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Kamiwan Oliver is a mom of three, chicken owner, and a resident of Calais.
Mainers take pride in our self-reliance, so I think it was only right that we enshrined a right to grow and raise our own food in the state constitution. That right now stands alongside our rights of freedom of speech, religion, the rights of the accused, and the prohibition on unreasonable searches.
But the right to food is new, and the boundaries of what government can do to restrict it are still being defined. My family is standing up for the right to keep chickens and provide our family healthy protein. We hope that our challenge to our city’s ordinance will ensure that the right to food isn’t chipped away to nothing with heavy-handed rules.
Paul and I are raising our family of five in Calais. We love Calais and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. It’s a strong community full of people who care for each other.
We started raising chickens after close friends left for another state and gave us their birds. It turned out to be a life-changing decision.
Today, we keep 19 chickens and every day they give us fresh eggs and occasionally we cull a bird for meat. On the rare occasions we have more eggs than we can eat, we share with neighbors.
The controversy in Calais started when another chicken owner let some chickens wander free. Letting your animals roam free is already a violation of city rules, but some in the community pushed for new restrictions.
City councilors proposed an ordinance that would make our coop illegal and make it illegal for most property owners in town to keep chickens. The ordinance only permits coops on half-acre lots when most lots in central Calais are a quarter-acre. The rules also requires coops be set back 20 feet from the property line, built with all new materials, and limited to six chickens. Since our lot is small, and we repurposed an older shed for the coop, and we have too many chickens. We knew there would be no way to comply.
We organized everyone we know who keeps chickens and spoke up at the city council meetings, but our pleas went unheard and the ordinance passed unanimously last spring. For the last year, we’ve tried to see if there was a path to keep our chickens but the answer was a solid “no.”
The right to food says that Mainer’s “right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment” is “natural, inherent and unalienable.” That’s strong language that means any government restrictions on that right need to be reasonable and narrow.
If Mainers can keep chickens so that they aren’t a nuisance to their neighbors, they should be free to do so. Calais rules limit the right to keep a coop to people who can afford to live on larger properties and afford to build brand-new coops. The benefits of fresh eggs and clean meat shouldn’t just be for people who are better off.
We’re now suing Calais with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that supports food freedom nationwide and has represented home bakers and gardeners across the country.
I want to reiterate that we love Calais. We didn’t rush to file a lawsuit. For months, we worked with city officials to see whether there might be a variance or exemption that would let us keep our chickens. But the answer was no. We believe the right to food is too important to leave hanging.
In the words of one of my daughters during the first council meeting, “I am here to say we should have chickens because I am sick of eating store-bought eggs, and that we deserve to have chickens because they bring joy and happiness to me and my family.”
