Need versatility in your broiler or heritage pen set up? Anne Gordon recommends using snap together wire pet exercise pen panels. You can read more about Anne’s whole Broiler Set-up here. Wire Pet Pens I’m a huge fan of 42-inch wire pet exercise pens because they are versatile, easy to use and can be quickly […]

Learn how to set-up your Cornish Cross broiler operation for versatility and efficiency. Anne Gordon shares her tips so your set up can reduce and even eliminate health issues and the sudden death “flip.” [Unless otherwise noted, all photos by author] Each spring and fall, I raise a batch of 25 Cornish Cross pullets. My feed […]

Joel Salatin a.k.a. Chicken Man is both an experienced broiler farmer and businessman. Here he shares some of his economic wisdom and the nitty gritty of farm finances. Read and learn lots. The Gross Margin Pastured broilers were my ticket into fulltime farming. For that and many more reasons, I’m still in love with pastured broilers. In […]

Second in a three part series. Dr. Jacquie Jacob shares her research on how to effectively use heritage breeds for small-scale meat production operations.  As discussed in Part 1 of this three part series, we ran a study at the University of Kentucky poultry research farm comparing three heritage breeds (Black Australorp, Barred Plymouth Rock […]

College Farms are training grounds for students who want to learn about farm management, from small organic operations, to large industrial farms.  C.J. Walke is the manager of Peggy Rockefeller Farms, part of The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. He shares with us the history of the farm and specifics of its […]

First of a three part series. Dr. Jacquie Jacob shares her research on how to effectively use heritage breeds for small-scale meat production operations. Here’s a link to Part 2. Small-Scale Chicken Production Small-scale broiler chicken enterprises are often competing with large commercial companies for a share of the consumer market. But there are ways […]

Joel Salatin (aka Chicken Man) is a familiar name among chicken keepers, small poultry business owners, and homestead rebels. We asked Joel to share with our readers how he got started with broiler chickens and what keeps him going. Beginnings On Sept. 24, 1982, I was a married 25-year-old with a 1-year-old son, doing the town […]

by Hank Will — Photographed by Suzanne Griepentrog At the end of the original Community Chickens Project in 2009, headed up by the editors of Grit and Mother Earth News magazines, Grit editor, Hank Will invited several project contributors to his Osage County Kansas farm to teach them how to humanely clean and package the […]