Comment by UtopiaPunk
3 days ago
Yeah, the daily tasks are pretty small. Just a few minutes a day. Scoop some food, change out the water, gather the eggs.
Every so often, you need to do bigger chores, like go buy fees or fix something in your setup. A couple times a year you need to do a deep clean of the coop (throw out all the straw, scrape any poo that's collected on the floor or wherever, put in clean straw). Sometimes a chicken dies, and that's not fun, but it is something you have dispose of properly.
Ultimately, though, it's a hobby. It should be fun or relaxing most of the time or else it's not worth it. Like gardening or running a home server. If you're trying to just save money, maybe you can save a tiny bit in this particular moment, but there are surely better ways to save a few bucks.
What are your thoughts on a more communal approach? Say we have a neighborhood of 20 single family homes that all participate in tending a large garden and raising chickens. Would the cost and chore time drop to a level where it was saving all involved enough money to justify the effort?
I ask because I used to have a good sized garden at my old house, growing enough veggies to both preserve and distribute to neighbors because I grossly underestimated the yield. While it was nice to have the neighbors love me, it was also a lot more work than I had bargained for (especially when otherwise working 40+ hours per week) and it got me thinking about community gardens and whatnot, why those might make more sense these days
When four roommates often can't keep the kitchen sink clean of dishes, I wonder how a 20-home communal coop would work without creating politics and resentment.
Great, the guy who "cleans" the coop when it's his turn by gently sweeping it for two minutes just swiped all of the eggs again.
I always thought it was silly that everyone in the suburbs owns their own lawn mower, edger, and weed whacker. Why not have a communal shed on every cul-de-sac? ...Until I lended tools out to people and saw how they treated them.
I'd think most of the time you'd need some sort of oversight structure just to manage people.
Community projects like this can operate successfully, but they do take work (like intentional communication and meetings), and there are politics. If we're envisioning 20 houses, yeah, there probably needs to be some kind of structure.
Since you mentioned the suburbs specifically, I'll also note that, at least imo, that: - the suburbs are designed in such a way as to encourage atomized, isolated living (houses are relatively far a part, you usually need a car to get anywhere, fenced-in yards are the norm, etc). - presumably people are moving out to the suburbs because they find that lifestyle appealing, so there's some self-selection happening such that people in the suburbs are less interested in sharing stuff communally.
So if you were just trying to get 20 households that happen to live closest to you involved, it probably is too big a committment for them.
Everyone just has to opt-in to it and remain opted in. That's a completely different community building problem, but it's still a problem. If you succeed at it you trade off the cost of "doing all the chores" with the cost of "keeping the community running" (unless you are graced with someone else in the community who is interested + able + better at it than you are) so you don't generally come out ahead (but it's worlds better for sustainability if you can build up something like that).
I was actually a member of a "cohousing" community for a while, which is similar to what you describe. If you're not familiar with the concept, I recommend looking into it, as I think you'd find it appealing: https://www.cohousing.org/
I'd still say that if the primary goal is saving money, there are better options to consider. If there are 20 single family homes living the "default" lifestyle of such a home, there are probably more than 20 cars (probably approaching 40). Can this community work out a system of sharing cars (and the costs associated with those cars)? How few cars can this group of people reasonably get by with if they are sharing?
Another option is having one big tool shed where everything inside is shared. Each single family home, by default, would probably own their own lawn mower. But a community of 20 households probably only needs to own one or two.
That said, I think there are other benefits of a big community project like a community chicken coop. It's good for building relationships with other people, it's fun, and the eggs do taste good. You could draw up a simple calendar and decide who is responsible for taking care of the chickens each day if you wanted, and that'd probably make things easy (although, tbh, one or two people will probably need to be "in charge" of the chicken coop, and following up if something falls through the cracks). A community chicken coop also makes it much easier to take a week-long vacation or whatever, because you know that someone will take care of things. When we had a chicken coop (in our single family house, not part of a larger community), finding someone to care for it was kind of a large task before we could actually leave our home for an extended amount of time.