The great chick rush

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, April 9th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the price of poultry.

Egg prices have flown the coop. So more people are wondering, “Why not raise my own hens?” But as eager newbies flock to local farm stores to buy chicks, they are finding some of what they found at the grocery store shopping for eggs: high prices and empty bins.

MAST: Not to mention long waitlists.

As it turns out, backyard chickens are more than just a fancy coop and a basket of fresh eggs.

So why are families going to such lengths to turn their backyards into miniature hobby farms? WORLD associate correspondent Theresa Haynes went to her local farm co-op in Monroe, Washington, to find out.

OTIS: They are so cute and fluffy.

THERESA HAYNES: Ten-year-old Otis Lloyd and his mom, Paige, are sitting in camping chairs in the Monroe Farm Co-op. They’re near the front of the line that winds throughout the store.

The mother-son duo have been waiting for almost two hours already, and they know it will be at least one more hour before the store releases its chicks for sale. They came prepared for the wait. Otis brought his Kindle and his math homework. Like most people in line, this is not their first attempt to get chicks.

A few days ago, they waited for two and a half hours and only came home with two chicks.

OTIS: Yeah, we got the last Jersey Giant.

Otis's criteria for bringing home chicks is simple. He is looking for the “cute ones,” but his mom is more picky. She wants layers that produce at least 250 eggs a year.

PAIGE: I look at egg size and production, and they just look at which ones are cute.

They need at least 10 more hens to replace the 15 chickens the family lost in a coyote attack this year.

PAIGE: This year we're restocking more because the coyotes got 15 in one night. They tunneled under hardwood cloth and 8000 volts of electric fence.

In the first weeks of the chick season, more than 250 people showed up at the Monroe Co-op, creating traffic around the store and long lines inside. The farm store sold 500 chicks in a few hours. The next week, they doubled that, selling 1,000 birds and turning away disappointed customers.

This year, national hatcheries are selling out of all their chick stock. Customers who want to buy online are finding that nearly all egg-laying varieties are unavailable until the fall.

Ashley Soto has worked at the Monroe co-op for four years. She says she’s never seen a demand like this year’s.

ASHLEY: It's definitely the egg shortage and egg prices that people have seen in the last couple of months. I’ve heard that directly from customers' mouths, and the bird flu last year unfortunately wiped out a lot of people's flocks, both production level and at a like backyard level.

Paige Lloyd who created an LLC to sell her eggs also suspects the high cost of grocery store eggs. But she says that’s not a great reason to begin chicken farming.

PAIGE: The actual cost of owning chickens and caring for them, is higher than paying $10 a dozen for eggs. But for us, we love it, and I think the eggs are healthier and better tasting.

Lloyd is a trained nurse and she homeschools her sons. She likes the hands-on science lessons of raising birds.

PAIGE: The first year, we hatched our own turkey eggs. That was our project that year, like growth and development and all those things in the turkey eggs, and we cared for them.

Another homeschooler is in today’s line, 13-year-old Laney Lancaster. She got up early to stand in line for a couple of rare chicken breeds. Laney says raising chickens is worth it.

LANEY: They're cute and their eggs are yummy and they're fun.

But Laney’s dad Brent sees a bigger picture. For him, the benefit in raising chickens is in the life lessons of caring for animals.

BRENT: I like it because of the aspect of the eggs. But caring for something teaches life lessons. So for children, young people, it's a life lesson for them to one, nurture, take care of the chickens, and then, you know, just like life aspects, there's life and death and things like that.

During the early days of the pandemic, Taimi Knowles and her two daughters began raising eggs. Having chickens in her urban backyard meant food security despite political uncertainties.

KNOWLES: If you have eggs, you at least have breakfast covered for your family.

And despite the costs involved with setting up a chicken coop, Taimi points out that it doesn’t have to be expensive. Chickens are foragers who eat grass, bugs and kitchen scraps.

KNOWLES: We don't throw food away ever. We always feed the chickens our food that we don't want, and sometimes we get expired food from the food bank that people can't eat. So that cuts down the food bill, cuts down on waste.

Taimi says gardening and raising chickens could go a long way towards national food security.

KNOWLES: If just a few houses on every block were growing enough food for every family to just have one meal, that would take a lot of burden off of our food supply chain.

While the short-term financial benefits of raising chickens may justify the initial investments necessary to start a backyard flock, the super-fans all seem to have one thing in common. They love chicks.

AUDIO: [Sound of chicks peeping]

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Theresa Haynes, in Monroe, Washington.

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