Obamanomics: North Jersey homeowners joining trend of raising chickens in the back yard

04/07/2014

MITSU YASUKAWA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Victor Alfieri of Wayne, known as "The Chicken Man," feeding hens in his back yard. Alfieri started growing his own food around 2006 and later began to keep hens to produce eggs.

Victor Alfieri doesn’t mind ruffling a few feathers when it comes to chickens. For years he passionately battled with officials in Wayne to win the right to keep egg-laying hens in his back yard.

Alfieri, a 43-year-old Dumont native, said that he and his wife, Michele, 39, were early advocates of the sustainability and urban homesteading movement in North Jersey. They decided to start growing their own food in 2006 at their Wayne home, and later began to keep hens to produce eggs.

“We were kind of in on the beginning of it in this particular area,” Alfieri said. “We kind of opened a lot of eyes.”

Health-conscious American consumers are increasingly crying foul about the antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides, herbicides, genetic engineering and the age of the fare they are eating. For people like Alfieri, who is known as The Chicken Man, the solution is to seize control and produce your own fruits and vegetables, and raise your own hens for all-natural, organic eggs.

“This is in vogue now,” Alfieri said. “People want to know where their food comes from. ... They’re fighting their local governments to have the ability to raise chickens. And it’s a tremendous movement that is happening.”

The surge of the sustainability trend was in evidence Sunday at the Fourth Annual Chicken Owners Workshop, where Alfieri was one of several speakers discussing raising hens and local laws regarding keeping them. The event was held by Mike’s Feed Farm in Riverdale, and roughly 175 people attended, with people from such towns as Wyckoff, Fair Lawn, Franklin Lakes, Garfield and Oakland registering, said the store’s assistant manager, Michelle Dixon.

Tracy and Andy Haas of Oakland and their daughter Jamie, 16, and son Ty, 12, were among those looking to buy fertilized eggs to hatch into chicks, then raise them to produce eggs.

This is their second stab at raising the birds after a difficult experience with three roosters. Tracy and Andy are vegetarians but do eat eggs, and they want to make another attempt at raising poultry — this time, they hope, with egg layers.

“There is nothing like a fresh egg,” Tracy said. “And I think the whole hatching process is really cool.”
The family was in the front row for the chicken owners’ workshop.

“We want to learn a little more about it so that we have the right setup,” Andy said. “We didn’t really know anything about it.”

The first year the workshop was held, only about 20 people came, Alfieri said. The second year, attendance increased to about 60, he said. The demand for the workshop was so great last year that Mike’s Feed Farm needed more space and moved the talk across the street to the warehouse of Bograd’s Fine Furniture. That’s where the workshop was held this year as well.

In the past few years, as more people are raising chickens, sales of chicken feed have at least doubled at Mike’s Feed Farm, Dixon said.

Alfieri and other advocates of home-produced eggs maintain that studies show those eggs are much healthier to eat than those from “factory farms,” where the birds live very stressful lives packed in close together. Backyard eggs have one-third less cholesterol, one-quarter less saturated fat, two times more omega-3 fatty acids, three times more vitamin E and seven times more beta carotene than those purchased in supermarkets.

“If you take a chicken and let it do what it does naturally, what it’s supposed to do, peck around and eat bugs … and eat grass and eat the things that a normal chicken does … and all of sudden, the egg gets healthier,” Alfieri said.

Alfieri also said that eggs at super­mar­kets can be up to 65 days old when purchased. Chemicals are used to prolong their shelf life, and as they age air seeps into their porous eggshell, degrading their taste and nutrition. Eggs are perfect sources of protein, he added.

“It’s the easiest pet in the world,” Alfieri said of the chicken. “You don’t have to walk them. It saves you money. It makes you healthier. It brings a tremendous amount of food security. It has so many benefits.”

At home in Wayne, Alfieri has eight hens in a coop. Each one produces about 300 eggs a year. Alfieri, who met his wife when they were working together at Morgan Stanley in Paramus in 1997, now works as a caretaker at the 45-acre Big Dog Farm in Pompton Plains, which has 200 chickens.

Alfieri isn’t the only chicken zealot. Arianna Bos, a 15-year-old West Milford High School student, spoke at the workshop about raising birds for either eggs or meat. At her family’s 40-acre farm in West Milford, she is already somewhat of an expert in animal husbandry.

Arianna has been raising chickens since she was 5 years old, and her farm now has what is called a “batch” of 120 chicks and an additional 50 to 100 adult hens. At the workshop, she brought some of the chicks and chickens from her farm, which were for sale as part of a project with the West Milford 4H Velveteens Rabbit Farm Club. Arianna, past vice president of the West Milford 4H Club, said raising chickens is very easy.

“No one can imagine a farm without chickens,” she said. “They can be really friendly birds. … Some of them like to be petted in certain places, just like dogs. Some have bigger personalities than others.”

Those interested in sustainability and keeping chickens often have to navigate local ordinances that govern raising chickens at homes.

“I know chicken law better than any attorney in the tri-state area,” Alfieri said.

He engaged in a heated dispute with Wayne officials when he received a summons for keeping three hens on his quarter-acre property on Woodlot Road, where he and his wife also raise 1,500 pounds of vegetables and fruits annually.

Wayne’s ordinance barred homeowners from having chickens for agricultural purposes on less than two acres of land, a mandate that Alfieri argued was aimed at restricting commercial chicken farms, not residents who wanted eggs for their own consumption. In June 2012, a municipal judge found Alfieri not guilty.

Alfieri said he recently helped Arianna Bos’ 4H Club draft an amendment to an ordinance in West Milford.

The ordinance originally permitted farm animals, including chickens, only on properties in West Milford with at least one acre of land. It now allows a household, even with less than one acre, to have up to six hens, said West Milford 4H leader Celeste Hampton.

The entire club, about 20 youths, petitioned the council to change the ordinance after one of its members, an autistic boy, visited Arianna’s farm and said he wanted a chicken of his own, Hampton said.

“I said, ‘You guys can petition to change a law,’Ÿ” Hampton said. “It took one year, but the council changed the law.”

Alfieri encourages people to fight, as he did, against town officials misinterpreting ordinances in order to bar residents from keeping backyard chickens.

“I advise people to fight for their rights,” he said. “Anything important in life, you’ve got to fight for — whether it’s changing the law, whether it’s defending the law. If it’s illegal, fight to change it. If you believe you are not breaking the law, fight to defend it.”


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