The “omelet for everyone” idea hatched by Thompson Rivers University student Bonnie Klohn is gaining momentum.
Between 40 and 50 supporters of Kamloops Urban Hens were with Klohn at city hall on Dec. 9 when she presented her case for back yard poultry to Mayor Peter Milobar and council. Council has requested a report and recommendation by mid-January before making a decision on the urban hen pilot project.
For Klohn it will be the third time she goes before council proposing they change the 1981 bylaw that bans back yard chickens from city lots less than an acre in size.
If her suggestion for sustainable, local food production gets the ok from city council, 32 families will go through a series of courses about hen husbandry, public safety and disease prevention and coop building during the winter. Initiatives Klohn has coordinated. If all goes well, each pilot family will keep three hens for six months starting in March 2009.
As she works to create a group of educated responsible hen owners in Kamloops to improve food security in the city and get people thinking more about where their food comes from and what is in it, she is earning three credits in Politics and Law, a directed studies course facilitated by Derek Cook.
“Bonnie is very interested in sustainable food production,” Cook said. “Whenever a student is very interested in their topic they initiate interesting research and are willing to do a great deal of work.” The direct studies course came with an extensive list of required reading, a major essay and a final essay exam.
Klohn says incorporating the urban hen project into her directed studies class means learning effective research and presentation skills to make her arguments to council.
The idea for the urban hen’s movement came out of two of Klohn’s first year classes, agricultural science and political ideologies. “We had been talking about free trade and the political issues behind the world’s food system in both classes,” she said. “Urban hens came out of an open ended research project for my Agricultural Science class on food security in Kamloops.”
She first became interested in poultry during the two years she spent in France after graduating from Westsyde Secondary. “In Europe people have never lost the tradition of keeping hens as we have in North America,” Klohn said. “Growing our own food is one of the best ways that people can make an impact by become more sustainable.”
Besides her four-course academic load, this enthusiastic 21-year-old works part-time as the TRU representative for the Campus Climate Network and is a member of TRU ECO. For more information about Urban Hens check out http://www.campusclimatenetwork.org/wiki/Urban_Hen_Movement.
