MCLEANSVILLE, N.C. — At Fine Feathered Friends Farm & Hatchery in the Triad, the phones haven’t stopped ringing.
“We were going to start slow,” said Tina Sharp, the self-proclaimed “chief chicken wrangler” at the family-run operation. “But we just kept getting phone calls and phone calls—people wanting chicks, people wanting hens already laying. It hasn’t let up.”
Sharp and her sister started their hatchery recently, expecting a gradual launch. But demand for chickens has skyrocketed, driven in part by skyrocketing egg prices and growing interest in food self-sufficiency…