As it happened, Masterson had thought about keeping chickens at Zenger Farm. She had drawn up a crop and chicken coop rotation schedule and even bought an electric fence to keep chickens in and predators out. Right away she offered to put Barber in touch with a farmer who was getting rid of his hens.

Helping to move the process along, Zenger Farm had just received a two-year grant from Heifer International to raise livestock, including chickens, worms, and bees. If Barber and McGuire could find enough volunteers for two daily shifts of chicken duty, the grant would pay for chicken feed, bedding, and building materials for the coop. It would be, as McGuire said, “a thought experiment come to life.”

Barber and McGuire put out the word for volunteers. They hung notices at cafés around town and posted on a listserv. In the end, almost twice as many people applied for the co-op as there were shifts available. “We didn’t even think we’d get enough volunteers to cover all the shifts,” Barber said.

The Eastside Egg Co-op’s members draw from a wide swath of Portlanders. One member is a school teacher, another is a firefighter, and yet another is a “polysomnographic technologist” (someone who measures sleep patterns) at Oregon Health & Science University. One member looks forward to bringing her grandchildren to feed the chickens, and another member plans to track the yield of eggs by the phases of the moon.

The co-op’s first task was to build a chicken coop that could be moved between fields. It turned out that many of the members of the co-op had definite opinions about what sort of coop should be built, and soon ideas floated for a five-star hen paradise on wheels. Sacha White, the owner of Vanilla Bicycles, a custom bicycle frame builder, agreed to make armatures for the coop’s wheels. After friendly discussion and White’s practical suggestions, the coop’s original grand design became a simple 4′ x 4′ x 8′ coop with nesting boxes that open to the outside. By the summer solstice, the coop was up and the hens were in residence.

Since then, the egg co-operative has had a few minor setbacks: One hen died of natural causes, the barn door froze shut, the coop blew over in a windstorm, and the coop’s wheels still haven’t been mounted. Perhaps the most visible problem has been that a handful of hens peck at lower status hens to the point that they’ve yanked out all their tail feathers and drawn blood. In a large chicken operation, chicks are often de-beaked to prevent this problem.