When Emily Brooks started Duck and Hen Farm in 2024, she wasn't chasing a business plan, she was chasing a closer connection to her family. She and her husband, Shane, had already kept chickens for about a decade, and as Brooks grew more drawn to self-sufficiency and from-scratch cooking, those farm-fresh eggs became the foundation of something new. "Flour is a staple in most baked goods," she says, "but we can't forget about the eggs." That shift eventually let her leave corporate retail behind for good, freeing her to pour her energy into family and baking full time.
Brooks started small, selling sourdough cinnamon rolls and cookies under Tennessee's cottage food law. The cookies took off, and for nearly three years she refined the recipe. What started as a modest "grandma's cookie," four to a small package, and grew into a soft, 5.8-ounce gourmet cookie made with eggs from her own hens. Today, cookies and homemade pop-tarts are the shop's best sellers, sold from a reconstructed shed at the front of the family's Harrison, Tennessee, property. The farm-stand-style shop is open Thursday through Saturday, 9AM to dusk.
The menu rotates, with standouts customers keep coming back for: a classic chocolate chip cookie finished with coarse sea salt, and the quadruple chip, packed with four different baking chips in one cookie. That recipe came from Brooks' husband, who dreams up many of the farm's more unusual flavors while also handling the physical work the property demands. "He's very good at coming up with out-of-the-ordinary flavors," Brooks says. The pop-tarts get the same from-scratch treatment, down to homemade jam fillings, with a brown sugar cinnamon version as her latest creation.
The farm's name carries its own story. While homeschooling her children, Revan, 8, and Maeve, 5, Brooks ran a hatching experiment with the family's incubator, tucking three duck eggs in among a batch of chicken eggs to see whether the same conditions worked for both. Nearly all the chicken eggs hatched, and, to everyone's surprise, exactly one duckling did too. The farm still raises both: chickens strictly for eggs, and ducks that are Cayugas, a breed on the Livestock Conservancy's watchlist for declining numbers.
For Brooks, the appeal of baking has always gone beyond the recipe. "I love baking as a form of expression," she says, "to pour my heart into something and, in return, watch others enjoying it." Customers agree as feedback is consistently glowing, with regulars praising the soft centers, generous size, and flavors they can't find anywhere else.
Revan and Maeve's roles are less about baking and more about learning. Through their homeschool days, they've picked up everything from animal care to problem-solving, the same curiosity that led to the farm's name. "Honestly, the same goes for my husband and me," Brooks laughs.
With her husband's support and her children learning alongside her, Duck and Hen Farm has become less a business than a shared family project, built from the ground up. For Chattanooga-area readers, a drive out to Harrison is a chance to taste a cookie three years in the making, straight from the shed where it all began.
To learn more about Duck and Hen Farm, follow along on Instagram at @duckandhenfarm or visit linktr.ee/duckandhen.
"I love baking as a form of expression, to pour my heart into something and, in return, watch others enjoying it."