Shellie Tippet built a chicken coop behind her Eureka, Missouri home, only to have her homeowners association demand she tear it down or rebuild it to its specifications. What she didn’t expect was to spend the following months watching a fight over a handful of hens turn into a test of a brand-new state law, one that briefly settled the question in her favor before a judge pulled it back out from under her.
Tippet’s HOA told her the coop violated its architectural rules and threatened enforcement action, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which reported on her standoff in May 2025. Tippet argued the association had no authority over the coop at all, pointing to a state law passed the year before that was written to resolve exactly this kind of dispute.
That law, Missouri House Bill 2062, took effect in August 2024 and barred homeowners associations and deed restrictions from banning chickens on any lot of two-tenths of an acre or larger, letting owners keep up to six hens. State Rep. Jim Murphy, a Republican from St. Louis County, sponsored the bill after his granddaughters Josie and Lily asked for chickens of their own and testified in Jefferson City to make their case, according to KCUR and St. Louis Public Radio. “People should have the right to do with their property as they see fit,” Murphy said.
The relief proved temporary. A homeowners association at the Lake of the Ozarks sued to overturn the statute, and in late 2025 Cole County Circuit Judge Brian Stumpe struck it down, ruling that lawmakers had violated Missouri’s constitutional requirement that a bill address only a single subject, according to KOMU News. The ruling didn’t outlaw backyard chickens. It erased the specific protection that had kept HOAs from enforcing their own bans, reviving the covenants that homeowners like Tippet believed the legislature had already overridden.
The reversal puts Missouri homeowners back in roughly the position Tippet started in: legal under city and county code, but exposed again to HOA boards that can cite governing documents to demand the birds, or the structures housing them, go. Missouri’s attorney general has since asked the court to revisit the ruling, so the statute’s fate remains unsettled even as HOAs statewide point to the decision as grounds for renewed enforcement.
Missouri isn’t alone in navigating this collision. A growing number of states have passed narrow statutes that specifically shield small-scale chicken-keeping from HOA restrictions, distinct from older agricultural right-to-farm laws built mainly to protect commercial farms from nuisance lawsuits. Homeowners counting on a new state law to settle an HOA fight would do well to read the statute, and its legislative history, before assuming the protection will hold.
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