Life on the Farm
Goat hoof trimming shears are available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over the decades I’ve spent a small fortune buying and trying just about every style touted as being the best goat hoof trimmer ever. Some of...
Controlling incubation humidity for a successful hatch ensures that moisture evaporates from poultry eggs at just the right rate. Humidity is a measure of the amount of moisture in the air. At a given temperature, the drier the air, the...
Finding a good recipe for homemade kosher dill pickles can be a gamble. I’ve gone through many recipes that didn’t quite hit the mark and some that were downright awful. Finally I discovered a recipe that’s perfect. For starters, these...
When deer congregate under the apple tree and crows drop apples in the driveway for a peck fest, it’s time to make apple jelly. The deer and crows tell us the apples are just starting to ripen. Apples that aren’t...
Supposedly a newborn goat that walks on pasterns doesn’t need its legs splinted. The theory is that the kid will grow out of it. But why take a chance? Causes of Weak Pasterns One of the two main causes of...
Eggs laid on the coop floor, appropriately called “floor eggs,” easily get dirty or cracked. They are unsanitary to eat and unsuitable for hatching. Plus a cracked egg is likely to get broken, making a mess. Hens will sample the...
Sweet potatoes were considered to be a winter holiday treat in my family, until we moved to Tennessee. Now they have become a basic staple. The main reason we learned how to grow sweet potatoes is that regular potatoes don’t...
Taste buds determine what chickens can and can’t taste, which in turn determines what a chicken prefers to eat. Taste buds therefore have an important impact on a chicken’s health and productivity. Until 1904, researchers believed birds didn’t have any...
The cecum is a blind pouch that branches off the juncture of the small and large intestine. Humans have only one, but chickens have two. A chicken’s cecal droppings differ from regular intestinal droppings. The word cecum comes from the...
Like most newbie goat owners, I started out with the notion that bottle feeding and weaning dairy goat kids is mandatory. After several years of keeping Nubian dairy goats it dawned on me that I wasn’t doing my goats or...
