Plus, there are few things cuter in life than trotting hens. 

We don’t have our own chickens (yet) but often babysit our family and friend’s flocks. Backyard chickens lay every 1 or 2 days and can produce around 250 eggs annually during laying peak years (first 2-3 years), but can keep laying as long as 10 years.

What do they need to “work that”? Daily water, grain-based feed, and, ideally, some pasture to graze and fertilize simultaneously. Chickens also eat bugs, including cockroaches and scorpions, and unwanted food scraps.

Because most pet chickens mainly eat processed grains, their diet relies on large-scale land, pesticide, and fossil fuel use inherent to modern agriculture. Large-scale commercial systems can actually be more efficient when it comes to transforming these inputs into eggs, but at the cost of extremely inhumane confinement systems: hens in battery cages live in less than half a square foot of space.

Providing 391 million laying hens with 108 square feet of pasture (typical standard for “pasture-raised” eggs), each, would require just under 1 million acres of land. This may sound prohibitive, but is utterly trivial compared to about 800 million acres of grazing lands across the US, and 40 to 50 million acres of lawn. Furthermore, a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report concluded that, since they can forage for food scraps and eat marginal crops, small-scale backyard chicken operations have about the same environmental impact as poultry farms.

While industrial operations are generally more “efficient” with resource and energy use than small-scale passion projects (ironic, we know!), this report gives us yet another reason to celebrate the welfare of our chicken friends. With a coop, yard, and TLC, they get to feel good, and so do we! Oh, and those eggs!