CONCORD -- Can there be such a thing as a happy chicken? On a cloudless, sweltering morning, a dozen or so White Leghorns, Araucanas , and Black Sex-links follow Pete Lowy and Jen Hashley around their fenced-in pasture on four acres here, rather than chill out in the funky painted mobile coop Lowy built for them. Curious and alert, the birds occasionally rub up against a leg or peck close at their feet.
"I was working inside here a couple weeks ago," says Lowy, who lifts up the coop's side wall to gather a couple of eggs from laying boxes. "They all followed me in here to watch."
The bigger question is, do happy chickens mean better-tasting omelets now and divine coq au vin later? Lowy and Hashley think so, as do the customers of Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds , a business the couple started at Verrill Farm here in 2002.
This is a homegrown enterprise. The Peace Corps alums met at a six-month-long ecological horticulture apprenticeship at the University of California at Santa Cruz. They discovered a mutual interest in homesteading as well as in each other. When they moved into their house on Verrill Farm, where Lowy is the assistant farm manager, the couple noticed a neglected weed- and bramble-covered coop at the bottom of their yard and asked the Verrills if they could clean it out and raise chickens.
Backyard Birds started with eight laying hens, only two of which were producing. The couple sold eggs to friends and co-workers. Experience bred confidence, and soon they were expanding their flock and looking for ways to raise birds humanely and with minimal environmental impact. Their research brought them to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia, who writes and speaks about pasture-based farming. By adapting some of his practices, Lowy and Hashley were able to move the birds out of the enclosed coop and into the pasture. "The Verrills have been very generous," says Lowy. "They let us use their land and build gardens, and expand and try new things."
