How we look, cont'd
The planner types in Portland city government are always telling us which other place we should be more like. Barcelona! Copenhagen! Vancouver, B.C.!
Well, the tables are turned now, as Vancouver, B.C. planning types come on down to Clinton Street in Portland to get the skinny on a matter most fowl.
This is pretty profound stuff, as it reminds us on a deep level of the Portland City Council -- as one observer put it, "lots of chickens**t spread all around and a group of six bird-brains squabbling over who gets the latest tasty treat."
| Posted at 8:07 PM | Permalink |
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Comments (6)
"Planning Pool is a thought repository and incubator for all things relating to the planning field"
The horror. The horror.
Posted by tom | February 11, 2010 6:02 AM
Ha. We used to live near that guy. Pretty sure he's a government worker --City of Portland I think. That piece makes him sound a little crazier than I remember him being. Maybe it's the chicken poo.
Posted by LD | February 11, 2010 7:11 AM
Oh, CHICKEN Week!
I thought
it was Chick Week.
Dang!!
Posted by Lawrence | February 11, 2010 10:20 AM
The dude looks as if he might also be an advocate for another of Oregon's idiosyncracies.
Chickens rock. I take issue with his assertion that raising hens is more expensive than buying eggs at the store. In an average month, I get 70-plus eggs and spend about $20 on feed. The water cost is negligible. So that works out to $3.36 a dozen, which is less than the organic, cage free, naturally nested eggs are in the store.
Posted by Gil Johnson | February 11, 2010 2:43 PM
We have had chickens for years...we love our chickens and they love us by giving us lots of yummy eggs and eating up the slug eggs and bugs....yay for chickens! We have Banty chckens so their little feet don't do too much damage to our garden...and they don't cost much to house,feed and water!
Posted by kathe w. | February 11, 2010 4:14 PM
So...Gil? Was your coop free? Is all the work cleaning out the guano free? You've got sunk costs there, man, that a new raiser of chickens would have to eat just to get started.
Economically, there are relatively large front-end fixed costs that have to be apportioned to the product over the lifetime of the venture. Then there are maintenance, upkeep and replacement.
I can see how people conveniently forget a lot of costs that go into chicken tending, if you focus on just eggs.
Besides, the hens provide a lot more than just better eggs than you can get in the store. Pest control, lawn mowing (for small lawns only), compost turning, soil aeration, and foremost, entertainment. When you are a chicken tender, one thing you can know is that your birds are not confined to less than six cubic feet of cage for their entire life, like the 'battery chickens' the egg producers emprison.
I like my chooks, but I don't fool myself into thinking that I'm getting them at a cost less than the megaproducer does...I don't even calculate my feed/egg ratio.
I just fool myself into thinking that they have a better life.
My hens are "pets with benefits", rather than some calculation on 'sustainability'.
Posted by godfry | February 11, 2010 5:00 PM