Fifty Chickens and a Grand Idea

By Angela Sanders
Photos by John Valls

Early on a November morning when it was still dark, fourteen members of the Eastside Egg Co-operative braved the driving rain to gather at Zenger Farm. They had come to move a chicken coop.

The coop movers, the smarter of them wearing rubber boots, walked past a field of leeks to a coop smaller than an upended outhouse. The 50 hens shut in the coop started to cluck as they heard people approach. As the coop was lifted, the hens’ cackling jumped to a fevered pitch.

Once the coop was set down in its new home in an adjoining field and the coop’s door opened, the hens shot out like cannonballs, quickly scattering to peck at chickweed. A glance back showed the chickens’ old field pecked clean down to the dirt.

The Eastside Egg Co-operative is a group of Portlanders who take care of a flock of Barred Rock hens in exchange for eggs. Zenger Farm, a nonprofit educational farm in east Portland, provides supplies, land for the hens and coop, and room in the barn to store eggs and supplies. In return, Zenger Farm receives free fertilizer for its fields and an educational opportunity for visiting school children.

Patrick Barber and Holly McGuire run the co-op. They manage volunteers and work with Laura Masterson, who farms at Zenger, to coordinate where to move the chickens so that they forage from finished crops and fertilize fallow fields in preparation for the next crop.

Last April, Barber idly mentioned to Masterson that it might be interesting to start an egg co-operative. Instead of selling eggs as a business, a group of people could tend the chickens together, sharing labor but also sharing eggs. He and McGuire had worked for a car co-op in Oakland and liked the idea of co-operative agriculture.