Festival an introduction to backyard poultry farming

A chicken is a humble bird. For ages it has scoured barnyards and gardens for spills of grain and a few insects here and there. It has dined on kitchen scraps and bruised fruit, pecked at worms and yard waste, all to produce a daily egg and often end its days in the soup pot.

So it’s about time it gets its own celebration. On Saturday One World Spokane and PEACH Community Farm are putting on a chicken festival, and it’s an urban one at that; it will be held just off Sprague Avenue at the heart of the International District.

“The idea really came from Brightspirit at PEACH,” said Janice Raschko, owner of One World Spokane Cafe. PEACH stands for People for Environmental Action and Community Health, a nonprofit that runs a farm near Cheney and the organic store, Fresh Abundance, at 2015 N. Division St. One World Cafe, which serves locally grown organic food, has worked closely with PEACH putting on farmers markets and growing vegetables on a small plot just behind the business.

Raschko explains that they discovered there aren’t that many chickens left in Spokane County. That means chicken meat and eggs at most stores are trucked in from far away, adding to the environmental impact of consuming chicken products.

“It’s expensive to raise birds in Canada, and we always paid a good price for the meat,” said Raschko, who’s Canadian. “Here it’s something like 99 cents a pound, and who knows where it’s from? Everybody is eating chicken that’s not raised here in Spokane. We’d like to change that.”

It’s legal to keep a handful of chickens in a backyard within the city limits, and Raschko said the Chicken Festival is the perfect place for potential backyard chicken farmers to get some information.

“We believe that more people want locally raised chickens,” said Raschko. “This is a fun way to give a little lighthearted information about how to raise chickens, while also getting the point across that there is a problem with how most of our chickens are raised.” Raschko said medicine use in large-scale chicken farms is one of the things that concern her. And then, of course, there was the recent recall of eggs tainted with salmonella bacteria.

On Saturday, there will be several informational booths about how to keep chickens and what to feed them.

And there will be chickens to look at and visit with, as well as a chicken tractor – a large movable cage that can be used to move chickens around property.

“Someone asked if we were going to butcher them, too, during the festival, but no, we aren’t doing that,” said Raschko. “But we will be serving fried chicken.”