Our Chickens Are Laying PFAS-Free Eggs!

We’re excited to share some big news: Our changed setup with a newly constructed raised coop, new soil and filtered water has proven to work.

All three of our most recent egg tests conducted by three different certified labs came back showing only very low levels of PFAS. This means the eggs are essentially PFAS-free. Yay, Cluck, Yippee! We could not be happier!

We are celebrating by eating lots of eggs. 🎉🥚 🎉🥚 🎉🥚

Three days worth of eggs from our flock. These eggs now contain 70x less PFAS than before!

 

Significant Breakthrough

PFAS (also known as “forever chemicals”) have been showing up in backyard eggs across the world. Families like us, who thought they were eating the freshest, healthiest food possible, learned about contamination and health risks they never expected in their cherished backyard food supply.

The fact that our solution has proven to work is a very big deal, as it provides a roadmap that others can follow. While PFAS has been found in many food sources, research shows that high levels of PFAS tend to be concentrated in a small number of otherwise very healthy foods, specifically natural, protein-rich foods like organic free range eggs.

What We Changed

After finding high PFAS in my blood and very high PFAS in our backyard eggs, we stopped eating our home-produced eggs and began working on a multi-faceted solution. 

We rebuilt the chicken coop as a raised structure, eliminating earthworm consumption. To ensure clean inputs we tested our newly purchased organic top soil, chicken feed and only provide the chickens with reverse-osmosis filtered water.

While we can’t know with 100% certainty which specific inputs were contributing to the very high PFAS levels on our eggs, we have now proven that the combined changes work. 

Our hypothesis is that earthworms were the main culprit, as they accumulate PFAS in their lipid, protein-dense bodies. We tested a sampling of our backyard earthworms, confirming elevated PFAS levels. Soil and water (which we both tested, showing moderately elevated PFAS before the changes) were likely contributing to a lesser extent. Our organic chicken feed thankfully showed no trace of PFAS.

We Triple-Checked the Results

To see if our new setup really worked, we sent eggs to three different labs. Every test came back with the same conclusion: Very low PFAS levels, significantly below norms. The consistency across all three labs gave us strong confidence that the changes had the the desired effect.

Chicken Happiness

Somewhat unexpectedly, and much to our delight, our chickens seem happier in the new coop. The soil is well-aerated due to small gaps in the floor of the coop and therefore less muddy and less smelly than when the chickens foraged on our lawn and backyard soil. Their feathers are fluffier and they are cleaner. Our happy ladies love to dust-bathe, especially when we add a new mountain of fresh soil, which we do every few weeks.

Next Steps

Our goal is to help more chicken farmers and families test their eggs, understand their results, and take steps towards PFAS free eggs.

If you’re raising backyard chickens, we encourage you to test your eggs and if high PFAS levels are detected follow our roadmap. We are working on a step by step how-to guides that will make this easy. 

We will also continue to invest in testing our own eggs periodically to verify that our solution keeps working. And we plan to test commercially available eggs to get a sense for how widespread the PFAS problem is in eggs, and whether we can detect patterns. This can help consumers make better choices in terms of which eggs they buy, as well provide insights to commercial egg producers and help them make changes if needed.

Appendix: Test results by lab

All samples were collected around August 23, 2025, about 5 weeks after we moved the chickens into their new coop. 

Values shown are in μg/kg (equivalent to ng/g). 

Key conclusions & notes

• Average Sum of PFOS, PFOA, PFNA and PFHxS decreased by almost 2 orders of magnitude, 70x. This is a very compelling result, frankly much better than we hoped.  
• PFOS, the dominant detected contaminant in the May test (before making changes), decreased by a factor 90.
• The most recent test showed a relative small amount of PFOA, which is a very toxic type of PFAS. Since it was detected by one lab only, at a low value, we don't consider this a major problem, but we'll keep an eye on it in future tests. 
• Variations between different lab results are quite large, especially for PFOS in the May test. This is not surprising given our discussions with scientists. Measuring PFAS precisely is very hard, and small contaminations in the testing equipment can cause results to vary. That said, the directional results of all tests combined are very compelling and given this we have confidence that our eggs are much safer and healthier than they were before making the changes.