Playing Chicken

We have been involved for years with a shelter for trafficked, impoverished, abused and at-risk girls.

For them money is tight. Very tight.

One idea to raise both cash and food is to keep free-range chickens and sell the eggs at the local market. They had a budget and they brought it to us. It was wildly expensive with a proposal for top-grade everything and a payment to outside labour to build the coop. We rejected it.

They’ve come back with something that is much cheaper and incorporates the use of second-hand, but satisfactory, building materials. They have agreed that everyone can pitch-in and erect the coop and thus there won’t be any labour costs. (Let me say here that there will be no chance of me getting on the end of a hammer; without a solitary DIY bone in my body and an allergy to time spent outside in 40 degree heat, it isn’t going to happen)

So it would now be half the cost- at $1,000- of the original budget. Sounds good and the business plan, if somewhat optimistic, makes sense.

Yet, there remains a nagging doubt. The folk at the same centre spent days preparing land to cultivate vegetables and they grew one crop and stopped. Stopped. Dead. The land is overgrown again and we don’t know why. And it’s the same with a small mushroom growing enterprise there, too. Producing one week and finished the next.

Will that happen with the chickens? We don’t know. Is it worth the risk? Yes, or how else can they develop the skills that they need, is the easy and obvious answer. Easy and obvious that is, if it’s not your $1,000.

Whether to raise chickens, that is the question.