NPR

Too Many Eggs For One Basket! Backyard Chicken Farmers Scramble To Give Them Away

Some food pantries are benefiting from home chicken keepers' desire to keep collecting the birds as pets, which results in more eggs than they can handle. But sometimes it can be hard to find takers.
Many backyard chicken keepers are thinking less about the business of raising chickens and more about collecting them — you just have to have them all — which comes with predictable consequences: too many eggs.

When Timothy Masters got his first chickens a decade ago, it was easy. He lives "way out in the country" in Pennsylvania, away from urban regulations about keeping chickens in backyards. He built a chicken coop and got three hens to provide eggs for him and his wife. "It was the perfect number for us," he says.

That's when the catalogs began to arrive.

"I started getting these chicken catalogs, and they'd show these photos of glorious chickens in every size and color," Masters says. He wished he could have

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