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Selecting the Best Chicken Egg Incubator

baby chicks in Incubator

Sooner or later nearly every poultry keeper will want to try hatching eggs in a mechanical device known as an incubator. With the huge number of different egg incubators now available, selecting a model can be daunting. In choosing the best model to fit your needs, consider each of these features:     Price First […]

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How to Help Your Chickens Stay Warm in Winter

Rooster in Snow

Whether or not your chickens experience cold stress in winter depends on a number of factors, including how rapidly the temperature drops, how cold it gets, how long it stays cold and the chickens’ ability to stay dry and out of the wind. A well-feathered bird can be perfectly comfortable at an air temperature of […]

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How Chickens Keep Themselves Warm in Winter

orpington hens

Chickens have a naturally high body temperature, averaging around 106°F, which allows them to remain active despite cold weather. As the temperature drops, a chicken’s metabolism speeds up to keep the bird warm.   At the same time, the flow of blood to a chicken’s legs decreases to minimize the escape of body heat from […]

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Can Backyard Chickens Alleviate Poverty?

Pakistan Desi

Giving chickens to underprivileged women will lift them out of poverty. So says Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, who is getting a lot of flak from his country’s political elite. But consider this: Chickens were once the savior of poverty-stricken rural Americans, according to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace (1933-1940).   In the 1900s, […]

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Which Chicken Started Laying Eggs?

First Egg

When you raise hens from baby chicks, finding their first eggs can be exciting. Chickens don’t all start laying at the same time, so you’ll likely find an occasional small egg, then maybe one each day. Before long you’ll be finding multiple eggs daily. But since most chickens don’t lay an egg every day, how […]

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Blue Egg Chicken: Ameraucana or Americana?

Ameraucana-Eggs

How do you spell the chicken breed that lays eggs with blue shells: Ameraucana or Americana? If you said Ameraucana, you are correct. So how did this breed get such an oddly spelled name? To answer that question requires reviewing the breed’s origin.   Araucana In 1925 a breed of chicken discovered in Chile was […]

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Broiler Chickens Infographic

Click on the image to enlarge In the United States, approximately 9 billion chickens are raised for their meat each year! About 25,000 family farmers have production contracts with the broiler chicken companies. Approximately 95% of broiler chickens are produced on these farms while only 5% are raised on company-owned farms. The U.S.A. has the […]

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Breed Spotlight: Brahma Chickens

Brahma Hen

If you spend much time on YouTube, you may remember seeing a massive Brahma rooster strutting his stuff in a video that went viral last year. We received quite a bit of interest in Brahma chickens as a result, so we figured this would be a great opportunity to provide our readers with a little […]

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