After Longmont starting issuing permits last year to allow residents to raise their own chickens, many people, like Melissa Held, jumped at the opportunity to form a closer relationship with their food and where it comes.

While Longmont has seen few problems with urban chickens, a story in the Daily Camera shows that raising chickens may be more complicated than expected:

… the increased interest in urban chickens has drawn fire in other parts of the country. Farm Sanctuary, a national coalition of farm animal rescue groups based in New York, issued a statement last month urging cities to reconsider changing anti-chicken ordinances. The group decries what it says are inhumane conditions in hatcheries, where birds may be deprived of food and water for extended periods. The group also says its members are seeing a surge in unwanted chickens, particularly roosters, which are not allowed in most cities.

Held, who raises chickens in Longmont, purchased her chicks from a feed store in Fort Collins that guaranteed hens to buyers, removing the potential rooster problem. She says that people who want to raise chickens should do their homework.

She adds that chicken care includes cleaning out the coop about once a week, checking chickens for diseases, making sure they’re warm enough in the winter and are safe from predators such as foxes, raccoons and even neighborhood dogs.

This September, Longmont city planners will be making a recommendation about increasing or decreasing the number of chicken permits, so Held hopes that other people who want to raise their own chickens will be responsible so she and her family can continue to enjoy their own chickens and eggs.

–Lindsay Gulisano

Piazanos, in the Cheyenne Arapaho Hall on the University of Colorado campus, serves cage-free eggs | Daily Camera

Some students at the University of Colorado are demanding that the school purchase all its eggs from vendors that let their chickens run free.

CU says the switch would cost them at least $70,000, which would be hard to justify in the current economic climate.

From the Daily Camera:

The Partnership for Animal Welfare group has gathered more than 1,000 student signatures asking that CU start buying cage-free eggs because the battery cages are so cramped that hens can’t even spread their wings, according to CU student Suzanne Spiegel.

On average, each caged laying hen is given 67 square inches of cage space, which is smaller than a single sheet of letter-sized paper, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com.

Cooking chicken poop sans oxygen could help fight global warming.

Charring chicken poop probably won’t save the planet on its own, but some people think charring fowl manure along with beetle-killed pine trees, corn husks and other organic matter might be an important weapon in the war on greenhouse gases. And a lot of the people who think that are hanging around Boulder this week.

Wednesday wraps up the first-ever North American Biochar Conference, which was hosted by the University of Colorado’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security.

Biochar — a fancy name for charcoal, more or less — is what’s left when organic matter is burned in a low-oxygen environment. And when you don’t have oxygen, you can’t make carbon dioxide. So after the burn, you’re left with biochar, which stays stable for a thousand years, locking up that pesky globe-warming carbon in a big black chunk. And as a bonus, the biochar makes an excellent fertilizer when added to agricultural fields.

“Humble biochar has uncharted potential for capturing and storing carbon dioxide, while simultaneously improving soil fertility and agricultural productivity,” Lakshman Guruswamy, head of CU’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security, said in a news release.

Check out Laura Snider’s story on the nation’s first biochar conference, check out the Web site for the International Biochar Initiative here, or read about the nice things Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack had to say about the biochar conference.