Farm Animals: Your Guide to Raising Livestock [Paperback]

Jeanie Peck-Whiting (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2002

From lists of fundamental start-up equipment to advice on charting income and expenses, this book guides small farmers through feeding, sheltering, and breeding cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, ducks, and chickens. Breeders and farmers learn the full scope of husbandry and care, including which records should be maintained -- health records, breeding journals, milk sheets, and family trees -- to which ointments, sprays, and syringes should be kept in the animal first aid box. Included are farrowing charts and pregnancy diaries that detail each step of gestation. Extensive details and instructions are provided on castration, giving iron, docking tails, and caring for newborns. Farmers' accounts, photos, a glossary of terminology, and a list of resources offer support to experienced and novice farmers alike.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These two new books are targeted at anyone with a couple of acres (and even city dwellers where ordinances permit) who would like to raise a few farm animals for meat, milk, eggs, or simply enjoyment. Both volumes are intended for beginners and are written by nonexperts who nonetheless can offer a great deal of practical information and advice based on their own experiences. Peck-Whiting and her family have dabbled in raising chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats, pigs, and cows on their country homestead in the mountains of northern Washington. In Farm Animals, she devotes at least a chapter or two to each of these species while saving the most space for pigs. (She previously wrote Pigs and Other Stories.) The author crams her book with personal anecdotes, enthusiastically sharing the successes and failures of her ventures in a casual, down-to-earth style. While Farm Animals gives readers a relatively quick survey of a variety of livestock and poultry and is best employed as supplemental reading material, Living with Chickens focuses entirely on one species and stands on its own as an excellent introduction to chicken basics for newcomers. Rossier draws heavily on his own experiences raising fowl in Vermont and fits in additional chicken facts as he gives detailed "how-to" advice on housing, hatching, buying, feeding, and butchering. He even includes a chapter on children and chickens. Photographer Hansen (My Life as a Dog) ably captures the essence of chickens at home in various barnyards and other Vermont locations. Both titles are recommended for public libraries. (Index of Living with Chickens not seen.) William H. Wiese, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

See review from Midwest Book Review soon... -- Midwest Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: On The Farm Press; 1st edition (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971617406
• ISBN-13: 978-0971617407
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,271,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Probably not worth your time, December 30, 2004

By 

Mark A. Fox "markafox" (Calgary, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Farm Animals: Your Guide to Raising Livestock (Paperback)

Although the author's love of animals, her family, and farm life infuse the text of "Farm Animals", in my honest opinion, it's not enough to make it worth reading. This is underscored by the existence of such good alternatives.

My first complaint is the poor editing and proof-reading. The book is poorly organized and it's a rare page that doesn't have a grammatical error or typo that really does get in the way of the reader's understanding. The author's conversational tone often stretches what would be a short concise statement into a long and hard to understand exchange between author and reader. A serious investment in editing followed by thorough proof-reading would go a long way to improving this book.

But I can forgive poor writing and editing if there is some useful information or entertaining stories in the text. After all, I believe the modern small-scale farm is a worthy subject. The problem with "Farm Animals" is that there just isn't much that is useful or entertaining here. The book is mostly stories drawn from the author's farm, but rather than being entertaining or enlightening, many of the stories are downright horrifying.

An example is an account (the bulk of the text is made up of these stories) about Rosie, the author's sow. The author watches while Rosie gets more and more agitated as her male piglets are castrated nearby and (at the same time) a visitor antagonizes her. Eventually the sow turns on the author's daughter, trapping her in the shelter, and then attacks the antagonistic visitor. This story wouldn't surprise anyone familiar with pigs... Well, it is surprising that anyone working with pigs would make such obvious mistakes and then write about them in a book about how to raise farm animals, but the fact that the saw acted as she did is far from shocking.

These stories do illustrate mistakes that the reader should try to avoid, and to the author's credit she does eventually make her point after each story's conclusion. However, it is surprising how many mistakes the author made in caring for her animals.

The book is definitely not competitive as a reference. Any of the Storey's Guides would be much more useful to the beginning livestock farmer or hobbyist. Infact, much of the books factual content will seem eerily familiar to anyone who has read the relevant Storey's Guides. There is some useful information here, it's just that the information is in no way complete.

In my opinion, this book would have been better if the author completely forgoed any intent to write an informative book. As a collection of funny stories about what *not* to do on the farm, it could have value. Even as a collection of stories about her farm raising experiences, it would be better, but by using stories to illustrate points about raising animals, it just doesn't work.

The book does paint a picture of a family trying to succeed at something they love. The author obviously holds a special affection for, and a desire to write about, both her children and her animals. A particularly important lesson that it does contain is to investing time early in an animal's life to help develope a (two-way) bond between itself and its caretaker. This is a point made in "Farm Animals" that I haven't seen given due attention elsewhere.

For the dedicated reader of literature about modern small-farms, this book has some value. But, in my opinion, most others should give it a pass.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars this is really awful, January 2, 2004

By 

M. Ahrens "maggieliz" (York PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Farm Animals: Your Guide to Raising Livestock (Paperback)

This has got to be the worst book on "farming" I have ever read. Amazingly, the cover reads "Compared to All Creatures Great and Small" well yeah it compares...it compares POORLY.

If this were merely a memoir, I'd let the poor grammar and randomly-generated thoughts pass...after all, I'm not one to stifle creativity.

However, when someone passes off copious "borrowing" from Storey publications, inter-dispersed with reminiscing from their barnyard, and chock-full of misleading or mistaken "facts"...that's too much.

For instance:

Pg 37: "Make sure every animal has clean, fresh water daily. You wouldn't want to drink dirty defecated water..."
(Is she referring to drinking water fouled with feces? You'd think an author would phrase themselves better)

Pg 69: "If you stagger breeding dates, you could have milk all year long" misleading... does (except for the Pygmy breed) only come into heat in the fall - winter. I have never heard of any Dairy Goat breeding in the summer.

Pg 220: 1 gallon of milk does NOT weigh 8 lbs...A gallon of milk with 2% butterfat weighs about 10.2 lbs (by the way- NO mention of pasteurizing milk apparently this author is fine with Tuberculosis, Brucellosis, and Toxoplasmosis...all transmittable to people in milk, if your animals are infected)

Pg 246 "I keep a cheap pair of scissors on hand in case I need to cut away the excess skin around a wound. The scissors I use have a flat and a sharp edge" ?!?! Have you ever used a scalpel blade??? Try it sometime!

Overall, it is a difficult read given the poor grammar, fragmentary sentences, and general randomness of the (albeit few) nuggets of real information.

As an aside....I do like "chatty" books, and an informal read can be fun. This is neither.

A much better buy is Backyard Livestock by Steven Thomas. Don't waste your money with this one...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars There are MUCH better books of this type, February 8, 2006

By 

Lori Freeman "rosaphile" (Milford, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Farm Animals: Your Guide to Raising Livestock (Paperback)

I've been avidly reading all the small-farming books I can get my hands on over the past few months. I was pleased when I ran across this one at my local library, since it was not one I had seen before. I soon found out why I hadn't seen it mentioned elsewhere, however....

The writing is definitely subpar, not least because of the grammatical and spelling errors sprinkled liberally throughout. I couldn't help but wonder if the book had been edited at all - if it has, the editor should perhaps consider another line of work. It is very poorly organized and incomplete. The personal stories were uninspiring and, truth be told, did nothing to enhance the author's credibility.

I would venture to say that it would be nearly impossible for a novice to successfully keep livestock of any kind using this book as a guide. One would be far better off reading _Barnyard in Your Backyard_ and/or _Backyard Livestock_, followed up by the various Storey's guides for specific types of livestock (e.g., _Storey's Guide to Raising [Dairy Goats, Pigs, Chickens, etc.]_) for far better organized and complete information.