Can I have chickens in Denver?

As of June 2011, Denver now allows each lot to have up to 8 chickens and ducks (total of 8) and 2 dwarf goats.  These must be females, although there some brief exceptions for newborn male goats and neutered goats.  A one-time license is issued by the Denver Animal Shelter for $25; you must go there and get it.  Their address is 1241 W. Bayaud Ave, Denver, CO.
 

As of January 3, 2012, the Denver Animal Shelter posts the following on their website at http://www.denvergov.org/denveranimalshelter/DenverAnimalShelter/FAQ/tabid/434759/Default.aspx  Click on the title Food Producing Animals Ordinance.

What if I want more than 8 chickens or turkeys or an alpaca, etc.?

You can use the old permit law for this.  The process involves getting permits from Animal Control and Zoning, $150 for a first annual fee and no objections from your neighbors.  Annual renewal fees are $70.  And contrary to logic you can only get a permit in a residential zone district.

I live outside of Denver. What are the laws in my city?

Information on the laws in other nearby cities are at www.denverbackyardfarms.org (another website we created when we began the campaign to change the chicken laws in Denver in February 2009 but haven't had time to transfer here).  The list may not be entirely up to date; the best way to check is to call your zoning department.  Aurora Councilwoman Melissa Miller is leading the way to make chickens legal in that city.  Citizens in other jurisdictions that do not allow chickens periodically contact us to seek advice in changing their laws, so email me, James Bertini, if you want advice on how to change the law in your jurisdiction.  My email address is at the bottom of the Home page.

Do I need a rooster to have eggs?

No.  A rooster is only needed to have fertilized eggs.  Hens (female chickens) lay eggs as do other female egg-carrying species.

For how long will a chicken lay eggs?

This depends on the breed, but often peak capacity goes for 2-3 years until it begins to taper down.

What do I feed the chickens?

Chicken feed, of course, and we sell organic chicken feed at Earthdog Denver, 370 Kalamath Street, Denver.  We also sell organic goat feed.  You can go to feed stores out-of-town to buy conventional feed, which is cheaper than our organic feed.  By my wife and I think that if we are going to raise our own eggs, we want to eat eggs that have no chemicals, pesticides and herbicides in them.  And that is the reason we use organic feed (and the reason we decided to stock it and sell it for others).  So we shopped around and found feed from a mill that solely grinds organic feeds (some mills grind organic and conventional feed using the same equipment) using only grains sourced in the United States.  It is Modesto Milling in Modesto California, www.modestomilling.com.  They even have a line of soy-free feeds where the protein comes from sesame seeds.  (All the other soy-free feeds we have investigated use fish meal for protein, but there are no organic certifications for fish.)

The feed comes in biodegradable sacks, and each sack lists the ingredients, nutrition information and protein percentages so you can be sure of what you are buying and feeding to your chickens. 

But you can also feed your chicken most kitchen scraps and garden wastes.  This cuts down on your feed costs in the spring, summer and fall, and the chickens love to eat our vegetable trimmings, stale and moldy bread, spoiled milk and yogurt, burnt popcorn kernels, weeds and grasses...the list goes on and on. 

What about odor and noise?

Hens make very little noise, and roosters are not allowed in Denver nor in most cities.  Manure odor is minimal for the small number of chickens most people are likely to have in the city. 

Is the manure good fertilizer?

It is excellent fertilizer, and high in nitrogen.  In fact the nitrogen level is so high that it could burn your plants if you put it directly on them, so you should let it age for a period of time.  We clean our the coop and run periodically and put everything (the manure and straw that we spread in the coop to absorb it and the plants left in the run that they didn't eat) on our compost pile.  Then in the spring we use the compost for fertilizing the garden.

Where can I buy a chicken coop?

You can build your own coop if you have time, carpentry skills and money.  If you are short on the first two, then you can buy a coop.  Many coops are sold online, and we sell them at our market.  Ours are designed and built very well by local carpenters.  For the quality, they are priced properly, and we are planning a buyback guarantee program in which we will buyback your coop for a set price if you decide you don't want to keep the chickens.  However, you can buy coops cheaper on the internet, but let the buyer beware and remember you get what you pay for.  For example, Cynthia from Centennial is a new chicken owner and she bought a coop online for $360.  I met her when she came in to buy one of our coops and she told me she made a terrible mistake buying the online coop.  Here are her comments about the online coop:

* I bought a cheap coop because I was not sure I would want to keep the chickens and didn’t want to invest too much in case I changed my mind.

* The coop came in a kit.  It had pre-drilled holes that did not line up.  Consequently, the screws went in sideways or crooked and broke the wood.  We had to drill in at other places and install screws to make it hold.

* The door clasps were super flimsy and so ineffective that I believe it was raccoon-friendly rather than predator-proof as advertised.

* The door arm attachment bent and did not work properly.  The door fell off because there was too much space between it and the frame.  Same thing with the vent.

* The roof opens but the hinge pin falls out.  The roosting bar keeps falling off because it has no way to be secured on the supports.  The eve support cracked and splintered.  The nesting box hasp overshot the loop and I had to buy a new hasp and install it on the side.

* The company claimed it would take two hours for setup, but it took me THREE ENTIRE DAYS!  This was truly a nightmare.  I regret buying it because I do want to keep the chickens and I now have to spend more to get one of your quality coops which I should have bought in the first place.

 Do I need to heat my coop in the winter?

Think about this: chickens have lived on farms in colder climates than Denver without heat.  We have heard that there are certain instances when toes or big combs (the part that sticks up from the head) can become frostbitten in very cold weather.  We have a heat lamp in our coop that we keep on all night during the coldest nights.  Otherwise we use the lamp to give them light until about 9pm during the winter to keep their egg production up.  Chickens' egg production is tied to the amount of light they receive during the day.

Will my pets bother my chickens?

For dogs, it depends on the breed and character of the particular dog.  Retrievers are often not good with them while working breeds, herders and shepherds seem to be protective of them.  For cats, well, there is a cat here that knows he will get pecked by the chickens if he dares to bother them (although the cat would likely have eaten them when they were chicks).  But some other more aggressive cat could bother them.

How likely is it that other predators will bother my chickens?

This depends on where you live in Denver, as some people live near a river or other natural corridor or park and are more likely to be visited by a fox or raccoon or skunk than others.  The safest and most convenient setup is to have a solid coop connected to a predator-resistant run.  The run is the outdoor area for the chickens.  If the run is protected and connected to the coop, then the chickens can freely go from the run to the coop and vice-versa without you having to close them into the coop every dusk (and let them out every morning) and be protected the entire time.  And the best way to make the run predator-proof is to use solid wire, such as rabbit wire (chicken wire can be ripped by a big raccoon) and run it down into the ground past the bottom of the run to about one foot below the soil surface.  This will keep out the foxes who, like dogs, will dig at the edge of the run where it meets the soil to get underneath.  They give up quickly when they can't get past the wire screen. 

We live in the 400 block of Kalamath Street, not far from the South Platte River, and we have foxes test our defenses on a periodic basis in the evening.   (But once a fox killed most of our neighbors chickens and ducks that were running freely in the yard.  The killing took place on a summer morning at about 8:30-9AM.)  We also occasionally see evidence of raccoon visits and we have personally met some inquisitive and non-aggressive skunks (non-aggressive to us, but they would surely kill chickens, which they do by biting off their heads).

We sell fox urine and coyote urine at the market, which will ward off all the mammal predators we are likely to encounter in Denver (except for fox, which are apparently not afraid of coyotes).

What do I do with my chickens when they are old and their egg production goes down and I want to get new ones?

The natural way of dealing with old chickens is to eat them as our grandparents did.  The meat will not be as tender as you are used to eating, but you can make very good broth and soup out of the meat.   We don't know all of the local jurisdictions that allow or ban slaughtering, but we do know that Denver recently banned it in most zone districts (they did this as a political compromise when chickens were legalized in 2011, not because there was any problem with the practice).   We offer classes on chicken slaughtering in the summer.

You can also have a veterinarian euthanize a chicken.  One of our chicken-keeping teachers, John Beauparlant, paid $117 for this service from his vet, which included the cost of transportation and incineration.

You can utilize our CHICKEN RECYCLING SERVICE.  For a fee, we will take your chickens, process them humanely and legally and then return them to you or turn them into dog treats that we will give away or sell.  This process respects the animal and wastes nothing except the feathers (and we are working on finding a way to use those).  For obvious reasons, we cannot accept chickens if you know that they have an illness.  Chicken owners who want to use this service must deliver their chickens to us on designated days which are about once a month and which we will announce on this website. 

The fee is $25 per chicken.  If you deliver five or more chickens at one time the fee is $20 per chicken.  We don't expect to get rich providing this service and indeed it may even run at a loss.  But we do it in the spirit of finding solutions to our backyard food-production needs and because we are trying to create successful business models for our market, our homesteading school and  services like this one.  So if you want to help us and you need this service, then allow us arrange end-of-life issues for your chicken and know that by doing so you will be part of the solution. 

At this stage, due to the small scale of the processing operation we cannot anticipate making a profit on the dog treats.  We do it for utilization of the resource and to make the operation more sustainable, so the fee is not lower if you do not want your chickens returned.  However, if you do want your chickens returned to you (or if you want some other chicken provided to you because you don't want to eat your own) you will be able to pick them up at the market the following week, frozen.

***THE NEXT CHICKEN RECYCLING DATE IS unscheduled.***

How can I learn more about chickens and goats?

We host chicken-keeping and goat-keeping classes in the spring and summer beginning in January.  Also from January through October we hold Chicken Swaps where you can buy and sell chicks, chickens, ducks, rabbits and more and talk to the farmers and backyard farmers raising them.  Once a year in the fall we hold the Denver Chicken Coop Tour and you can visit homes in the Denver area that have coops and wonderful gardens and get ideas for your own. 

What if I want to buy local chicken eggs or chicken meat?

At the Denver Urban Homesteading year-round, indoor farmers' market our farmers sell a variety of chicken products.  Windsor Dairy sells organic, free-range, non-soy eggs.  Ranch Foods Direct sells eggs from Wisdom Poultry, a family-run poultry farm out east.  They also sell whole chicken and parts from Wisdom Poultry.  Their birds are not raised organically but they are free range and not factory farmed.  And Denver Urban Homesteading sells backyard farm-raised chicken and duck eggs.

Goats. What about goats?

We had a goat once and loved it.  Goats are wonderful pets.  However, if you want them for milk know that you have to breed them regularly, which means they will produce offspring regularly which you must care for and which you cannot keep since you are limited to two goats in Denver.  Also, you have to milk the goats every day, and often twice a day, without fail.  But of course the milk is very healthful.  If you want goat milk but don't want to produce it yourself, we do have raw goat milk as well as pasteurized goat milk available from local farmers who come to our indoor, year-round farmers' market at Denver Urban Homesteading.

We offer classes on goat keeping.

And ducks?

Ducks are sweet, and they make a soothing quack quack noise.  Duck eggs are popular with some.  Ducks need water to swim, and they are messy.