The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens | Hacker News Reader

The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens

washingtonpost.com

33 pointsnautilus1228 comments

Hit piece of an article from an East coaster. It doesn't take much traveling to realize that people in California like all organic, chicken, and organic food as something normal/part of their lifestyle, independent of their income.

Heck, I know plenty of folks in either Oakland or Berkley, that do raise their own animals.

Being in SV, or an engineer, has anything to do it. The only constrain is to have a back yard. When that is not possible, than people start growing organic in communal farms.

There are few of them in Brooklyn as well, even one in East Village (done on an abandoned lot).

It doesn't take much traveling to realize that people in the Northeast are basically interchangeable with folks in the Bay Area, and that we have plenty of backyard animals here, too.

(I lived in Berkeley and Palo Alto for a decade, back in New England now, have always kept chickens. Had goats in Palo Alto, will have them again in New England when we move to a house with bigger yard.)

Privileges:

- to have the option, not the requirement, of raising animals for food

- to have the good health and free time to hobby farm

- to have access to land (organic communal plots are not too common in super low income areas, community gardens are a hallmark of gentrification)

- to live in a place where you can go to a communal plot outside of normal working hours without looking like a criminal and getting shot (or looking like a mark and getting robbed)

Basically anyone that has this option is doing okay for themselves-- Anyone struggling in a suburban/urban environment can't muster the resources to grow their own food, or would rather not have to.

is it just me or is homesteading becoming popular again? jerry brown is retiring to an off-grid ranch. off-grid ranches, homes and homesteads are becoming more popular. locally grown greens are more popular which flirts with homesteading and is totally different from the centralized farm model of the past. and me and a lot of people ive known all seem to have come upon living away from the city, growing a little food and keeping some chickens, as an attractive prospect. i think this trend may grow into something much larger

I definitely feel a trend going on for small-scale agriculture. But unlike in olden times where it might have been a way to reduce a (lower class) family's grocery bill, now it's more of a hobby for rich boys that probably in most cases does not make any economical sense.

Small scale agriculture is actually very profitable if you do it right. I know farmer making $100,000/year off half an acre within city of Vancouver, and while that's definitely a bit of an outlier, shows that it's very very possible to have profitable small scale agriculture. In fact, most of the big farmers I know are drowning in debt. Sometimes scale is a burden.

The growing popularity and declining cost of solar electricity and wireless telecom probably have some effect on the imagination, and are driving down the level of austerity it requires. The hacker community may be more interested in living "off the grid" now that we wouldn't necessarily have to leave our toys behind. Rooftop solar, Powerwall battery, electric car, Ubiquiti wireless mesh with the neighbors... it has a certain appeal.

I love cities, and think that for the benefit of humanity, we should encourage more people to live in cities. It's one of the only ways to live a low(ish)-carbon relatively comfortable lifestyle.

However, on a personal level, I have been investigating homesteading as a hedge against climate change and possible damage (I hesitate to say collapse) to civilisation. I'm not sure being in a city during crop failures and rising seas is a great idea. Then again, I'm also not sure being on arable land without adequate defense is a great idea either.

I wonder if there's a more general anxiety about whether we can rely on the systems and infrastructure that provide us with food, power, water, etc. and that manifests itself in a desire to ensure we can provide for ourselves (though I worry that sense of assurance is illusory).

In Senegal, Africa, a similar thing is happening with sheeps. They, however, have taken it to a whole new level. People breed them and ask for exorbitant prices, say $1,000 for a lamb before they are born. Peple negogiate prices sometimes pre-conception. These sheeps have names, some are known locally or regionally. Nowadays it is not uncommon to hear a seller tell you "This is so and so, the grandson of so and do and so and so."

I would love to read about this, especially if it included photos.

The great senegalese sheep bubble of 2018. WP would lap it up.

Is there any deeper reason behind this 'sheep mania'? Are sheep exported to China like donkeys seem to be in recent years?

It's tough to read the tech workers quoted in the article talking about how they're doing things that farmers did long ago, like figuring out how to maximize egg yield to chicken feed.

I can't believe I find it so difficult to relate to people who have many of the same interests and presumably backgrounds as I do.

As with most stories about tech workers' ridiculous extravagance, they are really talking about tech executives, investors, and entrepreneurs. It's not surprising at all that ICs are as culturally distant from senior management in tech as everywhere else.

I'm not in SV and the market where I make my living doesn't have nearly the high salaries or costs, but I've considered getting chickens a few times. I didn't plan to do it for health reasons, environmental reasons, or any sort of activism. I considered it because working in tech consistently makes me feel very far removed from the kind of lives that many people lived only two generations ago and having backyard chickens has always appealed to me as a way to slow down a bit and do something that's completely different from my usual routine of going to work in a corporate office all day and feeling like everything I do is completely ephemeral.

I've been very blessed to get into tech and have a nice living for the last 20 years but some days I really wonder what it would be like to live an existence that wasn't almost completely dedicated to technology. The reason I've never followed through on chickens is because I suspect that having them won't really evoke the kind of connection to simpler times that I crave.

I don't really enjoy articles like this. Am I supposed to decide that all backyard chickens are anachronistic foolishness or only that it's silly if it's taken to the extreme presented here? If people get pleasure out of backyard chickens that's nice, regardless of whether they feed them scraps or grilled salmon. I can think of many other pastimes that are far more pernicious.

Have you tried growing your own food as a way to get that connection back?

For me, ive found it an invaluable way to "get out of my head" and calm down my mind. It's very peaceful, plus you get to eat fresh food. But mostly I do it to stay grounded, pun partially intended

I did try that about ten years ago and while I enjoyed it a little I had problems with pests ranging from slugs to deer. I also had a bit of a black thumb and my veggies never turned out that well. Part of the reason I've never taken the plunge with chickens is because I worry I'd make a bad farmer. :)

Alert: hit piece !

It's true that there is an obscene amount of money in SV, and it has chiefly been accumulated by building out the modern surveillance state to the detriment of wider society.

But given that the mainstream critique seems to be inevitably descending into this type of populist rabble rousing over the petty, the result is not going to be productive nor pretty.

This title would benefit strongly from an apostrophe.

Whenever I visit my mother-in-law’s house, she always prepares fresh chicken for us, and by that I mean she keeps a few live ones (provided by a farm, she doesn’t raise them) in a storage locker outside of her apartment that she then kills with her hands when they are going to be eaten. She doesn’t even live in a rural area, china is just flexible like that.

I looked into it here, but it seems like keeping live chickens in your storage space is a nono in most USA cities.

Ducks are much more quiet, but they do require some water

So chickens are the new horses when even the rich can't afford pastures

Huh. Here in the remote-work mid-south, chickens are commonplace. The eggs just taste better.

I guess every locale has advantages and disadvantages. For me, winter weather gets extra weighting.

Chinese families in Silicon Valley have literally been doing this for years, out of frugality and not status-seeking. They also do group buys of meat direct from the farm.

Allow me to dissect the subtle bragging in the opening:

> Excelling at his work, Land said, requires an obsessive focus on it

"I excel at my work."

> But maintaining that passion — especially with his fourth child on the way — means knowing when to detach

"I'm excellent at my job, despite having more kids than average (i.e., probably more family obligations than you). And also, I find time to 'detach'. I'm awesome at my job and find time to chill out."

> relaxing with a glass of wine in the back yard alongside his wife, kids and the family’s 13 chickens and three sheep

"Despite working in Silicon Valley, where a 1100sqft home with no yard costs $2m, I have a wine-worthy backyard with enough grounds even for sheep and chickens."

This just reeks of the I'M ALWAYS WINNING attitude so pervasive in Silicon Valley, buried in an article about chickens ffs.

> “Despite working in Silicon Valley, where a 1100sqft home with no yard costs $2m...”

You could buy roughly 667 acres of land here in Lower Michigan for that much money, which provides plenty of room for wine and chickens. ;)

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis in HN comments, regardless of how annoying something is. It's basically yelling, and the site guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Well, it is supposed to be a hit piece after all. Really, I'm so much less bewildered that these folks have figured out how to raise the simplest of farm animals. The "Raw Water" and high-priced Esselen kookiness bothered me more because they took something that used to be nice (or just safe) and turned it into woo-woo for the stock-option mentally impaired.

Raising chickens can be done in less than 50sq ft pretty much anywhere. It doesn't make a huge amount of sense for most folks and there's a real risk of salmonella, if you're not careful... and don't get a rooster, if you want to have neighbors who like you. But expensive, or time consuming... only if you're trying to put diapers on them.

But hey, these folks discover what it's like to raise the animals they use for food, feed them properly, and protect them from predators, etc. That's good, even if they're douche bags about it. You could do a hit piece on the self important waste of time that is President Carter's Houses for Humanity too, but why bother.

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