Books from Robert Plamondon's Publishing Company, Norton Creek Press. Success With Baby Chicks Robert Plamondon More Information Gardening Without Work Ruth Stout More Information Poultry Production Leslie E. Card More Information Genetics of the Fowl F. B. Hutt More Information Feeding Poultry G.F. Heuser More Information

Sign Up For My Free Poultry Newsletter!

Practical and Funny!

My name is Robert Plamondon, and I keep a flock of 600 free-range hens and my wife raises over 1,000 pastured broilers and turkeys per year on our 37-acre farm in Blodgett, Oregon. We do this the old-fashioned way, with portable houses on grass pasture. I learned old-fashioned poultry farming by reading all the old-time poultry books and farm magazines I could get my hands on, giving the ideas a modern twist, and putting them into practice. Grandpa's generation knew a lot about small farms, and a lot of these ideas have been lost.

For example: the Ohio Experiment Station developed an insulated chick brooder for 200 chicks that can be built in a couple of hours, keeps the chicks far more comfortable, and uses a third as much electricity as ordinary overhead heat lamps. It was used for decades on thousands of farms all over the country. Forgotten. Chicken coops need a lot more ventilation than people think, and they need it year-round. Our instincts tell us to shut the house up tight, but our instincts are wrong. Or take the real ins and outs of deep litter for chickens. It's not a compost pile -- you have to manage it differently. Forgotten. And it develops valuable nutritional properties through fermentation and anti-coccidiosis properties through the colonization of coccidia-eating microbes. Forgotten. And you can confine your chickens and keep predators away with a single strand of electric fence wire if you know the trick. Forgotten.

Mother hen and chicks on my farm.

So sign up for my free newsletter, which contains tons of stuff like this. Every issue contains news from the farm, helpful hints, and other useful information. The first issue of every month contains a to-do list of poultry tasks for the coming month. I include a lot of techniques from farm magazines and poultry books from 1900-1960, when the accumulated wisdom of millions of small farmers regularly made its way into print.

I keep the newsletters short, useful, and funny. Check out the newsletters in the archive to see what I mean, and sign up for the newsletter below. It's free, so share with your friends!

Sign Up For My Free Monthly e-Newsletter! Full of news and tips from my farm. Your E-mail Address: Action: Subscribe Unsubscribe Read back issues.

Portable turkey pen.

ogle Code for Remarketing Tag -->