Enjoy a weekend breakfast featuring eggs, bacon, and honey from your own chickens, pigs, and bees, or a holiday meal with your own heritage-breed turkey as the main attraction. Gail Damerow covers everything you need to successfully raise your own farm animals, from selecting the right breeds to producing delicious fresh milk, cheese, honey, eggs, and meat. Even with just a small plot of land, you can become more self-sufficient, save money, and enjoy healthy, delicious animal products.
Also available in this series: The Backyard Homestead, The Backyard Homestead Book of Building Projects, The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner, and The Backyard Homestead Book of Kitchen Know-How. Companion to Storey's best-selling The Backyard Homestead, this book delves deeper into raising animals for meat, milk, eggs, cheese, and other dairy products.
Gail Damerow has written extensively on raising chickens and other livestock, growing fruits and vegetables, and related rural know-how in more than a dozen books, including What's Killing My Chickens? and the best-selling Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, The Chicken Encyclopedia, The Chicken Health Handbook, and Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks. Damerow is a contributor to Chickens and Hobby Farms magazines and a regular blogger for Cackle Hatchery. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, where they operate a family farm with poultry and dairy goats, a sizable garden, and a small orchard. Visit her online at gaildamerow.com.
Contents
Preface
Introducing Backyard Farm Animals
How Many Animals Can You Keep?
Chickens
Turkeys
Ducks & Geese
Rabbits
Honey Bees
Goats
Sheep
Pigs
Dairy Cows & Beef Cattle
Glossary
Resources
Credits
Index
The Best Breakfast You'll Ever Eat, Courtesy of Your Backyard Animals:
• Gather fresh eggs for fluffy omelets.
• Stuff homemade sausages with meat.
• Fill your omelet with tangy, creamy cheese.
• Stir sweet honey into tea or coffee.
• Fry a steak or bacon as a savory side.
• Top off your meal with a cold glass of milk. Breakfast isn't the only meal you'll enjoy from your backyard farm...
Imagine the satisfaction of feeding your family wholesome eggs, milk, meat, and honey produced by animals raised organically and humanely in your backyard. On as little land as one-tenth of an acre, you can raise healthy, productive barnyard animals and take a big step toward food independence.
Learn how to:
• Raise chickens in brooder boxes
• Determine the freshness of eggs hidden in the backyard
• Roast a duck or goose to perfection
• Make goat-milk yogurt
• Interpret everyday sheep behavior
• Harvest honey
• Raise your own Thanksgiving turkey
• Manage your beef cattle to produce the best-tasting meatIncludes Full-Color at-a-Glance Breed Guide
The animal-raising companion to The Backyard Homestead.
