GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 8 min

Raisingbaby poultry is easy and a great deal of fun. Many people start with chickens, but you might also consider ducks, guineas, turkeys, or geese. You can order chicks from a hatchery, buy them at a local farm store, or allow a hen to hatch eggs an

Capper's Farmer

Lecture de 9 min

Raising baby poultry is easy – and it’s also a great deal of fun. Many people start with chickens, but you might also consider ducks, guineas, turkeys, or geese. You can order chicks from a hatchery, buy them at a local farm store, or allow a hen to

Capper's Farmer

Lecture de 6 min

MANY chicken keepers get frustrated when a hen persistently sits on her eggs, but I embrace her “broodiness,” because it makes my job much easier. Why spend the time, trouble, and money buying fertilized eggs, babying them in an incubator, and hand-r

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 5 min

Whichcame first, the chicken or the egg? For most backyard poultry enthusiasts, the chicken came first—well, more correctly, the day-old chicks first arrived in the mail. But that’s not the only way to create your first flock or maintain your existin

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 5 min

After several years of raising chickens, and with many broods of chicks under our belts, I thought I would outline some of our experiences in hatching chicks using an incubator vs. doing it the natural way — that is, by a broody hen. Should you go fo

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 9 min

Raising baby poultry is easy and a great deal of fun. Many people start with chickens, but you might also consider ducks, guineas, turkeys, or geese. You can order chicks from a hatchery, buy them at a local farm store, or allow a hen to hatch eggs a

Grit

Lecture de 5 min

When Justin and Lucie Stephens settled on their property in Missouri, they wanted to raise an animal that could supplement their income. “We thought cattle, but everybody does cattle,” Justin says. In the end, the Stephens decided on a red-meat anima

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 4 min

My Blue Splash Marans chicks were getting a little big for their feathered britches, so my girlfriend and I built some new digs for them over the past couple of weeks. I have a pretty palatial doghouse (with a covered porch, even), which I received f

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 3 min

Melissa Caughey, award-winning blogger and owner of Tilly’s Nest, makes it easy for kids to master the basics of chicken raising in her new book, A Kid’s Guide to Keeping Chickens (Storey Publishing, 2015). The following excerpt is from Chapter 2, “C

Grit

Lecture de 2 min

JOIN THE CONVERSATION Raising Goats for Land Clearing (www.Facebook.com/GritMagazine) William Laut: Goats are awesome! I plan to have several as pets, and so I can use their soiled bedding as compost. Kendra Rudd Shatswell: [Our goats] worked to clea

MOTHER EARTH NEWS

Lecture de 1 min

Chicks are a favorite food for snakes and rats. Both of these predators can slip through holes smaller than you’d expect. Check your coop and brooder area thoroughly for holes, even ones as small as a dime. If the holes can’t be patched easily, try p

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 4 min

Here on Haven Homestead, we keep a number of different animals. We have meat rabbits, ducks, a goat, a cat, a dog, and of course, chickens. The one thing that surprised me about the poultry was the differences in anatomy between them and me. There is

The Atlantic

Lecture de 3 min

In his lab at the University of Edinburgh, Mike McGrew is turning commercial egg-laying hens into surrogates for rare chicken breeds revived from frozen cells—a technique that he hopes one day might also be used to revive endangered bird species. The

Good Organic Gardening

Lecture de 4 min

Sit outdoors with a cuppa and observe your chooks going about their daily activities. They’re great DIY workers. They all have individual quirks and personalities and most lay a distinctly coloured and shaped egg. With the breeding season imminent, h

Grit

Lecture de 6 min

My hen is sitting persistently on her eggs — again. Many chicken keepers get frustrated when this happens, but I embrace her “broodiness,” because it makes my job a whole lot easier. Why spend the time, trouble, and money buying fertilized eggs, baby

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 2 min

“We had a beautiful rooster who hated EVERYONE except the little old neighbor lady who he would go up to for a hug and a cuddle. So strange. The garbage men left a note on the gate saying they wouldn’t collect the trash due to a vicious animal. Heck

American Survival Guide

Lecture de 1 min

ADM's Animal Nutrition's Pen Pals Poultry: a guide to feed products for various types of chickens https://www.admanimalnutrition.com/webcenter/ portal/ADMAnimalNutrition/pages_feed/poultry/poultrybroilers Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C

Capper's Farmer

Lecture de 3 min

FOR as long as I can remember, chickens have been a renewable natural resource, similar to such things as sunshine or television signals. When I was a kid growing up on our humble South Dakota dairy farm, our parents would purchase a hundred baby chi

Earth Garden

Lecture de 2 min

Q Why won’t my chicken lay in the nesting boxes provided and how can I convince her to? Lillian B. A Sometimes if there are too many chickens per number of nesting boxes they will alternate laying locations. If the access isn’t easy, there’s a bro

Australian Women’s Weekly NZ

Lecture de 3 min

Roosters divide people. Most people dislike their loud crowing, sometimes as early as 3am. And others say they are vicious, nasty things who will attack their owners and bite the hand that feeds. But some people, like me, cannot get enough of them. M

The Christian Science Monitor

Lecture de 3 min

My girls, who are 6 and 8, have an animal problem. I can blame only myself, since my poor husband wants nothing to do with muddy dogs, shedding cats, and messy chickens. He believes joy is found in peaceful cleanliness. He likes order. Creatures who

The Makers

Lecture de 3 min

There is plenty of information about getting started with chickens, whether it be on the web, magazines, books or advice from your neighbour. The best advice is keep it simple and start small. One thing is for sure, you will constantly learn somethin

Earth Garden

Lecture de 3 min

Q We have never had chooks and finished the coop this week and my husband has purchased ten hens and two roosters. What should we feed them? We grow food for a living so there’s a big variety of fresh vegies we can feed them, but should I supplement

BBC Wildlife Magazine

Lecture de 1 min

Incubating birds turn their eggs but not, as is commonly thought, to prevent the embryos from sticking to the shell, or to warm the eggs evenly. Instead, turning is to ensure that the embryo can use all of the albumen (egg white) during development.

Shooting Times & Country

Lecture de 3 min

If your passion is wild bird keepering then you, like me, will simply love this time of the year. For those who do not need to rely on a wild stock of birds to create your season, you are definitely missing out on the true nature of the term “gamekee

Country Life

Lecture de 1 min

• In chickens, eggshell colour is often related to the shade of the bird’s ear lobes: red-eared hens generally produce brown eggs (except for the delightfully named Easter eggers, which lay blue or green eggs) and white-eared hens tend to lay white •

GRIT Country Skills Series

Lecture de 10 min

By Lindsay Hodge Here on Haven Homestead, we keep a number of different animals. We have meat rabbits, ducks, a goat, a cat, a dog, and of course, chickens. The one thing that surprised me about the poultry was the differences in anatomy between them

Good Organic Gardening

Lecture de 4 min

Words & photos Megg Miller Now that incubators are easy to come by, lots of people are trying their hands at hatching chicks. For some, it’s a successful project but for others, it can end in disappointment. There are, however, few experiences as mag

Good Organic Gardening

Lecture de 4 min

Words & photos Megg Miller We all know the modern super hen: the red-brown and silver-plumaged hens that are ubiquitous in backyards and commercial operations. Some go by the name ISA Brown, others Hy-Line Brown or Lohmann Brown. They’re friendly hen

Garden & Gun

Lecture de 3 min

Some people raise chickens as a hobby; some raise them for food. Paul Bradshaw raises chickens to champion conservation. Or as he puts it, “to protect poultry genetics as a critical hedge against rapid environmental change.” As a result, his hundred-