Asagi Hatchery / The folks at Asagi Hatchery see the growing trend in raising chickens as a throwback to the the 1930s, when Asagi Hatchery first opened and almost everybody had a chicken in their backyard. Stepping into the Kalihi hatchery is like stepping back in time: from the clicking of typewriter keys to the peeping of fuzz balls in a cardboard box. Only the chicks in the box aren’t for a country farmer, but a punk rock girl with tattoos up and down her arms. The times they are a-changin’.

Asagi Hatchery’s clientele includes 10-year-olds who beg for a pet chick instead of a puppy, health-conscious young people, and retirees nostalgic for the days when their parents raised chickens.

“There’s definitely an increase in people raising chickens in their backyards…there’s such a diverse group coming for chicks,” Maxie Asagi says. “Before it was kind of like country people. Now, it’s all over Hawaii–suburban, city, backyard, in apartments even…People let [chickens] run around in their apartment, like a dog. And there are chicken diapers.” So maybe less like a dog than a toddler yet to be potty-trained.

How to explain the fervor for picking up chicks–of the fuzzy yellow sort? It’s the locavore movement carried a step further: an attempt to forge a deeper relationship with food. In these economic times, it calls to mind the mood of self-sustainability forged during the Great Depression, the last era of backyard chickens; it’s no coincidence that vegetable seed sales are also up.

“It’s a natural way of bug control,” Asagi says. Especially when it comes to cockroaches and centipedes. (I visited a chicken owner in Palolo and watched a teenage chicken wolf down a centipede that was half as long as she was. “It’s what makes the eggs taste so good, I guess,” said her owner.)

And for many, the hook is the eggs, plain and simple. Fred Bannan, who raises chickens in his backyard in Punchbowl, is unsentimental: “They’re chickens, they’re there for my eggs. They’re not really pets, they don’t have names.” He is matter-of-fact when recounting details of chicken-rearing–from building a coop to dislodging a stuck egg by sticking his finger up a chicken’s butt. “Egg, poop, pee, it all comes out of the same hole,” Bannan says. “It’s kind of a one-hole system.”

“We just got into it because we wanted to have fresh eggs,” says one chicken owner in Kahala who wishes to remain anonymous because his landlord doesn’t allow chickens. “We know what the chickens are eating and the [eggs] just taste better. The shells are really thick, [the inside] really gelatinous, not runny. When you crack it in a pan, it just stays there and cooks up. The yolk is a lot more yellow.”

He also sees his chickens as part of a personal recycling program: “We can feed them all our food rubbish, let them run around the yard and they poop on the grass and make fertilizer.”

For him, the chickens are “kind of there mostly for food purposes” (though that doesn’t stop him from naming them: Lola, Carmela, Larry–a hen who just happens to have a male name), but for others, the line between food producer and pet is blurred.

“People come in and they want chickens for eggs…but they get so attached,” Asagi says. “Chickens are very intelligent animals. People just kind of underestimate them a lot…You raise them from a baby. You’re going to go out there and they’re going to run to you. They’re so curious, and the way they move…they are funny. They have great senses of humor…I just can’t get enough. I’ve seen them all my life and it never gets boring or ordinary or anything. No matter what age they are, babies, adults, they’re just so cute.”

Then, as if to say, “You try to resist one,” she places a cheeping yellow cottonball in my hands. It’s impossibly light and soft. This is how they get you.

Chicken law

A Honolulu ordinance (Sec. 7-2.5) allows for two chickens per household. Though many chicken owners have more than two, the city employs what the New York Times refers to in other counties as a “don’t cluck, don’t tell” policy.

“We don’t have the resources to check these things out,” says city spokesman Bill Brennan. “If we get a complaint from a neighbor that lives next door to somebody who had that situation, then we’d go check it out.”

Agasi says,“People are always worried about smell and noise.” She explains that noise isn’t so much an issue as long as chicken owners stick with hens and not roosters, which aren’t necessary for eggs. Regular cleaning of the coops keeps smells under control. And the best way to deal with chicken-wary neighbors? Share some of the fresh eggs when you get them.

It takes chickens about five months from the day they hatch to start producing eggs–usually one egg a day, though this can vary a bit from breed to breed. Asagi Hatchery regularly carries Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns, and two to three times a year, between January and June, they offer a specialty hatch.

“If you give us the breed you’re interested in, we’ll try to find it and hatch it,” Asagi says. Some requests have included Araucanas, popular for their blue eggs, and Buff Orpingtons, golden brown with big, fluffy butts. According to [backyardchickens.com], if hens were celebrities, “Buff Orpington hens would all be Scarlett Johansson.”

The Scarlett Johansson of chickens might motivate some to build a sexy chicken house (a photo at Asagi Hatchery features a homemade coop with architectural flourishes like a double-pitched, hipped roof), but for most, a simple coop made of two-by-fours and some tin suffice as shelter for the hens. Because their needs are simple–shelter, food, water–it’s easy to see why backyard chickens are gaining such traction. But is it easy-come, easy go? Some already proclaim goats as the new chickens, as if livestock were fashion accessories for the locavore set, to be switched out each season. In North America, abandoned chickens are turning up in local animal shelters.

But Asagi, whose family and hatchery have weathered 75 years of supplying chicks and thus perhaps have the best gauge on the local chicken zeitgeist, says optimistically, “I don’t think it is a fad. I think it’s an awakening.”

Asagi Hatchery

1830 Kanakanui St., Mon-Thu 8am-5pm, Fri 9am-2pm, Sat please call, 845-4522