Anyone Can Raise Chickens —You can start baby chicks off right by following this expert advice. 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.

How to Raise Chickens — Raising chickens from chicks is a fun and easy backyard project. Most people start with day-old chicks purchased in the spring from a  local farm store or mail-order catalog. But mail orders usually require a minimum shipment of about 25 chicks (so the chicks can keep each other warm en route).

You Can Raise Chickens in Your Backyard — Find out how to raise chickens legally in urban areas. Whether you have rural acreage, a suburban backyard or an urban lot, you may be able to raise chickens. No kidding. Keeping a few hens in your backyard will give you fresh eggs that are significantly more nutritious than what you normally buy at the supermarket.

Incredible Homestead Chickens — Easy-to-keep, chickens will provide delicious eggs and meat, plus bug control, fertilizer and tillage. Eggs from backyard flocks are of a quality and nutritional density that those dependent on the supermarket can only dream of. Necessary culling (of excess males and non-productive females) graces the table with flavorful meat.

Secret of the Rooster's Crow — This rural resident's morning ritual has little to do with time. He is an icon of the morning. In most every rural scene he crows to greet the dawn. He crosses cultural and geographical boundaries as the harbinger of daylight. He says “Cock-a-doodle-do” in English, “Kikeriki” in German, “Kuklooku” in Urdu, and “Ko-ke-kok-ko-o” in Japanese.

Nothing to Brood About — Raising chicks from scratch – or nearly scratch – isn’t all that difficult. Folks have been doing it for thousands of years, and most pulled it off without all the technology we have today.

Adventures with Mail-order Chickens — One summer in the heyday of the back-to-the-land movement, a friend witnesses how the pages of glossy poultry catalogs lure a pair of inexperienced farmers into an outrageous chicken-shopping spree.

Adventures in Chicken Keeping — Assigned to be “the family chicken foreman” by his parents, Jerry Schleicher learned as a boy all the trying habits of a flock of free-range fowl – before the word had even been termed. The humorist reflects upon the simple, stubborn and often downright nasty nature of poultry, but concedes that he values no meal higher than a plate of his wife’s fried chicken.

Build the Perfect Chicken Coop — With this unique design, anyone can keep a few chickens, even in small backyards. Chickens are every bit as fun and easy to care for as dogs or cats, plus they give you great farm-fresh eggs. The biggest challenge is keeping the birds safe from predators, and at the same time allowing them to enjoy a natural diet of grains, greens and insects.

MOTHER's Mini Coop — Keep backyard chickens with class in mini-coop designed by the folks behind Mother Earth News magazine. There are so many good reasons to keep chickens that even city folks really should have a few birds. But too many backyard chicken operations look like something plucked out of a John Steinbeck novel, and that's a stumbling block for many.

Adventures in Chickensitting: The Chicken Tractor Coop — Few things are friendlier to an urban chicken farmer than the chicken tractor, a coop-on-wheels that gives you the freedom to move your chickens from one part of the yard to another.

Chicken Brooder in a Box — An easy-to-make chicken brooder for growing chicks provides a lightweight, low-cost alternative to commercially available rearing systems. It provides easy access to your birds, and it won’t leave you with a bulky brooder to store until your next batch of day-old chicks arrives. We’re talking about a brooder made from cardboard boxes.

Heritage Chicken Cooking Competition — We support heritage breeds because they serve as an important role in the preservation of genetic diversity. Heritage chicken breeds are typically a good choice for a backyard or homestead flock. Heritage breed animals often produce more flavorful meat. But cooking heritage chicken is different than cooking modern industrial chicken.

Raising Chickens for Meat — Want to ensure that the chicken on your plate was raised and processed humanely? Do it yourself!

Chicken-Apple Sausage Fry-Up — Cast-iron skillets and sausage just seem made for each other. This recipe takes the flavor of chicken-apple sausage and combines it with peppers, cheese and zucchini to create a fast, tasty batch of stovetop breakfast fixings.

The Business of Eating Chicken — Processing chickens is best done in the company of similarly committed and caring people. Our 2009 Community Chicken project came to a close last October when eight people gathered at an Osage County, Kansas, farm to kill and clean about 30 commercial-type broilers raised on range for nearly 12 weeks.

Meet Real Free-Range Eggs — The results are in: Eggs from hens allowed to peck on pasture are a heck of a lot better than those from chickens raised in cages!

How Do Your Eggs Stack Up? — Whether you live in the city or country, here’s how to find healthy, delicious, farm-fresh eggs — and even raise a few happy chickens of your own.

Best Chickens for Mother's Mini Coop — The best chicken varieties for MOTHER's Mini-Coop, including buttercups, brown leghorns, hamburgs and anconas.

Enjoy Heritage Chickens — Chickens are a perfect choice for homestead livestock; they don’t require much space or special equipment, and keeping a small, backyard flock is an easy and fun way to expand home food production. You can serve your family the freshest (and most nutritious) eggs they have ever eaten, and you can re-create the rich flavors of your grandmother’s homegrown/homemade fried chicken.

Go Ahead, Get Guineas! — Any bird with a call like "Buckwheat!" and a head like a helmet needs some redeeming quality. In the case of the guinea fowl, which have both the call and the oddly shaped, nearly bald noggin, their appetite for ticks may be their meal ticket in more than one way.

Why the Midget White Turkey is the Perfect Homestead Turkey — Breeder Bernard Wentworth, who holds doctorates in poultry science and avian physiology, shares his thoughts on these special, great-tasting, little turkeys.

How Eight Heritage Turkeys Kicked a Butterball's Butt — Approximately 70 people gathered at Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, Va., to participate in a blind tasting comparing one industrial and eight heritage varieties of turkey. The food professionals, chefs, food writers and food connoisseurs in attendance voted for different varieties, but all of the heritage birds came out ahead of the Butterball.

Homegrown Turkeys are Terrific! — Beautiful and helpful in controlling pests, turkeys are easy to raise and fun to watch. Plus by raising turkeys at home, you'll have farm-fresh turkey for holiday meals.

A History of the Midget White Turkey — In the early 1960s, a commercial interest developed in creating miniature versions of the broad breasted large white and bronze turkeys. Midget white turkeys would emerge from cross-breeding at the University of Massachusetts, and the variety would be preserved though careful control of the bird’s pedigree.

Marvelous Muscovies — Fun, easy to care for and a great source of meat, Muscovy ducks also can help control flies and other pests on your homestead. With its head dominated by brilliant red, fleshy outgrowths called caruncles, the male Muscovy probably wouldn’t win a beauty pageant for domestic ducks. But that doesn’t bother fans like Corine de Wit of Reva, Va., who began raising this unusual species of waterfowl in the 1970s, when she lived in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa.

Perfect Chickens — Every farm and most households in America used to play host to at least a small flock of laying hens – doing so was, after all, part of the program for feeding one’s family. Those flocks also supplied plenty of meat for the table, either as old hens long past their reproductive prime or cockerels of virtually any age.

Dare to Dabble with Ducks — If you are looking for a perky companion that will entertain, feed and help take care of garden pests, ducks are a great choice.

Keeping Quails: Newly Hatched Baby Quails — Meet Porkchop the coturnix quail (also known as Japanese quail). along with siblings Doug, Beebe, Skeeter and Porkchop. A city-dweller finds these birds have personalities as distinct as the markings that distinguish them – and their individuality come out in the photos he takes of them.

Keeping Quails: Gender Differentiation — Unlike chickens, which can take as long as six months to begin laying, quails will lay, at the earliest, at six weeks of age. As a first-time quail owner continues to tend his flock within the city limits, he’s delighted to discover one female laying at six weeks – and continuing to produce lovely, gourmet-quality eggs each day afterward.