Fashion
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? To Get to Its Summer Home.
Chicken rentals are soaring as Americans look to make their egg sourcing as local as their backyard. Just don’t expect to save money.
Last summer, Genevieve Shaw Brown rented chickens to keep in the backyard of her family’s summer home in East Quogue, N.Y. “I saw it on an Instagram post, and I thought it would be fun,” said Ms. Brown, 43, who works as a freelance journalist and lives the rest of the year on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “The kids were immediately taken with them, almost like pets.”
Her children, now 13, 11 and 9, named the four chickens Chicken Nugget, KFC, Betty and Hei Hei (the chicken’s name in the Disney movie “Moana”) and staged games for them, like the chicken Olympics, in which they raced across the backyard. Each chicken laid an egg every one to two days, and in the morning, the children would collect them and make scrambled eggs or baked goods. Sometimes, the family would give eggs as gifts.
At the end of the summer, when the rental company Clark Farm, based in Higganum, Conn., came to collect the chickens, Ms. Brown immediately signed up for summer 2025.
And now she’s really happy she did.
“Last year when we did this, everyone thought it was so strange,” she said of the summer rental. But this year, it’s a different story. An outbreak of avian influenza has contributed to soaring eggs prices across the country (wholesale eggs now cost an average of more than $8 a dozen, up from $2.25 last fall), and many Americans are determining that it makes sense to have their own local — very local — supply.
These would-be farmers are not purchasing coops or flocks, as many did during the coronavirus pandemic (and before). They’re renting. And numerous companies across the country, mainly farms, are supplying chicken coops (chickens included) in the spring and summer, when chickens lay a lot more, and then picking them up in time to return to their winter homes: the farm that is set up for them.
“We’re sold out,” said Joe DeFrancesco, the owner of Farmer Joe’s Gardens, which does chicken rentals in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the lower half of New York state. “This is not normal. We are doing more rentals this summer than we’ve ever done.” (The company said it still had some space for rentals later in the summer. The April deliveries are sold out.)
