The Free Press
It’s not easy right now for Americans to buy eggs. With avian flu on the rise, more than 35 million chickens have been culled in the U.S. so far in 2025, which has pushed the price of eggs up 53 percent since last year. Retailers like Costco and Trader Joe’s are capping the number of cartons each shopper can buy. Some Americans are reporting that eggs in their local stores are selling out within 10 minutes of becoming available.
With indications that the egg shortage is likely to continue and even worsen, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently offered a solution on Fox News: Americans might consider raising chickens in their backyards—a suggestion she was roundly mocked for, with the HuffPost describing it as “clucked-up.”
Did her advice sound a little apocalyptic? Maybe. Is it naive to suggest that most Americans have the time and space for chickens? Sure. But as someone who once kept chickens in a backyard in New York City, and who has been proselytizing for years about how fun and easy it is, our columnist Larissa Phillips found Rollins’s suggestion quite charming.
In today’s essay, she tells the story of her life-changing decision to buy a few chicks—which will inspire and guide any Free Pressers who are thinking of following in her footsteps. But first: a video, in which Larissa explains the basics of keeping chickens. —The Editors
I made the jump into chicken-keeping while living in a small row house in Brooklyn. It was an impulsive decision, but not a crazy one. We had a 70-foot-deep backyard, more than enough space, and I already knew a few things about chickens: When I was a child in New Rochelle, just north of Manhattan, my parents had a small flock. I have fond memories of being 5 years old and peering into a wooden box at a swarming crowd of tiny chicks, and my mother showing me how to hold them gently, their delicate feet resting on my palm while my other hand cupped the body loosely, so I wouldn’t hurt those tiny wings.
Decades later, I wanted my two children to have the same experiences.
And even though the shops were full of eggs back then, I loved the idea of running out to the coop to retrieve fresh ones for breakfast.
Every city has its own regulations. In New York City, the Office of Urban Agriculture allows hens within all five boroughs, but prohibits roosters. Too noisy. Considering how loud the city is, a bit of dawn crowing doesn’t seem like a big deal, but this ban is strictly enforced: A friend who kept chickens a few blocks from us hatched chicks, one of which turned out to be a rooster, and exactly one day after its first crow, there was a knock on her door. A representative from the health department informed her that she had a few days to get rid of it. It was that, or a hefty fine.
Still, I was jealous of this friend. I wanted chickens, too. One day I stumbled across a website that allows you to order as few as three chicks—you could request all-female birds, for an extra fee—and have them overnighted to your front door. This was a game changer. Most hatcheries, designed for farmers, had much larger minimum orders. When I was a kid, we had to order chickens in a batch of 25—from the Sears catalog.
Back then, you had the option of just a few sturdy American breeds, suitable for both eggs and meat. But by the time I was shopping for a backyard flock, in 2008, the options had dramatically multiplied. A lot of hatcheries will offer 100 or more varieties, originating from all over the world, with varying degrees of egg productivity and color, heat or cold tolerance, and personality. (In recent years, hens that lay the darkest brown or the most heavily speckled eggs are in high demand—possibly because their produce looks best on Instagram.) The most popular breeds will be about $3 a chick, while the fancier ones might be $100 or more.
I quickly decided we should get Bantams, which are smaller-than-average chickens—ideal for a backyard in Brooklyn, and very cute. I settled on Buff Brahma Bantams, which, according to that breed description, are fluffy, quiet, and hardy. Perfect.
My kids, then 5 and 9, crowded around the computer and approved. So I added three female chicks to my shopping cart—and a fourth for security, because in my childhood experience, as I told the kids, “The cat always gets one.”
We didn’t have a chicken coop. We didn’t know where to buy feed. But these seemed like minor details. I planned to keep the chicks in the house under a heat lamp for the first six weeks, because fluffy newborns can’t retain heat until their feathers grow in. We would figure everything else out as we went along. I clicked “place order.”
Online hatcheries suggest alerting your local post office when you are expecting chicks, so someone can give you a call when they arrive. Ours came to our front door by special delivery, cheeping inside a ventilated cardboard box. The hatchery sent five instead of four—an extra chick in case one dies en route.
Chicks can go without food and water for around 36 hours after they hatch. The day-old chicks arrive hungry. As I picked each fluffy body out the box, I dipped its beak in water, then showed it where the food was. Then we set up the chicks in a fish tank, with pine shavings and a heat lamp. My kids pulled up chairs to watch them.
In the weeks that followed, the little birds were a source of endless entertainment, zigzagging around the tank, sleeping sprawled out flat like kittens who’ve run out of gas, or trying out the little platforms and perches we’d set up.
Meanwhile, my husband set to work on their coop: a little cedar-shingled cabin with a roost for sleeping and two nesting boxes for laying eggs. If you don’t have the tools or the time to DIY one, you can buy coops on Amazon for not much more than $100. Just make sure you line the bottom with hardware cloth, to prevent predators like raccoons from burrowing in.
When the coop was done, it was a relief to get the adolescent hens out of the house. An important caveat: In crowded quarters, the smell of chicken poop quickly becomes unpleasant. But proper space and ventilation solve this problem.
On their first night in the backyard, we showed them the ramp that led up to the coop; every night after that, a couple of hours before sunset, they would all march off to bed like clockwork. This is one of the best parts of chicken keeping: They don’t have to be trained.
Another plus: They will eat virtually anything. Yes, we would trek to a feed store in the Bronx, an hour’s drive from our house, to get them grain. (These days, Amazon sells everything you’d ever need for urban chickens.) But we also fed them our food scraps, from Chinese takeout to PB&J sandwiches to macaroni and cheese and other remnants from my kids’ lunchboxes. (There are a few things that chickens aren’t supposed to eat, like avocados and chocolate.)
The hens grew nicely, maturing at around four months, at which point we waited for their first eggs like expectant parents, checking the nest boxes several times a day. It felt like it would never happen—and then it did! Eggs are the most mundane foodstuff, but that first one really did feel like a miracle. And when the second egg arrived, I photographed the two of them side by side, next to a quarter for scale, so I could show off the pictures.
Then we made what we all agreed were the best scrambled eggs we’d ever had.
Once they got going, the hens each laid about three or four small eggs per week, perfectly shaped and luminous. We had enough to share. Sometimes my kids would bring a half dozen into school as a gift for a teacher.
We also liked sharing the chickens themselves. When we’d had them for about six months, we packed up two hens into a pet carrier and drove to our school’s annual fundraiser, the Harvest Fest, to set up a booth. Kids could hold a hen for a dollar.
It was wildly popular.
Holding a placid hen on your lap can have a tranquilizing effect and, having been handled so much since their first days, our hens were tame and docile. Some kids, their little hands stroking the hen’s soft feathers, would go into what looked like a blissful trance.
I knew the feeling. As a child, I liked to tuck my favorite hen under my arm and carry her to the porch, where I’d set her on my lap while I read. And as an adult in Brooklyn, I loved sitting in the backyard with a coffee and the newspaper while the hens scurried around, keeping busy in their composed, focused way.
It made our yard feel like an oasis away from city life.
The biggest problem with keeping chickens is that they’re addictive. They’re often jokingly referred to as the gateway farm animal, as “just a few chickens” turns into a desire for “just a few more.” In my case, I found keeping chickens so satisfying, and so delightful, that it became the gateway to a more drastic life decision: leaving the city, and moving to a farm upstate.
I credit one particular hen.
We’d had our flock for about a year when I got a call from my kids’ school: “Larissa, we have a chicken for you.” The secretary’s teenage daughter had rescued a stray hen from a slaughterhouse on Hamilton Avenue in Brooklyn, and now it needed a home.
The hen was a Silkie—a white fluffy breed with black-skinned meat popular in Chinese cooking. My kids named her Cloud. Having been raised in an industrial setting, she was missing some normal chicken behavior like scratching in the dirt and roosting. And she rarely laid eggs. But one instinct remained intact: Cloud loved to go broody, hunkering down into her nest and refusing to move, which is what hens do when they are preparing to hatch chicks.
But to produce chicks, we needed a rooster. To keep a rooster, we needed to leave New York City. One year later we were living on a hobby farm upstate, and I was joking that it was all so Cloud could become a mom. (She went on to hatch several broods of chicks, and was a devoted mother to each of them.)
So, if you’re thinking of getting chickens, I heartily recommend doing so, but beware: They might transform your life. I now have ponies, goats, and sheep, and more chickens than I can accurately count.
And with this looming egg shortage, I obviously need to buy some more chicks.
That’s just how it goes, with keeping chickens.
If you liked this essay about how Larissa became a chicken-keeper, you’ll love her last essay about how she became a wife. You can read it here.