Keeping hens is easy. This friendly, chatty book gives you all the everyday information you need to keep your hens happy and safe. It covers all the questions you might have: How many hens to keep? What to feed them? What about a cockerel? Will they get on with the dog or destroy the vegetable patch? Jane Furnival shares her decade of experience with a back garden flock, which over the years included battery rescue hens and cockerels. As you'd expect from the Queen of Thrift, Jane's top tips include no-nonsense money-saving ideas and practical suggestions. This chatty guide also includes instructions on how to build a hen house by Jane's husband Andy. Jane's hilarious and heartwarming stories of life with Winchester the cockerel and his hen-pecked retinue will entertain animal lovers and inspire anyone who is thinking about keeping chickens. About the Author Jane Furnival was the author of cult bestseller Mr Thrifty's How to Save Money on Absolutely Everything, and became TV's Queen of Thrift as presenter of the BBC1 series Smart Spenders, and a regular on GMTV.

From about a generation after the end of the Industrial Revolution up until the Great Depression, Texas agriculture went through many changes. Unlike the massive, storied ranches spun into romantic westerns or Hollywood films, small family ranches had to adapt constantly to the economic present. Cattle, Cotton, Corn draws from the minutiae of family records and oral accounts to piece together the history of several middle-class ranches in Central Texas that were operational from 1880 to 1930. The Caufields, Cavitts, Youngs, and Footes were ordinary Texans surviving changing economic forecasts and the boom-and-bust cycles of living from the land. Compiled from decades of research by a scion of one of the families, this book adds to the corpus of Texas ranching epics by focusing on the lived experiences of regular ranch families, most of whom were not particularly wealthy or politically prominent. Cattle, Cotton, Corn tells a history important to the fabric of turn-of-the-century Texas, and it will resonate with many who will see their own family's history reflected in its very pages.

The 'Good Life' has never been so popular. More and more of us are searching for the perfect rural idyll - our very own piece of the countryside where we can live side by side with nature, produce our own food, and have a degree of control over what we eat. Written by an experienced and successful smallholder, the Smallholding Manual is ideal for existing landowners as well as those contemplating a move to the countryside. Unlike previous books in this genre, it takes the reader right from that all-important Step 1 - finding the perfect smallholding to creating a viable lifestyle. It offers a complete introduction to the myriad potential land uses and provides clear, step-by-step guides to getting to grips with enjoying a new, more fulfilling lifestyle.

Tea is big business. After water, tea is believed to be the most widely consumed beverage in the world. And yet, as productivity increases, the real price of tea declines while labour costs continue to rise. Tea remains a labour intensive industry. With a distinguished career spanning over 50 years and rich experience in diverse crops, Mike Carr is eminently qualified to indulge in an intelligent discourse on tea agronomy. In addition to a comprehensive review of the principal tea growing regions worldwide in terms of structure, productivity and principal constraints, he has attempted to question and seeks to find the associated experimental evidence needed to support current and future crop management practices. The book will assist all those involved in the tea industry to become creative thinkers and to question accepted practices. International in content, it will appeal to practitioners and students from tea growing countries worldwide.

Biochar is the carbon-rich organic matter that remains after heating biomass under minimization of oxygen during a process called pyrolysis. Its relevance to deforestation, agricultural resilience, and energy production, particularly in developing countries, makes it an important issue. This report offers a review of what is known about opportunities and risks of biochar systems. Its aim is to provide a state of the art overview of current knowledge regarding biochar science. In that sense the report also offers a reconciling view on different scientific opinions about biochar providing an overall account that shows the various perspectives of its science and application. This includes soil and agricultural impacts of biochar, climate change impacts, social impacts, and competing uses of biomass. The report aims to contextualize the current scientific knowledge in order to put it at use to address the development- climate change nexus, including social and environmental sustainability. The report is organized as follows: chapter one offers some introductory comments and notes the increasing interest in biochar both from a scientific as well as from a practitioner's point of view; chapter two gives further background on biochar, describing its characteristics and outlining the way in which biochar systems function. Chapter three then considers the opportunities and risks of biochar systems, chapter four presents a typology of biochar systems emerging in practice, particularly in the developing world. New, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14040-based life-cycle assessments of the net climate change impact and the net economic profitability of three biochar systems with data collected from relatively advanced biochar projects were conducted for this report and are presented in chapter five, providing a novel understanding of the full life-cycle impacts of these known biochar systems. Chapter six investigates various aspects of technology adoption, including barriers to implementing promising systems, focusing on economics, carbon market access, and sociocultural barriers. Finally, the status of knowledge regarding biochar systems is interpreted in chapter seven to determine potential implications for future involvement in biochar research, policy, and project formulation.

Helen Tiegs didn't take to driving a tractor when she became a farmer's wife, but after fifty years she considers herself the hub of the family operation. Lila Hill taught piano, then ultimately took a job off the farm to augment the family income during a period of rising costs. From Montana's cattle pastures to New Mexico's sagebrush mesas, women on today's ranches and farms have played a crucial role in a way of life that is slowly disappearing from the western landscape.
Recalling her own family-farm ties, Sandra Schackel set out to learn how these women's lives have changed over the second half of the twentieth century. In Working the Land, she collects oral histories from more than forty women-in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas-recalling their experiences as ranchers and farmers in a modernizing West.
Through this diverse group of women-white and Hispanic, rich and poor, ranging in age from 24 to 83-we gain a new perspective on their ties to the land. Although western ranch and farm women have often been portrayed as secondary figures who devoted themselves to housekeeping in support of their husbands' labors, Schackel's interviews reveal that these women have had a much more active role in defining what we know as the modern American West.
As Schackel listened to their stories, she found several currents running through their recollections, such as the satisfaction found in living the rural lifestyle and the flexibility of gender roles. She also learned how resourceful women developed new ways to make their farms work-by including tourism, summer camps, and bed-and-breakfast operations-and how many have become activists for land-based issues. And while some like Lila made the difficult decision to work off the farm, such sacrifices have enabled families to hold onto their beloved land.
Rich with memory and insight into what makes America's family farms and ranches tick, Working the Land provides a deeper understanding of the West's development over the last fifty years along with new perspectives on shifting attitudes toward women in the workforce. It is both a long-overdue documentation of the lives of hard-working farm women and a celebration of their contributions to a truly American way of life.

There is a huge social change with more and more people wanting to live a simple, more self-sufficient, make it yourself life. With lawns and flower gardens being turned over to vegetable production and keeping chickens being adopted by suburbia with the more adventurous looking to keeping other livestock such as pigs, sheep, bees and goats urban farming is becoming less of a dream and more of a reality for many. The Urban Farmer's Handbook is the bible for all those wanting to grab a slice of the good life without having to move to the country. Paul Peacock, joint editor of Home Farmer magazine and self-proclaimed 'self-sufficient in a semi enthusiast, examines all angles of urban farming from how beekeeping without unsettling the neighbours to keeping pigs on a small acreage. Packed with practical advice including the legal and welfare implications, the potential problems and the joys The Urban Farmer's Handbook gives good, solid advice on animal husbandry, allotments and making the most of your produce to improve the quality of your life. In short, says the author "if you can eat it, ou can grow it and cook it."

'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.

When Spring Warren told her husband and two teenage boys that she wanted to grow 75 percent of all the food they consumed for one year,and that she wanted to do it in their yard,they told her she was crazy.She did it anyway. The Quarter-Acre Farm is Warren's account of deciding,despite all resistance,to take control of her family's food choices, get her hands dirty, and create a garden in her suburban yard. It's a story of bugs, worms, rot, and failure of learning, replanting, harvesting, and eating. The road is long and riddled with mistakes, but by the end of her yearlong experiment, Warren's sons and husband have become her biggest fans,in fact, they're even eager to help harvest (and eat) the beautiful bounty she brings in. Full of tips and recipes to help anyone interested in growing and preparing at least a small part of their diet at home, The Quarter-Acre Farm is a warm, witty tale about family, food, and the incredible gratification that accompanies self-sufficiency.

A fresh, new guide to the backyard lifestyle The homesteading movement is continuing to grow, as more people are stepping up to have a hand in where their food comes from. Whether you want to dabble or immerse yourself completely in the do-it-yourself, back-to-basics lifestyle, Welcome to the Farm is a comprehensive, fully illustrated guide to growing the very best food right in your own backyard. Shaye Elliott takes readers on a journey that teaches them how to harvest baskets full of organic produce, milk a dairy cow (and make butter), plant a homestead orchard, can jams and jellies, and even raise chickens and bees. From her experience running The Elliott Homestead, Shaye provides all the how-to wisdom you need to know about: *The benefits of a home garden *The basics of seed starting *Building your own greenhouse *What belongs in the winter garden *Canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques and recipes *The pros and cons of caged vs. free-range chickens *Keeping a dairy cow and what to do with all the milk *Raising animals for meat *Making your own cider and wine *And so much more! Welcome to the Farm is aimed to serve homesteaders and urban-farmers alike, guiding them through the beginning stages of small-area farming and utilizing whatever amount of space they have available for optimal and delicious food production.