About Us

The Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour is a nonprofit organization, staffed entirely by volunteers, that organizes a self-guided chicken coop tour every Spring in the city of Austin, Texas. The purpose of this tour is to encourage city residents to raise chickens at home by demonstrating the many ways that chicken (and other poultry) housing can be incorporated into a city residence without violating city ordinances or creating a nuisance. Many of the homes on the tour have featured various alternative energy sources, such as solar panels, along with other environmentally sound practices such as rainwater harvesting and xeriscaping.

We also like to show Austin residents that chickens and their manure are readily incorporated into a household gardening and composting regimen that results in inexpensive, healthy and sustainable food, even in relatively small spaces. Encouraging people of all income levels to produce their own food is, in our opinion, a means of advancing social and community welfare. Since this local production of foodstuffs (and nothing is more "local" than one's own backyard!) replaces food produced on commercial farms and trucked into supermarkets, we also believe that our organization promotes the advancement of the natural environment.

Another benefit of our tour is to raise awareness of heritage breeds of poultry, many of which have been in danger of disappearing as factory poultry farming has come to dominate most commercial production; local chicken enthusiasts have been responsible for the resurgence in interest in various poultry breeds, some of which are better adapted to Austin's hot climate and which represent an important part of historic American farming culture. One of the results of urbanization has been that fewer people have the knowledge or experience needed to care for food-producing animals; part of our mission is to show people how poultry-keeping can be done and where to find more information in order to care for one's own flock.

After three great years, the Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour has gained momentum and we are now organized under the nonprofit The Urban Poultry Association of Texas, Inc. April 7, 2012 marks the date of the fourth year that Michelle Hernandez has organized the team that will make the Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour a reality. Each year the tour gets a little bigger, and each year there are welcome new additions to the team that make it all happen.

Michelle Hernandez — Event Organizer & Sponsor Relations
Carla Allen - Coop Relations & Volunteer Coordinator
Julie Woods - Social Media
Christy Sanders – Publicity & Public Relations
Carla Oldenkamp – Website Assistance & Sponsor/Social Media Relations
David Brearley - Editor
Naomi Emmerson - Print Media
Doug Addison - Website and Technical Guidance


Michelle Hernandez has been involved with the coop tour since the idea first hatched and has been the leader and organizer, making sure everything comes together on tour day. She is the Organizer of the Austin Backyard Poultry Meetup, a free educational and social meetup. She has also worked with other "Rooster Boosters" and with City of Austin officials to keep rooster ownership legal in the city. When not working on poultry-related projects or other responsible pet ownership issues, she is President of an IT consulting firm and has released the Pickin' Chicken iPhone App, which guides users to find the perfect chicken breeds for their own backyards. Michelle raises chickens, guineas and ducks and she and her husband built their own chicken coop and are still happily married. More about her adventures can be found on the Funny Farm Industries blog.





Carla Allen is another original organizer of the Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour. She comes to us from Dallas, a retired manager/trainer from a large insurance company. Her interest in gardening led to chickens. "I decided chickens were cool, did some research, and now have 60 chickens of various breeds." She still has some of her original chickens who are 8 years old. "Since I get less than acceptable egg production from 52 hens, i am actually running a retirement home for chickens." As the Director of Coop Relations and Volunteer Coordinator, Carla accepts coop applications, coordinates volunteer activity, and puts together the coop tour brochure and mapping each year. She is an active member in several Austin poultry groups, and is also a moderator on Backyardchickens.com, the largest online poultry community in the world. Carla lives with her husband, 3 dogs, 2 cats, 15 fish and 60 spoiled chickens.



Julie Woods is a stay-at-home mom and writer about Austin and Texas history. She and her husband built a chicken coop using materials left over from building their house and they have been raising chickens for four years. Sustainability and energy efficiency have been very important to their family and chicken poop is an important part of their composting process and thus for the garden, which has been a source for vegetables shared with the neighbors. Their home includes many green features and was featured on the 2006 Austin Cool House Tour; it also received a five-star energy rating from the City of Austin. The chicken coop is not nearly as attractive but has its own green features, including solar-powered Christmas lights and evaporative cooling. Stanley the rooster presides over a flock of four hens and is responsible for letting everyone know when someone drives or walks up the driveway.


Christy Sanders has BFA from the University of Texas and has made Austin her home for the last seventeen years. Christy loves all things covered in feathers and fur, and has had chickens for over seven years and loves the fun and entertainment they add to her life. She keeps a flock of chickens at her home, along with several other adorable animals. She is responsible for Marketing for the Funky Chicken Coop Tour and is an Assistant Organizer for the Austin Backyard Poultry Meetup Group.





Carla Oldenkamp joined the Austin Coopies in 2011. Carla and husband, Dale, live on the outskirts of Austin and began implementing their vision for a sustainable backyard in the fall of 2010. Dale’s farm upbringing and engineering skills brought Carla’s dream of raising chickens and square foot gardening into reality in the spring of 2011. After attending Austin's Sustainable Food Center’s Citizen Gardener classes on square foot gardening, six raised beds are now producing vegetables for their kitchen table. Carla is driven to see all of God’s creation treated humanely. As stewards of the animal kingdom, she feels it is our responsibility to ensure quality of life and a happy existence for creatures that help nourish our bodies as well as our souls. Just ask her eight chickens, Diddly Do, Lovey Dovey, Amelia, Ophelia, Aussie, Charlene, Vera, and Hawkeye the Roo. They would agree that life in their “Zen House” is a chicken’s heaven on Earth.



David Brearley and his wife Molly O’Halloran started building their funky chicken coop out of recycled material in January 2007, after bring home a half dozen 1–week old chicks from Callahan’s. Not the best of timing! It took a month of weekends before the chicks could be moved outside to their new coop and heat lamp. In addition to raising chickens for eggs, David and Molly are both avid gardeners and appreciate the contributions chickens make to their compost pile (both the raw material and the labor for turning it). In 2009, David and Molly’s home was a Funky Chicken Coop Tour host site. The following year, they volunteered as tour photographers. In 2011, David earned his wings as a full-fledged volunteer Coopie. In his professional life, David is a senior technical editor for a trade publication serving the North American solar industry. (The company’s consumer publication is Home Power magazine, which is dedicated to small-scale renewables and green building practices.) In his spare time, he likes to restore vintage European coffee mills.


Hailing from Montreal Quebec, Naomi and her husband Jake arrived in Austin via Toronto then New York City in 2010 with the dream of getting closer to nature and getting more in touch with Community. Naomi designed and built her coop from "free wood" on Craigslist for her 6 beautiful hens which she raised from one-day-old chicks she acquired from a private fowl enthusiast outside of Buda - thanks Ruth! With the focus on "living the way my grand-parents did", she is interested in all things sustainable, renewable, recyclable and local. Her vegetable garden is in the beginner's stages, but everyday she learns more about how to improve life by connecting with the Earth and respecting all her gifts and believes "chicken watching" could replace Prozac. She is thrilled to be a new member of the FCCT Committee! Professionally, Naomi has been an actor, singer and director in Theatre and film for almost 20 years.




Doug Addison built his own chicken coop from plans shared by a neighbor and has been raising hens in it since fall 2008. He was a participant in the inaugural Funky Chicken Coop Tour in 2009, when he saw more 600 people visit his backyard coop in one day. While waiting for his grass to grow back, he has been providing the Coop Tour with website assistance and other technical expertise. By day, Doug is an independent web producer who helps businesses and organizations with how their websites are organized, what they do, and what they say. Doug also serves on the Wheatsville Food Co-op board of directors and is currently board secretary. Doug's background includes newspaper reporting and magazine writing and editing in the business and science fields. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Doug has written two books about web design: Web Site Cookbook (O'Reilly, 2006) and Small Websites, Great Results (Paraglyph, 2004). Doug moved to Austin in 1995 and currently lives in central Austin with his wife and two daughters.






November 1, 2009 | |

 

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