Customer Reviews

Day Range Poultry: Every Chicken Owner's Guide to Grazing Gardens & Improving Pastures

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I just finished Day Range Poultry and am thoroughly impressed. They not only tell you what Day Range is, but compare it to other methods of raising birds listing the pros and cons of each. If you want to start raising birds, especially large numbers of birds, everything is here, in detail. How to set up a Day Range system for broilers, layers, and turkeys, including shelters, what worked and what didn't for them, feeds and feeding, protection from predators fencing and moving about the pasture for optimum manure spreading.
They talk a lot about designing a rotation system using pastured poultry with crops and other species to optimize your potentional profits. Everything is geared to optimizing the use of the land without high $ input while at the same time maintaining healthy, happy animals and increasing land fertility. They also include a section on incubating eggs with a troubleshooting chart when things go wrong. The section on processing is complete, from choosing equipment to the actual processing of your birds for home or for sale. You don't need another book to get started, all the info needed is here, with an extensive resource guide. I would highly recomend this book to anyone who is serious about rasing poultry for themselves or as a small home based business.

This is an excellent book. I just recently started raising chickens and was disappointed at the information available at the local library. I purchased Chickens In Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide , Day Range Poultry: Every Chicken Owner's Guide to Grazing Gardens and Improving Pastures , and Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens: Care / Feeding / Facilities . Recent reading at the library about pasture raising livestock got me interested in this title. The volume they discuss is a little more than I was interested in, but that is not the fault of the book. It is well written, an easy read, and comprehensive in the amount of information it contains. The only thing I could add to Claudia Campbell's comments is that information is also included in business organization, strategies and marketing. If you go into poultry on this scale, it has to make a profit to be sustainable. I agree this book is a complete resource.

As for my ambitions, I found Chickens In Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide an excellent introductory text and Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens: Care / Feeding / Facilities adequate for my needs. Both these books have ample reviews and I could not add to them. We live in a small rural area and the library depends on local donations. Chickens In Your Backyard and Day Range Poultry will be donated to the library. Storey's will be kept as a reference.

This is a well written book with plenty of info on tested methods as well as the latest thinking and market-wise advise. It is mostly applicable to the larger scale operatons, though. I wanted something for a small number of chickens--one or two dozen--and so found this less useful. I should have bought a different book because of the scale of my needs, but that is not the book's fault.

This is a great book for commercial chicken operations. This book is not much use for the small flock owner. For small flock or backyard flock owners I recommend "The Chicken Tractor" by the same authors..