The first Sustainability Festival was held at Steele Indian School Park on Saturday, with one of its main goals being to advertise and sell tickets for the fifth annual Tour de Coops, a self-guided tour of the Valley’s best chicken coops.
Agriculture and livestock vendors were present at the festival, as well as utility companies such as Arizona Public Service and Salt River Project.
The Global Institute of Sustainability represented ASU, which was promoting a similar festival for next February sponsored by the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives. The tour and the festival also featured several bands and musicians at a stage next to the booths.
While the Tour de Coops is in its fifth year, the sustainability festival itself is a brand new event to “bring the community together by reaching out to like-minded organizations,” said Jay Headley, a chairperson of the Valley Permaculture Alliance.
“(Tour de Coops) is a day when people open up their backyards and allow the community to come in and see what it’s like to keep chickens in an urban environment,” Headley said.
People who purchased tickets for the tour at the festival were provided with a map of 22 homes around the Valley that keep an urban-style chicken coop. Some of those homes also have a garden.
Headley said raising chickens has become a trend in Arizona over the last few years, and chickens and chicken supplies have surpassed almost all other livestock purchases in Arizona.
“In the urban environment, it’s important that we look at how we move around, the water we drink, the food we eat,” said Jennifer Bonnett, another chairperson of the Valley Permaculture Alliance.
There are some roadblocks to the increase in municipal livestock. Headley said that while Phoenix, once an agricultural town, has fairly open laws about keeping animals, other cities, such as Chandler, have yet to create a policy around sustainable urban farming. Communities with homeowners associations are also reluctant to allow raising chickens because of potential noises and smells.
“Chickens are pretty easy to keep, easier to take care of than a dog or a cat,” Headley said. “People have a lot of perceptions about them that are not true.”
Bonnett said the Valley Permaculture Alliance teaches classes on topics such as energy usage, recycling programs and local farming.
“Anybody is capable of sustaining themselves,” said Kathy Hill, a coordinator for the Phoenix Seed Library.
Contact the reporter at jestable@asu.edu
