This is the first in a series of articles about incubating chicken eggs. In this series, I’ll show what we’re doing while we incubate two batches of Black Australorp eggs in small, styrofoam table-top incubators. Selecting and Candling the Eggs We went through first and selected the eggs to use. We’ve already set aside any […]
2017 Homestead Heritage Fair Introduction to Sustainable Poultry – Part 3
In Part 2 we talked about flock size and the water needs of chicks, now we finish looking at meeting the nutritional needs of the chickens. Now let's look at the other nutritional requirements. First. Chickens are omnivores, they like a variety of feed. When they are foraging, they are happy. When they are full, they stop. [...]
2017 Homestead Heritage Fair Introduction to Sustainable Poultry – Part 2
In Part 1 we talked about the importance of the soil, now we dig deeper into using the birds to improve the soil and meeting the nutritional needs of the chickens. After the animal impact we no longer have a sterile hard pan field, we are able to grow a very diverse cover crop to [...]
2017 Homestead Heritage Fair Introduction to Sustainable Poultry – Part 1
2017 Homestead Heritage Fair Introduction to Sustainable Poultry At one of my Sustainable Poultry talks at the Homestead Heritage Fair, the pictures were not showing. Here is the talk with the pictures in place. Once you've begun to raise poultry, another important question is how to raise them more sustainably. This brings up questions like: [...]
2018 Selective Bred Chicks – Where I talk about the 2018 hatching season
We've learned a lot raising and selling selectively bred poultry for coming up on 5 years. These chickens are not for everyone. They definitely are not for the first time chicken owner. These are not the birds to buy if you want a small backyard flock. A backyard flock needs pullets that will be good [...]