Fresh eggs from well-treated chickens taste better than supermarket eggs. Ask anyone who raises chickens, or anyone who's thinking about raising chickens, or anyone who gets eggs from anyone who raises chickens. Ask anyone, actually.
Well, as of about a year ago, I raise chickens. And I wanted to believe.
When my husband, Kevin, and I made the move two years ago from Manhattan to two wooded acres on Cape Cod, we were determined to do all the things we couldn't do in the city. We garden, of course. We also fish and hunt, shellfish and lobster. We grow mushrooms and make sea salt. We brew root beer and dandelion wine.
And we raise chickens. Apparently, so does everybody and his brother. There aren't any official stats: Backyard chickens fly under the Department of Agriculture's radar. But they seem to be all the rage.
"When the economy is bad, poultry is good," says Bud Wood, president of Iowa's Murray McMurray Hatchery, a major supplier of backyard chicks. "We've been operating at capacity for three years." He also has seen his call volume increase and transaction size decrease; those are indicators of more, smaller flocks, he says.
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