Backyard chicken blues

As almost everyone knows, the price of eggs has more than doubled in a year, and shortages are common. Most concerning of all? A lot of Americans are thinking of raising their own hens.

To which I have three words of advice: Don’t do it.

Yes, eggs are expensive. But that doesn’t mean you should run out to buy chickens.

It’s too late to stop some in this doomed quest to save money. People who work at hatcheries— the companies that incubate, hatch, and send chicks to homes and stores throughout the country—are seeing demand for egg-layers that tops even the great chick boom of 2020. “We’re already having customers calling about pre-ordering or asking if they can come in and buy them all,” says a farm store employee near my home in Oregon.

An employee at one hatchery told me that they’re selling out of production breeds—those that lay the most eggs—at unprecedented rates. A lot of people ordering from them “have never owned an animal before in their life,” he said. These folks are about to discover that chickens are animals, not egg-laying machines.

I bought my first flock five years ago because I wanted to know that the hens behind my breakfast had good lives. People often say that “free eggs” are one of the benefits of raising chickens, but the sentiment makes me laugh. Backyard eggs are the most expensive free food ever.

I long ago stopped tracking how much money I spent on the ladies. There is the price of the chicks themselves, the heat plate to warm them, the special baby-sized food and water feeders, bags and bags of chick feed—to say nothing of the time I spend cleaning their “brooder” (where they live until they develop feathers to keep them warm) as they spill their water dish time and again.

Then, once they’re old enough to move outside, you’ll need a coop—both to keep them in and critters out.

Which reminds me: Everything imaginable will try to eat your chickens. Depending on where you live, you’ll have to protect your flock from hawks, raccoons, weasels, coyotes, wolves, dogs, foxes and even bears. Don’t even get me started on the rats.

While most people do their homework before raising hens, too many dive in as if it’s giving knitting a try rather than committing to care for animals. I’ve seen people nearly kill chicks by thinking they can keep them warm with a desk lamp instead of a proper heat source.

Yet chickens can peck their way into your heart if you let them.

Early on, I spent so much time trying to keep my hens alive that I got to know them far better than I expected. Some are friendly, others standoffish. Each made me laugh as they got into mischief, like flying on top of my roof and refusing to come down, or hiding their eggs around the yard to keep me from grabbing them. Now, spending time with the chickens is what I do at the end of a long day.

And, yes, when my grocery store only had four cartons of eggs left on the shelves, I kept walking. I knew there would be eggs in shades of blue, green and chocolate in the nest box waiting for me when I got home.

Raising chickens is wonderful, but it’s not the solution to our egg shortage. It’s more like bringing home puppies than having a dairy case in the backyard.