Can you harvest feathers from a chicken... like... renewably?

Birds molt a new set of feathers every year around spring time. So yes they grow back. They also naturally lose feathers all the time. However, plucking them may cause the feathers to grow back like shit. Even a few flight feathers that grow in wrong can prevent good flying

>>2328208
>Before the chicken wore out
I lold

It would probably hurt the chicken a lot. Feathers are embedded into the skin. Especially primary, secondary and tail feathers that have a thicker quill. They tend to bleed if they get torn out and preemptively plucked or damaged feathers may not grow back properly. In general it's normal for them to loose feathers here and there, mostly body feathers.
Birds do molt however, where they naturally shed their all their feathers. It could be a few at a time or a ton of it according to some parrots I've seen. Makes me wonder wtf do they do in the wild when they're mostly naked.

And no birds can't fly without feathers. Even just missing some tail or wing feathers may fuck up their ability to fly. Seen some wild birds without their tails and they suck at landing, can't fly very straight. Seen some missing too many primaries so they sort of do these accidental turns and are horribly inacurrate when trying to perch. Pretty goofy. I've found an odd number of complete blue jay and mocking bird tails with vertebrae attached.

>>2328208
Wait until they molt the feathers, then pick them up.

Plucking feathers off a live chicken would be like if, instead of shearing sheep, we just ripped out their wool by the roots. It'll hurt the bird like hell.

>>2328293
The big flight feathers aren't just embedded in skin--they're rooted in bone for structural support.

Non-wild parrots have screwy molts. Essentially all wild birds molt over a period of several weeks. If they lost all their feathers like what you seem to be thinking, they'd die. Feathers are how birds fly.