Home is where the quail are. With modern farming, there are many ways to raise an animal. There isn’t a right or wrong way, rather, we all learn what works for our space and needs through trial and error. Environment plays a significant role in how we choose to house our animals. What works in […]

A few precautions will keep your chickens safe and warm during winter.   Caring for your backyard poultry flock in winter can be especially challenging. Frigid temps, snow, and wind can all play havoc with our normal chicken care routine and with your birds’ health. Depending on your climate, winter can present some trying conditions, […]

Predators can’t be avoided, but coop doors can help. -Advertisement- If you’ve had chickens for very long, there’s a good possibility that you’ve lost at least one or two birds to a predator. Losing a favorite hen is never fun, and unfortunately sometimes the first sign of predator problems is when we lose that first […]

Craft your own guinea incubator, and learn how to troubleshoot their hatching. (All photos by author.) Having incubated guineas three times now, I can attest that—despite the hard shells on their eggs—they aren’t any more difficult to hatch than chickens are. Not even when you use a cooler to keep them warm as I do! […]

Make sure your chickens have clean and free water with this DIY waterer idea stolen… uh… borrowed from Frank Hyman. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop in the hen pen that’s fit to drink, because it’s often mucked up with dirt, debris, or chicken poop. Yuck! Theoretically, keeping chickens can be a lot of […]

Maat van Uitert recommends calm, friendly chicken breeds to work with kids. For children, building a relationship with a pet can help them develop language skills, provide a fun sensory experience, and encourage the stewardship of another life. Over the years, I’ve found that chickens get children excited the most. Kids know eggs are food, […]

Movable boards for poultry droppings help with cleanup and let you use chicken manure for composting. Liz Fulghum explains how to easily build a drop board. All photos by author. It’s an irrefutable fact: Chickens poop, and they poop a lot. In the coop, their favorite place to poop is off the edge of the […]

Laws tend to be about following rules, something that many homesteaders aren’t necessarily keen on embracing. Matt Wilkinson shares his take on existing small-scale poultry keeping and chicken processing laws and how you can make them work for you. Skeptic and Solution Finder I’ve never enjoyed being told what to do, especially if I could […]

Joel Salatin (aka Chicken Man), Author of Pastured Poultry Profits, writes about the pros and cons of U.S. government poultry processing regulations. Legislation Protecting Small-Scale Poultry Producers One of the early poultry processing laws in the U.S. was passed by Congress in 1957. The Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) requires that any poultry intended to […]

Nurture your nascent covey in this cozy hand-built brooder box by Kelly Bohling.  All photos by author. Getting Started and Re-Purposing I’ve used several homemade brooders for brooding and raising quail over the years. Storage tote models work well, especially if you’re just starting out. After brooding several generations of chicks, though, I decided to […]