Becca White, 10, holds one of the chickens she and her family raise on their farm south of Onaga.

Feeding time at the White farm includes the dog and a cat.

Chickens on the White family farm examine eggs in the basket.

Nathan Woodyard feeds greens to his chickens.

Nathan Woodyard collects an egg from the chicken house on his farm east of Westmorland.

Eggs from happy chickens

By Paula Glover
It’s part of a country lifestyle that is coming back – raising chickens.
“People are increasingly interested in where their food comes from,” said Scott Beyer, poultry expert with Kansas State University. “If people have the time and the space, people also like feeling more independent and responsible for their own food production.”
For Nathan Woodyard, who lives with his wife, Kim, west of Westmorland, raising his own chickens is part of a life that harkens back to his childhood – his grandfather raised chickens. The choice also includes raising as much organic food for the family as possible.
Karen White and her children, Elizabeth, 15, and Becca, 10, adore their chickens. Their farm south of Onaga, farmed by husband, Paul, includes cattle. When the kids found a 4-H bucket calf to be too labor intensive, the kids switched to chickens. Now, their 28 chickens lay 22 to 28 eggs a day.
“They are just a joy to watch,” Karen White said recently.
“When we feed them, it isn’t hard to pick them up,” Becca said, demonstrating. “See when they lay their wings back, it means they want to be picked up.”
The Woodyard and White families are part of a nationwide movement toward food grown close to home, sometimes with an emphasis on organic, and generally including a focus on humane growing and harvesting methods for live animals.
Larry Cowdin, manager at Orchelyns’ farm supply said the demand for information from newcomers to chicken raising is so great that they host “Chick Days” in the spring, featuring talks on raising chickens. He said there are still many with 4-H projects, or people who for years have raised poultry for meat, but new people want specific “how-to information.”
With the right zoning, even city folks can get in on the action, as it isn’t illegal to keep chickens within the city of Manhattan. There are restrictions, however. The chickens must be quiet, clean and contained and the zoning is such that in the RS suburban areas and R smaller family residential, it is acceptable to have a small flock, but the restrictions are set so that the chickens have to be penned and 100 feet from a property line. Most homeowner’s lots don’t allow for that much set-back, noted Chad Bunger, a planner with the city of Manhattan.
“Right now, it’s rare, but we could see more chickens,” he said.
Riley County currently restricts chickens in the A1 and A3 zones, with no livestock allowed, said Steve Higgins, zoning enforcement office. In zones A4 and A5, livestock is allowed, including poultry. However, the county is in the process of examining zoning regulations, and it is possible that some day, poultry could be allowed in the A1 and A3 zones. For example, a person could keep 8 to 10 hens. “As long as you’re taking care of them, it would be OK,” he said.
“It is a matter of a healthier way to eat,” Higgins said. “It helps to maintain a healthier America.”
Beyer agreed that most people are motivated by a desire for healthier foods.
“Health seems to be more important than saving money,” he said. “In reality, it is hard to meet the prices from big producers. Sometimes people are interested in a different breed of bird than the meat in the stores, or are concerned about animal welfare.”
In the last year-and-a-half, he’s seen a definite upswing in people keeping chickens.
“There’s no doubt people are concerned in addition to the people who just want to do something different,” Beyer said. If a person wants to raise livestock, he suggested beginning with poultry.
“Poultry are easy to raise,” he said. He suggested starting with pullets if a person was concerned about raising chickens from that are just hatched, or hatching them on their own.
“There’s a lot of information available on raising chickens,” Bayer said. Although there is some mis-information on the Internet, K-State maintains a web site: www.asi.k-state.edu/poultry and he said farm related magazines like Mother Earth News and Grit Magazine tend to offer accurate information and specialty issues on poultry.
Hank Will, editor of Grit Magazine, said that the trend or raising chickens is part of a resurgence in interest in vegetable gardening, and “ways to take additional charge of your food supply.”
Their special issues on poultry are popular, he noted.
“Plus, people are realizing that chickens are gorgeous, not all are stark white. There’s a real appeal to raising a farm animal,” he added. He thinks that the growing interest in chickens is part of people seeking to feel safer in many aspects of their life and to reduce expenses. Friends of his who own hatcheries reported to him that they had trouble meeting orders for the last couple of years.
In the Woodyard family, keeping chickens is all a part of a general effort to live more closely to the land, Nathan Woodyard said. Right now, the family has barred rock and turkins, and are keeping some roosters separate to fatten them up for the pot. There are four laying hens and a rooster in the coop. He’s recently hatched some eggs in an incubator that used to belong to his wife, Kim’s father. Kim grew up with raising chickens in the Wamego area.
“It is part of our livelihood,” he said. “It goes a long way to have closeness to what you grow, to be close to nature and your land.”
Woodyard has gone so far as to share his love of the small farm he and his wife bought a year ago, by posting videos on YouTube – just search for flatheadcat4U to see him plant potatoes or wait on the gravel truck for a load of gravel for the driveway.
“It is a joy for me, not really a chore,” to care for the chickens, “it is just what life is when you are doing what you enjoy,” he said.
Raising chickens has been both a joy and heartbreak for the White family, as twice their flock has been destroyed by marauding dogs. Bayer said the number one predator of chickens is generally the family dog or stray dogs.
But the White’s persisted, and are planning on expanding the flock to 50 chickens just a couple of years after beginning their chicken adventure. The family currently has Red Star hybrids, white Leghorn, Golden Laced and Columbian Wyandottes.
“The chickens are great,” Karen White said. “We enjoy watching them.” The chickens are allowed to free-range in the evenings when the family is home, but are penned during the day and locked in the coop at night.
“We haven’t had nearly the number of bugs as before,” she said, because the chickens eat bugs while out foraging.
To make the chicken raising successful, Elizabeth White suggested that people do their research ahead of time, and she thought for first time growers, that buying pullets, rather than chicks, might be the way to go.
“It is great to know you accomplished something when you set out to raise poultry,” Elizabeth White said.
“There’s something to be said about knowing where your food comes from,” Karen White said, noting that the family also butchers their own meat – chickens and steers.
To offset the cost, but also because the family cannot eat 28 eggs a day, Karen White sells the eggs. She sells to people who want fresh eggs, and those who are old enough to remember farm-fresh eggs from their childhood when more people raised their own poultry. But some people want to eggs are interested in free-ranging hens also.
“One woman told me she wants eggs from happy chickens,” White said.

Appeared in Manhattan Mercury, April 29.