weirdness · Oct 2, 2026 · DAILY TRANSMISSION
Missouri’s Chicken Festival Has a $4,000 Egg-Eating Prize, Because Apparently We Deserve Nice Things
A nearly 90-year-old hatchery opens its doors this weekend for duck races, poultry glamour, human crowing, and a whole lot of hard-boiled eggs.
One hundred twenty-five eggs is a powerful sentence
Picture 125 hard-boiled eggs. Now picture one person eating all of them to set a record. Molly Schuyler did exactly that in 2025 at Cackle Hatchery’s Annual Chicken Festival in Lebanon, Missouri.
The festival starts today, Friday, October 2, and continues Saturday. At 411 W. Commercial St., people can watch a professional egg-eating contest with a $4,000 first prize. The amateur winner gets $500, which is still serious egg money.
That egg mountain is the loudest part of the event. It may not be the weirdest. There are also duck races, horse-drawn rides, a costume contest, a silent auction for grown birds, and humans competing to cluck, cackle, or crow.
Welcome to the poultry fan convention
Cackle Hatchery calls the event free and family-friendly, and says it has run for more than a decade. Its invitation for the costume contest asks guests to show up in their “cluckin’ best.” Frankly, this is correct behavior.
A hatchery is a place where eggs are incubated and chicks are bred for sale. Usually, that work happens far from any stage or cheering crowd. Here, the actual work becomes the show: hatchery tours, show birds, and chances to bid on fowl supporting youth poultry groups.
It has the energy of a comic convention, if comic conventions smelled faintly like feed. Fans get specialist knowledge. They dress up. They collect things, admire rare varieties, and perform their devotion in public.
The old mail-order machine gets rowdy
Cackle is a fourth-generation, family-run Missouri hatchery founded in 1936. It ships poultry nationwide and offers more than 230 varieties, according to the company.
That history gives the silliness some weight. The business began during the mail-order chick era, when people could order living birds from afar. A Congressional Record recognition describes Cackle as one of the remaining hobby hatcheries, preserving the genetics of more than 200 poultry varieties.
“Hobby hatchery” sounds gentle, but the work is real. The Congressional recognition says Cackle distributes hundreds of thousands of chicks each year. This weekend, that long-running system gets a human face, plus a person making their strongest rooster noise.
A fall festival with actual feathers
Lots of fall festivals offer the usual pumpkins, crafts, and vague seasonal feelings. Lebanon’s chicken weekend has BAWK! Bingo on Friday, then the hatchery festival beside a farmers market, a downtown fall festival, a local-author event, and a horse show on Saturday.
The Chicken Festival works because nobody has tried to smooth out its strange edges. A bird auction sits beside a duck race. A tour of a working hatchery sits beside competitive cackling. The egg contest is both gross and weirdly athletic.
There are several ways to join in without becoming a 125-egg legend. Tour the hatchery. Look at the birds. Wear feathers if that calls to you. Or stand in the crowd and discover how fiercely adults will cheer for someone attempting a convincing cluck.
Let the rooster within you file a complaint
The big charm here is participation. Visitors are not asked to politely observe poultry culture from behind a rope. They can enter the costume contest, make chicken sounds, bid on birds, or simply become the kind of person who has strong opinions about duck-race strategy.
That makes the festival more than a chicken-pun pit stop. It is a public party built around a working family business and the people who care about its birds. For two days, Lebanon turns the ancient sound of a coop into applause bait.
Somewhere in Missouri this weekend, a human will crow for glory. The chickens, one hopes, will judge fairly.
SOURCES FROM THIS TRANSMISSION
www.visitlebanonmo.org ↗Cackle’s Annual Chicken Festival ↗History & Tour of Cackle Hatchery - Hatching and Shipping Since 1936 ↗