Poultry Breeds is a fresh field guide of feathered friends with stunning photos highlighting the beauty and unique attributes of 104 chicken, duck, goose, and turkey breeds. Each profile outlines the bird's history, physical characteristics, and common uses, with specially noted fun facts sprinkled throughout. This pocket-size, browsable guide is easy to use, and author Carol Ekarius knows her birds: she has been writing about livestock for nearly 20 years and has raised her own for decades.

'a delightful and funny memoir of her family's crazy life in the English countryside. Perfect escapist reading for these locked-down times.' - SALMAN RUSHDIE 'a heartwarming tale of country living' - SUNDAY EXPRESS 'a charming memoir and a perfect choice for these unsettling times' - DEVON LIFE 'A total joy... enchanting, hilarious and vivid... Beautifully written, richly informative...' - LIZ CALDER 'A gem ... A heart-warming memoir of moving to the glorious Cornish countryside and taking up farming is the perfect antidote to city life.' - NIKOLA SCOTT "A love letter to the British countryside...a wonderfully earthy story of fresh Cornish air...an adventure from start to finish." - TOWN & COUNTRY "A light-hearted account of 30 years of trial and error on a Cornish farm...I loved every minute..." - SAGA Ever dream of packing up and escaping to a simpler life on the land, just the Cornish landscape and a few cows and goats rising up to greet you each day? When Rosanne and her husband left city life for the Cornwall idyll they knew little of farming, the seasons and milking; but over time they found their way, rising to each new challenge and embracing all that the land gave them. Growing Goats and Girls lovingly and invitingly charts the rural, hardworking and joyfully haphazard lives of Rosanne and her husband as they escape London to live off the land. In their tumbled-down farmhouse in Cornwall, they learn to rear goats, chickens, cows, bees - and two children - get to grips with unruly machinery and cantankerous farmers, and chart the changing seasons in glorious countryside over thirty years. Heart-warming and uplifting in its celebration of the simple things, this earthy portrait of life on the land taps into our collective imagination. After all, who hasn't dreamed of new beginnings, escaping into nature and living more simply. Growing Goats and Girls reminds us to appreciate the fleeting, timeless moments of beauty, nature and the simple comforts of family life.

There are probably more deer in the United Kingdom now than there have been in the past thousand years. As they have increased in numbers and distribution so, too, have the issues associated with them. Practical Deer Management offers candid and comprehensive advice for anyone who has to deal with deer and the issues they present, be they gardeners suffering attacks on their flower beds, foresters looking to prevent damage to newly planted trees, or landowners with larger scale problems. While a wealth of information on deer exists already, a career in teaching countryside managers quickly made it apparent that there was a need for a straightforward and comprehensive volume that is accessible to all. Written to be clear and easily understood, Practical Deer Management looks at the deer themselves and suggests non-lethal protective measures in addition to more active management, with attention given to other considerations such as health, the law and the practical construction of infrastructure such as high seats. A humane approach is stressed throughout. Practical Deer Management is an essential handbook for anyone who has to deal with deer and the problems that they may present.

Striking a perfect point, flushing grouse for hours, and retrieving perfectly to hand, two German shorthaired pointer dogs named Jager and Cent are at the heart of this huntsman's memoir. After hiring an expert to find the best of this breed in the world, William Urseth created "The Line"--generations of dogs that not only won countless tournaments but also created countless highs and heartbreaks in their lifetimes of bird hunting and spending days in the field. Centering on stories about the Minnesota Horse and Hunt Club, the kennel and dogs there, and the hunts in the northern Midwest of the U.S., these dog tales comprise an entertaining and touching look at the German shorthaired pointer breed and one man's relationship with it.

After a chance meeting in the pub, Roger Morgan-Grenville and his friend Duncan decide to take up beekeeping. Their enthusiasm matched only by their ignorance, they are pitched into an arcane world of unexpected challenges.

Coping with many setbacks along the way, they manage to create a colony of beehives, finishing two years later with more honey than anyone knows what to do with. By standing back from their normal lives and working with the cycle of the seasons, they emerge with a new-found understanding of nature and a respect for the honeybee and the threats it faces.

Wryly humorous and surprisingly moving, Liquid Gold is the story of a friendship between two unlikely men at very different stages of their lives. It is also an uplifting account of the author’s own midlife journey: coming to terms with an empty nest, getting older, looking for something new.

In a changing climate, livestock production is expected to exhibit dual roles of mitigation and adaptation in order to meet the challenge of food security. This book approaches the issues of livestock production and climate change through three sections: I. Livestock production, II. Climate change and, III. Enteric methane amelioration. Section I addresses issues of feed quality and availability, abiotic stress (heat and nutritional) and strategies for alleviation, livestock generated nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and approaches for harnessing the complex gut microbial diversity. Section II discusses the effects of climate change on livestock diversity, farm animal reproduction, impact of meat production on climate change, and emphasising the role of indigenous livestock in climatic change to sustain production. Section III deals with the most recent approaches to amelioration of livestock methane such as breeding for low methane emissions, reductive acetogenesis, immunization/vaccine-based concepts and archaea phage therapy.

As a city boy, all Philip Dixon wanted to be in life was a farmer, but achieving that ambition would be a lot less straightforward than he had anticipated! Starting work on a farm at the age of fifteen, Philip finds himself handling some highly temperamental bulls, meeting some very `witchy' women and encountering mysterious country ways. Later he gets married, raises a family, acquires his own farm and, along the way, becomes part of the Round Table team that invented the charity plastic duck race! Enjoy Philip's story as he makes progress in his farming career in the north east of England from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, and meets some remarkable characters, many of whom belong to an age all but lost to us. Philip's story will, at times, have you laughing out loud and weeping tears of sympathy, and will lift your spirits as you read how he overcomes all life's setbacks to make plans for a brave new future.

Raising a pig is easy to do, even in a small space like a suburban backyard. In just five months, a 30-pound shoat will become a 250-pound hog and provide you with 100 pounds of pork, including tenderloin, ham, ribs, bacon, sausage, and more. For anyone who wants to raise a pig for meat in a backyard or on a small farm, this comprehensive guide explains exactly how to do it, humanely and safely. Livestock expert Sue Weaver covers everything from selecting a breed with great flavor and bringing your shoat home to feeding, housing, fencing, health care, and humane processing.

'One woman's gloriously lyrical account of life and love as a shepherdess' Mail on Sunday 'Janet White's unfailingly enjoyable book . . . taps into a widespread feeling that we have become cut off from the natural world' TLS 'A book to share or even fight over if necessary' Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows 'An immensely enjoyable and heartfelt book: it makes you want to run for the hills' The Lady With an introduction by Colin Thubron As a child in wartime England, Janet White decided that she wanted to live somewhere wild and supremely beautiful, to inhabit and work the landscape. She imagined searching the whole world for a place, high and remote as a sheep stell, quiet as a monastery, challenging and virginal, untouched and unknown. Turning her back on convention, Janet's desire to carve out her own pastoral Eden has taken her from the Cheviot Hills to Sussex and Somerset, via the savage beauty of rural New Zealand. The Sheep Stell tells the tale of a woman before her time; a woman with incredible courage and determination, truly devoted to the land and its creatures. Evocative, unaffected and profound, it is a lost classic. 'An extraordinary memoir . . . The Sheep Stell is pure joy, one of the most moving books I've read in a long time' Philip Marsden, author of Rising Ground 'This is a strange and lovely book, and quiet as it is, it makes you gasp at the profoundly lived quality of the life it so modestly describes' Jenny Diski 'A hymn to country solitude, lyrical, unpretentious and deeply felt' Colin Thubron

This monumental text-reference places in clear persepctive the importance of nutritional assessments to the ecology and biology of ruminants and other nonruminant herbivorous mammals. Now extensively revised and significantly expanded, it reflects the changes and growth in ruminant nutrition and related ecology since 1982. Among the subjects Peter J. Van Soest covers are nutritional constraints, mineral nutrition, rumen fermentation, microbial ecology, utilization of fibrous carbohydrates, application of ruminant precepts to fermentive digestion in nonruminants, as well as taxonomy, evolution, nonruminant competitors, gastrointestinal anatomies, feeding behavior, and problems fo animal size. He also discusses methods of evaluation, nutritive value, physical struture and chemical composition of feeds, forages, and broses, the effects of lignification, and ecology of plant self-protection, in addition to metabolism of energy, protein, lipids, control of feed intake, mathematical models of animal function, digestive flow, and net energy. Van Soest has introduced a number of changes in this edition, including new illustrations and tables. He places nutritional studies in historical context to show not only the effectiveness of nutritional approaches but also why nutrition is of fundamental importance to issues of world conservation. He has extended precepts of ruminant nutritional ecology to such distant adaptations as the giant panda and streamlined conceptual issues in a clearer logical progression, with emphasis on mechanistic causal interrelationships. Peter J. Van Soest is Professor of Animal Nutrition in the Department of Animal Science and the Division of Nutritional Sciences at the New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University.

This beginner s guide to beekeeping clearly explains everything you need to know, from getting your first bees to harvesting your first crop of honey. Spectacular macro photography brings the inner workings of the hive to life, while the playful text gives you the information you need to make it through your first year. Everything is addressed here, from allergies, permits and restrictions, and how to deal with the neighbors to hive structure, colony hierarchy, and bee behavior."

A striking and famous feature of the English landscape, Dartmoor is a beautiful place, with a sense of wildness and mystery. This book provides a new perspective on an important aspect of Dartmoor's past. Its focus is transhumance: the seasonal transfer of grazing animals to different pastures. In the Middle Ages, intensive practical use was made of Dartmoor's resources. Its extensive moorlands provided summer pasture for thousands of cattle from the Devon lowlands, which flowed in a seasonal tide, up in the spring and down in the autumn. This book describes, for the first time, the social organisation and farming practices associated with this annual transfer of livestock. It also presents evidence for a previously unsuspected Anglo-Saxon pattern of transhumance in which lowland farmers spent the summers living with their cattle on the moor. Winner of the Devon Book of the Year Award 2013.

First published in 1984, this volume comprised a broad synthesis of contemporary research on sheep reproduction conducted in Australia. Australia is internationally recognized for the excellence of its research in this field, and heads the world in areas of the neuro-endocrine control of reproduction, reproductive behaviour, artificial insemination and manipulation of reproductive performance, to name just a few. The book comprises some 23 review papers and short communications, all refereed by experts in the field, covering such topics as neuro-endocrinology, sexual behaviour, testicular and ovular function, pregnancy and foetal growth, parturition, lamb survival, nutrition and genetics. Advanced methods, developed in the seventies and early eighties to control reproductive function, gene manipulation and intra-uterine insemination are also considered, together with the managerial and economic values of such developments.

Cattle are one of our major domesticated animals, a higher mammal with complex mental and physical needs. The benefit of a knowledge of cattle behaviour means veterinarians and stockpeople can recognise abnormal behaviour signs for disease diagnosis and indication of an inadequate environment. This book replaces the book Cattle Behaviour, written by the same author and published by Farming Press in 1993. The text has been revised and updated and four new chapters on cattle welfare have been added. The main interest of many reading a book on behaviour is its relation to the welfare of the species, so the combination of welfare and behaviour is a logical one.

Greg Judy was forced to liquidate his cow herd to pay debt in 1996. By the end of the following year he was dead broke and figured the family farm was history. A quote from Allan Nation, editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer magazine changed his whole view of ranching. Nation said, "Your sole purpose should be not to own the land, but to make a living from the land." Inspired by that approach, Judy started looking for idle, non-developed pastureland. By focusing on leasing rather than owning land, his grazing operation grew from 40 stockers to 1100 head. By custom grazing on leased land he was able to pay his entire farm and home loan within three years. Today he has four farms and leases 12. No Risk Ranching, Custom Grazing on Leased Land describes how he found and managed his first and subsequent leases. He offers a detailed guide for other graziers to follow on how to find idle land to lease; calculate the cost of a lease; draft and write a land lease contract (with examples included); develop good water and portable fencing on leased land; promote wildlife and improve timber stands; keep accurate records and more. No Risk Ranching was written to help other graziers from making the same mistakes Judy made. He writes, "I am convinced that in the USA our pastures are one of our most underutilized natural resources. I am not against land ownership. I just feel like it is an awful hardship on a new blooming grazing business."

This collection reviews the latest research on dairy cattle genetics and advanced methods of genetic evaluation and selection. After an overview of genetic improvements achieved so far, Part 1 assesses the problem of inbreeding and genetic diversity in modern dairy cattle as well as opportunities for crossbreeding. Part 2 then goes onto review research on targeting non-production traits such as fertility, feed conversion efficiency and methane emissions as well as resistance to disease and resilience to heat stress. Part 3 then surveys the latest techniques and advances in genomic selection (GS) in such areas as functional annotation and use of sequence variants to improve genomic prediction, as well as developments in genetic evaluation (GE). The final part of the book reviews developments in embryo technologies, gene editing and the way new techniques are being integrated in practice into dairy breeding programmes.

Coastal Habitat Conservation: New Perspectives and Sustainable Development of Biodiversity in the Anthropocene offers the latest research and approaches to biodiversity conservation in coastal areas. The book synthesizes the background of foundational conservation views and provides new perspectives and recent strategies within a sustainable development context for coastal species and organic life. Written by a team of international authors with expertise in wide-ranging issues of biodiversity conservation, this book analyzes the challenges of conserving marine habitats and species that humanity faces in the Anthropocene era. Sections explore emerging and unforeseen impacts within a changing world, specifically, the marine-based conservation in the context of global change, coastal urbanization and mitigation of its environmental impacts, marine bioinvasions, conservation strategies for of out-of-sight communities like caves, habitat restoration, and the citizen science and its challenging role in monitoring conservation.

Goats aren't just for farmers anymore. More and more people are keeping goats as pets. They're also choosing to raise them for milk and fibre and are keeping them as pack goats, and companion animals. With minimal space and housing needs, goats are a practical choice for people with small backyards who want to enjoy some of the benefits and pleasures of keeping livestock. "The Backyard Goat" is a perfect resource for anyone looking to raise a goat or two for milk, fibre, or pleasure, this book covers all the essentials of goat ownership. Readers will get to know goats in chapters discussing goat anatomy, different breeds and their histories, and how to choose the right goat for every situation. They'll learn how to play and work with goats, using clicker training to teach them how to do simple tricks, pull and drive carts, and serve as pack goats. They'll learn how to care for their goats by providing proper housing, good nutrition, and a healthy environment. And they'll find specific chapters on milking, shearing, breeding, raising newborn kids, and more.

In this revised edition of The Sheep Book, Ron Parker updates many aspects of sheep stewardship--such as new or newly banned medications, progress in reproductive technology, popular new sheep breeds, and the growing dairy sheep field. Updated nutrition tables, as well as email and web addresses, further enhance the book's sensible advice and gentle wit. The Sheep Book is organized according to the natural reproductive cycle of the ewe, leading the reader through a year in sheep's life during which sheep and shepherd form a symbiosis. A good shepherd manages a flock so that its care and environment fits all stages of the annual journey--from breeding through pregnancy, lambing, growing of lambs, marketing of lambs and wool, and the revitalization of the ewe for another cycle. "Sheep are the ideal, useful domesticated animal," writes Parker. "They are hardy and healthy. Except for an occasional aggressive ram or uppity ewe they are gentle and submissive. They are small enough for a good-sized child or senior citizen to handle. They give both superlative meat and a fiber that has no peer. They are the ideal animal for the homestead, small farm, place in the country, suburban backyard, or any other place where man makes his home and grass will grow." The Sheep Book is especially valuable for small and moderate-scale sheep raisers and those interested in growing wool for fiber arts. Enhanced and updated for the internet age, this classic book is a valuable companion for anyone who wants to raise sheep that are healthy and productive, and to do so by working in harmony with the natural instincts of sheep and the rhythms of the natural world.

From the large-rumped Karakul sheep to the wrinkled Fengjing pig, North America is home to an extraordinary array of livestock breeds. Increasingly, a rare breed renaissance celebrates heritage breeds for their contribution to biodiversity, adaptation to specific environments, curious appearance, or ability to produce singular meat, milk, or fibre. At the same time, people continue to need up-to-date information about the major domestic breeds. Finally, a single resource offers detailed information about both common and heritage breeds. Finally, a single resource offers detailed information about both common and heritage breeds: "Storey's Illustrated Breed Guide to Sheep, Goats, Cattle, and Pigs" by Carol Ekarius.This attractive, at-a-glance reference, written by one of America's foremost livestock experts, covers 194 of the most significant breeds of cattle, goats, sheep, and swine - from the common Guernsey cow to the near-extinct Guinea hog. For each breed, Ekarius provides full-colour photographs, a brief history, and details about the breed's unique qualities and quirks. Readers will enjoy reading about major breeds such as the iconic Holstein cow, and Icelandic sheep, as well as hundreds of lesser-known varieties, like the long-legged, ginger-coloured Tamworth pig; the lilac-spotted Jacob Sheep; the deer like San Clemente goat; and the powerful, droopy-eared Guzerat cow.Comprehensive, colourful, and captivating, this definitive, in-depth guide is informative enough to aid farmers in breed selection, but beautiful enough for fanciers to browse as a coffee-table book. "Storey's Illustrated Breed Guide to Sheep, Goats, Cattle, and Pigs" will appeal to anyone interested in North American livestock - small-scale farmers, conservationists, agricultural historians, gourmets, biodiversity champions, animal lovers, and anyone dreaming about crafting fibres from sheep and goats. This indispensable reference showcases North American livestock breeds for what they truly are: fascinating, stunning, and endlessly varied.