate, and evolution has compensated for this with oodles of eggs, which is why laying hens make such a great choice for farming. In two years, I’ve lost more birds than I’ve raised, which taught me the first lesson in the poultry business: Everyone wants to eat chicken.

The remaining flock of six has gone to a good home. I’ve given the whole kit and kaboodle—the hens, their chickshaw, the two electric fences and solar energizer, plus all of the equipment it took to raise fifteen chicks—to Heru Urban Farming.

If that farm sounds familiar, it’s because I published a two-part story on Tyrean ‘Heru’ Lewis and his urban food operation in the spring of 2023. As I detailed then, Tyrean had a wakeup call both about his own health and the health of his community that led him into farming. That’s an incredibly rare occupation these days, with less than 1 percent of the US population working as farmers, and as a black farmer, Tyrean’s in an even smaller minority, .08 percent. Persevering against those odds, Tyrean’s backyard bucket farm had already grown to three acres by the time I interviewed him nearly two years ago.

Back then he had just applied for a major grant to support his vision of a large-scale, non-profit project:

My goal is to have at least five farmers in an urban setting that need space come out to my property, and they can learn how to farm. I’ll give them five years, they can do what they want to do, and I’m not gonna charge them. After five years, they’ll have learned enough to move on with their skills. I want to be a training space, I want to have goats and chickens, maybe some hogs.

Tyrean saying hello to his new chickens.

Two years later, it’s mission accomplished, and then some. Tyrean was one of only ten farmers in the US to be awarded a Land Capital Market Access Grant, and with it, his non-profit purchased 87 acres of land near Owensville, Missouri, 44 of it tillable and the rest wooded. He already has 15 trainees lined up to come out to the property and learn how to farm. They’ll each farm a quarter acre while they train, and when they’re ready, they’ll move up to a full acre. The intent is for them to supply “food desert” urban areas with fresh, healthy produce. They get to keep any profit they earn on farm-product sales, with the hope they can save up for their own land.

As fate would have it, Tyrean was just talking with his board about a plan to expand into chicken-keeping when I reached out to him with my present of poultry. This kind of synchronicity is something Tyrean actively seeks to foster in his endeavor, as I covered in part 2 in our series, on how “intention is everything.” Reading that story again now, I get goosebumps recalling that Tyrean mentioned his habit of meditating under a cottonwood tree at Confluence, and I’ve just spent a year developing my own regular meditation practice as well.

The hens will live in a secure coop-and-run structure at Confluence for now but might migrate out to Heru’s Owensville pasture this spring. It was really tough for me to let them go, but as soon as I talked with Tyrean, I knew it was the right decision.

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Interested in learning more about Heru Urban Farming? All my articles and podcasts here.

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Now that you know they’re going to a good home, I’ll delve into some of the soul-searching I’ve been engaged in over this choice for the past few months. Here’s a pull quote for a sneak peek. Or should I say sneak peep. Sneak poop?