As we’ve learned recently, owning backyard chickens isn’t a pile of roses. It’s more like a pile of eggs, poop, and feathers. A pile that keeps on growing well after your chickens stop laying eggs. A pile that people don’t want to deal with, so they try to give away their chickens away on Craigslist.
But two brilliant people who call themselves “Homestead Phil & Jenn” have a proposal for you. They will rent you chickens. For $350, they will show up at your house in May, drop off two hens, a chicken coop, enough chicken feed to last you six months, and feed dishes. (If you live more than 50 miles away from a town that’s about 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, there’s an additional delivery fee.) Come November, they will come back, pick the chickens up, and keep them warm and cozy through the winter, when they don’t lay as many eggs.
If, as happens, you get particularly attached to your rent-a-chickens, Homestead Phil & Jenn will sell you the whole shebang. If a predator eats your chickens or if they get sick and die, Phil & Jenn will also replace them for free “as long as the death of the Rent The Chicken was not due to neglect.”
Plus, you don’t have to keep them their whole long lives after they’re done laying eggs. Phil & Jenn don’t say what happens to the chickens after they’ve lived out their lives as rental chickens, but we suspect that, unlike some backyard chicken novices, they don’t have much problem turning past-their-prime hens into soup.
