Some other downsides:

- The smell… Chicken crap is horrible. Our neighbour has chickens, we have flies. Lots of black flies.

- Bye bye garden… My dad has two chickens (did I mention the smell?) that free roam and absolutely tear up everything looking for a tasty bite.

- Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens

If there's a smell then the coop isn't being cleaned enough... simple as that. Ours coop is cleaned every day or two and there's zero smell.

It's like a cat's litter box. If it smells, then clean it more often.

> - Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens

The research done was mid at best. They just went "oh yeah there was huge variance in the hobby chicken PFAS data so we took the average". Most of the hobby eggs had little to no PFAS in them.

Furthermore, because of privacy laws, they weren't allowed to know where the eggs came from. They say they found no correlation between PFAS contaminations in eggs and known high PFAS areas but that's actual bullshit if you can't look at location data.

It's absolutely attrocious they were allowed to publish like this and that no one called them on their bullshit.

Overall, unless you are in a place where you know you have high PFAS concentrations, it's most likely fine? You could send off a few eggs for testing to make sure, that's a 200 euro test or something. Do that once per year just to make sure and you should be OK.

    > We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens

We used them to manage the garden. It much easier to put down nets/steel wire around problem areas, then it is to clear out weed and insects, and the chicken bring their own fertilizers to the mix. They are also great at managing grass lawns.

There were several lessons that we learned. Chicken will find dry earth to use as a bath. If one do not want that then you need to remove access and solve the underlying need. They will also dig up seeds and eat seedlings, so any fresh worked soil need to be covered/restricted. They also eat some fruits and herbs, but not others.

In term of total work they did save a lot of time and the garden was in much better shape than before.

I also read something saying that roads are one of the biggest sources of microplastics, with tyre wear, and that being next to one (as most suburban houses are) significantly increases the amount in microplastics in foods grown in backyards. I imagine Chickens would be worse as pollutants tend to accumulate as they go up trophic levels.

Though like many discussions about microplastics today, where "higher levels", and what microplastics, cross over into actual health issues is vague.