Resilience: Raise Backyard Chickens

What does it take to raise chickens in the backyard? Is it hard? And what is the payoff (in addition to delicious and nutritious fresh eggs)? Today, Harvey Ussery, farmer and author of “The Small-Scale Poultry Flock”, offers a kind of “backyard chickens 101” class on today’s episode and you get a front-row seat!
Harvey covers the ins and outs of backyard chickens: from how to get started, navigating your county’s regulations, how to source your chicks, how to avoid chicken coop “stink” and more. He discusses feed and the importance of allowing chickens to roam about and feast on earthworms, grubs, slugs, and snails. He talks about the value it brings to the entire household, in terms of understanding how nature works.

All in all, he makes a great (and entertaining) case for giving backyard chickens a go.
Visit his website: themodernhomestead.us

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Harvey Ussery is the author of “The Small-Scale Poultry Flock”. He has just completed a revision of the book, to be published in the fall. His website is themodernhomestead.us.

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Episode transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Harvey Ussery.

What does it take to raise chickens in the backyard? Is it hard? What is the payoff in addition to delicious and nutritious fresh eggs? This is episode 378 and our guest is Harvey Ussery. Harvey is an experienced farmer and the author of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. You have a front-row seat in this backyard chickens 101 class. Harvey covers the ins and outs of what it takes to have backyard chickens, including how to get started, understanding your county’s regulations, how to source your chicks, the shelter they need, how to avoid chicken coop stink and more.

He discusses feed and the importance of allowing chickens to roam about and feast on earthworms, grubs, slugs and snails since they are omnivores, after all. In some, he makes a great and entertaining case for giving backyard chickens ago. This is our fourth episode in the resilience series of the show. Before we dive into the conversation, I want to invite you to become a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

I’m telling you, the time is now. It’s important to join hands with a like-minded community to create the world we want to live in. Do it, step up and help those who are confused about what real nutrition is and how to build health and resilience. Go to WestonAPrice.org and click on the, become a member button on the homepage. Join us. Membership is only $30 a year when you use the code POD10 and thank you in advance. Welcome to the family.

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Welcome to Wise Traditions, Harvey.

Thank you very much.

We are going to talk about how to get started with chickens. I know you’ve been doing this for decades. How did you get started, Harvey? Were chickens your first farm animal?

We could go way back and say that I was always interested in the chickens that my grandmother had. She and my grandfather lived on a small farm. She had a flock of chickens that were tremendously productive and managed quite naturally. They fed themselves almost entirely on their own. That made a big impression on me. When we moved out here to the country in Northern Virginia, my daughter was living with us and she wanted to have chickens. We approved her project and she set up a brooder for hatching and raising 26 New Hampshire chicks. That was not only a success, but it was pretty easy.

That’s what I wanted to hear, Harvey because now is the time when people are concerned about food security. They’re also building their own self-reliance and chickens might be a great place to start. Let’s talk first about what you need to know about where you live and what’s permitted. Talk to us a little bit about regulations.

You do have to be aware of and comply with the correct regulations with some caveats. Fortunately, there has been a relaxation over recent years on keeping chickens for a long time in suburbs and city settings. Keeping chickens was strictly prohibited. In recent years, there’s been a lot of relaxation on that. Keep in mind that even if the regulations are quite restrictive, some people get away with having an under-the-radar flock, which, if it’s small and quiet, doesn’t cause a problem with their neighbors. Usually, the powers that be are not going to send in the posse if there’s no problem for your neighbors.

Keep that in mind. Whatever the restriction says, you don’t want to create a nuisance for your neighbors. Also, keep in mind the possibility of going before your local regulatory agency of whatever sort and making an appeal for relaxation of the regulations. We attended a meeting before our board of supervisors and they were considering whether to relax the regulations. It didn’t look too good for us until these two little boys got up and one of them said, “My pet goat doesn’t smell bad and she’s never bitten anybody.” It was not a surprise after that. They did relax the regulations.

Chickens are the ideal starter livestock. They’re easier than any other options to get started and keep going.

We need to know what’s going on around us. Also, one concern folks have before they get rolling is how tied-down am I going to be with a backyard flock of chickens? Talk to us about how easy-care the chickens are, as you like to say.

I like to say that chickens are the ideal starter livestock. They’re easier than any of the other options to get started and keep going. For that very reason, I think that chickens do not have to tie you down because their care is very easy. For your own sake, you’re going to want to set up their daily care so it is most efficient and most pleasant to deal with. Therefore, if you have a friend or a neighbor close by, if it’s easy for you to do the daily care, it’ll be easy for them too, as well. In exchange, they can get the daily take-home payoff of eggs, the best eggs they’ve ever eaten. It’s never been a problem for us finding somebody who can pinch hit for us when we have to be away.

We’ll get into the daily care bit in a bit, what is required when you are going to have some chickens, but I want to ask you next about where you can source them? Is it true that you can get chicks by mail?

Yes. There are local sources you could seek out, but yes, hatched chicks can be sent through the mail. Now people don’t understand how that can be possible. As a matter of fact, in nature, sometimes there’s a difference of quite a while, sixteen hours a day, between the hatch of the first sibling and a cloche and the last.

Nature’s provision for that is that before hatch, the chick absorbs the last of the nutrients from the yolk. They have in their system sufficient nutrients that they don’t have to have feed and water for two days easily, even up to three days. It’s in that on-hold, that pause period after hatch, that they can be sent through the mail safely and without any problem.

If you do get these hatched chicks, you probably need a brooder. Talk to us what is that exactly? Why is that needed?

I always liked to put it this way that you’re going to be raising these chicks and that’s pretty easy to do as long as you keep in mind, you are mama. You need to provide or set up ways to provide everything that the mother hen would supply. She supplies her bodily warmth to keep them warm. She helps them find food and water. She protects them from predators.

WT 378 | Chickens — Chickens : You’re going to be raising these chicks. And that’s pretty easy to do as long as you keep in mind that you are mama.

The setup that provides these conditions what we would call a brooder. You can buy a small well-designed brooder to cover all those functions. You can make your own. Our first flock, we started in a refrigerator carton. It’s easy to set up for providing those conditions. For the warmth, a heat lamp or an electric heating element. That heating heat lamp, by the way, it’s usually a 250-watt bulb. It should be secured at least eighteen inches from a flammable surface.

You can raise or lower the heat lamp as needed by the chicks or you can get a heating element with a rheostat control. You can dial up or down the temperature. They say to keep the temperature at 95 degrees and drop it to 5 degrees every week. You don’t need to use a thermometer. Just look at the chick. If they’re huddling under the source of warmth, it’s too warm and you need to lower the temperature. If they’re backed up against the inner walls of the brooder to get away from the heat source, it’s too warm and you need to turn the heat source down.

When you were talking about keeping it far from a flammable surface, I felt like you were talking from experience.

No. Other than that, you learn from other people’s experiences. Yes, I have read actual cases where people were careless with this element of having a 250-watt bulb too close to flammable materials and lost their barn or shed wherever they had the chicks. This is for real.

Those little chicks need to be in this brooder situation, mimicking what the mother hen would be offering them for 3 to 5 weeks or so, is that right? Do they need to be transferred to a coop? Is that the next step in the process?

Once they are well-feathered to maintain their body temperature more efficiently, they’re ready to go into the coop or whatever housing you’re providing for them. It’s like with brooders. Housing can be an incredible array of options. It doesn’t have to be elaborate as long as it provides essential security against predators and protection from the extremes of harsh weather.

It’s important to remember that chickens are quite hardy. Especially in the wintertime, people tend to look for a way to add heat in the wintertime housing. That’s probably a mistake. I’m not talking about people in Alaska and Northern Canada. I haven’t dealt with those situations. For mid-Atlantic winters where it gets pretty cold, I think it’s a mistake to add heat in the winter housing. It is certainly a mistake to make the wintertime housing too tight, too closed up.

The chicken’s best health will result from feeding the highest quality feed you can find and can afford. If you are what you eat, you are what your chickens eat. When you eat their eggs, you’re eating what they ate.

You want plenty of ventilation through the housing at all times. You want the chickens out of the direct blast of a harsh winter when you want them out of blowing wind, rain, or snow. As long as they’re not in the direct blast of the wind, as long as they can stay dry, they can take a lot of chill and the plenty of airflows through there is far better than keeping them tightly enclosed and adding heat.

They’re not little humans that we want to keep at a certain temperature. They’re hardy. They can manage. Another thing I found interesting because you gave me some resources to look at before we spoke, you mentioned that they need housing also because they need to be protected, as you said, from predators and so forth. They also tend to poop and do half of their pooping in the coop or in their shelter, so the chickens can do some of the work here for you in terms of cleanup. Can you explain that?

Now we’re going to talk about the nasty. The unpleasant. The stinky. The big pain in the rear. Is that what we’re talking about now?

Yes, that’s what we’re talking about.

Hilda, it doesn’t have to be that way and this is the good news. When it comes to manure management, during the day, we want our chickens outside where natural processes are more likely to take care of any problem, a potential problem of the poops. As you say, at night, they’re doing half of their pooping in there.

We can let the manure accumulate and become unpleasant for us and frankly unpleasant for them and also can create health problems for them. The answer is either frequent mucking out, as people call it, and putting that fresh manure into a compost heap and composting it properly. Eventually, you’ll get compost that you can use in the garden, but the alternative, that constant mucking out, sounds like a lot of work to me.

It sounds like signing up for an unpleasant chore for as long as you have chickens. I’ve got an alternative, which mimics natural processes that deal with manure everywhere in nature. All the animals are everywhere are pooping all the time. They’re not creating a problematic mess. In the chicken house, the key to proper manure management and far more pleasant conditions in the coop is deep litter. That is imitating a compost heap. Most of us know about how a compost heap works and imitating that model with one change.

Rather than having a balance between carbon and nitrogen, we want as much carbon and litter material as possible. Very high carbon lose easily worked by the chickens. Dry autumn leaves are terrific. Wood shavings, as long as it’s not aromatic wood shavings like cedar. Wood chips, if they’re well aged, that is not when they’re green. They’ve been chipped but age them a while and wood chips can serve. A shredded paper or cardboard would also be high carbon litter easily worked by the chickens.

They’re constantly scratching in and working in the manure into that material, which they are shredding with their scratching. Eventually, the microbes in that, just like in a compost heap, break down the manure and turn it into a resource. We call it compost. Let me tell you. You can dig down into that deep litter, pick up some fine granular material at the bottom, and smell it. Believe me, you are not smelling anything remotely like raw manure. You’re smelling something like fresh earth.

One final plea for use of deep litter as the best possible maneuver management, I’m going to quote my longtime mentor, Joel Salatin. I want your audience to reflect on because they are thinking this manure thing, that is the stinky part, the unpleasant part. Joel has said many times, “If you are around any livestock operation, regardless of specie and you smell manure, you are smelling mismanagement.”

This is super interesting to hear because I have friends that have backyard chickens and it does not smell bad at all. Maybe they’re using this litter that you’ve mentioned, an almost natural way of dealing with manures. They’re properly managing their chickens, I would say.

I’ve had the experience so many times when somebody came in to tour my chicken house and at some point, if she had ever been in a chicken house before, at some point she would stop, look around and sniff and say, “Why doesn’t it stink in here?” If you’re in somebody’s chicken house and it doesn’t stink, I would bet that they are using deep litter as the best manure management.

You can bet I’m going to go ask them if that’s what they’re doing. I’ll be very curious. I have noticed what you said is true that it’s easy care. My friends have a little system. “In the mornings, we do this. In the evenings, we do this.” What are some of those morning habits they need to have to help the chickens thrive? What are the evening habits? Can you speak to us a little bit about that, Harvey?

For me, morning time is the time to release the birds to the outside. I think it is important, however small your operation, to find some way to release the birds to get outside. If you have a small space to give them, you can always make a two-decker set up where the upstairs is the sleeping quarters and the tightly secured part at night.

When it comes to feeding chickens, it’s just like feeding ourselves. We have to read those labels. We have to plan ahead and do more of our own food production.

Downstairs from that, there’s a little fence draw and a ramp to get down into the downstairs where they have more space and it’s open to the sunlight. That would be the minimum that still allow the chickens to get outside in the daytime. If you have more space, you can set up a fence run, fence with chicken wire to protect from predators and allow them to be out in the sunshine.

The first thing in the morning for me is to let them out and check their water. I make sure they have plenty of fresh water. It is so critical that they always have access to fresh water. Speaking of letting them out in the morning, you’re going to let them out into a fenced run typically. People don’t appreciate it.

You might let them out on a nice grassy run, but it doesn’t matter how few chickens are in your micro flock. Sooner or later, they’re going to denude that area of the very last blade of green grass. After that, what do we see? We see a patch of bare dirt covered with chicken poops waiting for the next rain to run for the closest water source. We need to bring the deep litter concept from inside the house to the outside chicken run.

You can cover the chicken run deeply in the same sorts of organic decomposables. Spent plants from the garden, autumn leaves deadheading from the flower beds on and on. Whatever will break down in a compost heap, you put it in on that chicken run and let them naturally manage their manure in the same way we were talking about doing hymns.

You ask about the night thing. What to do as you’re putting them to bed at night? Do keep in mind that you want to provide some roost for them to be on at night. Even if you have them well protected from predators with a half-inch hardware cloth, for example, that provides plenty of ventilation but is a barrier to predators, even those raccoons have very powerful paws. Even though they’re well secured against predators, you want them to be psychologically secure. Be sure to give them a roost to sleep on at night. Another important thing about nighttime is that it is time for rodents.

It’s very common for people to leave feed out for their chickens 24/7. That’s a bad idea because the rodents come out at night. It’s like you’ve put up a sign over the feeder saying, “Be fruitful and multiply.” I promise you, they will. The best feeding practice during the day is to give them only the amount of feed they will clean up by late afternoon. When you show them up at night, make sure there is no feed available for our rodent friends. Rodents are the big draw for snakes to come in. They have a reputation for coming in and eating eggs out of the nest box. Ask me how I know.

I had a black snake that came in and got a couple of my eggs. They will also eat chicks if you have chicks in the hen house. They’re not coming looking for chicks or eggs. They’re coming and looking for mice. If you don’t do this free-choice feeding and minimize the small rodent population, then the snakes are not going to have much interest in coming in and having a free launch of eggs or chicks.

You were mentioning feeding. What do you feed the chickens? I love it that they’re omnivores. I’ve seen happy chickens on Joel’s farm and on my friend’s backyard farm, where they’re pecking away at whatever they can find. Do you need to supplement? Obviously, you do. What do you supplement with?

I think the starting point, Hilda, is what you were pointing out. The starting point is not feed X, Y, or Z available to be purchased. We’ll get to that. The starting point is to see what that chicken will go for when feeding herself on her own in a natural situation. I like to talk about the three food groups of chickens, green plants, seeds and fruits and animal foods such as earthworms, grubs, slugs and snails.

That’s what chickens will eat by preference if they have the opportunity. Of course, almost all of us are dependent to a greater or lesser extent on purchased feeds. The Weston A. Price folks certainly understand that food quality is everything for health and happiness. It’s the same for our chickens. Their best health is going to result from feeding the highest quality feed that you can find on a four.

Remember, if you are what you eat, you are what your chickens eat. When you eat those eggs, you’re eating what they ate. The best approach is this. Buy the best feed that you can find. Also, what you feed should be as fresh as you can get, then take every opportunity you can for maximizing their access to these high-nutrient natural feeds.

Harvey, this sounds like a good philosophy for people too.

This is a point I try to make in my book that when it comes to feeding chickens, it’s like feeding ourselves. We’ve got to read those labels, plan ahead and do more of our own food production. It’s the same with how we feed our chickens.

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People want to know whether they should wash their eggs. And the answer is an emphatic NO if they come perfectly clean from the nest.

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Wherever we live, we can find access for our birds to more natural feeds. For example, I talked about giving the birds access to the outdoors. One way to do that is in a movable shelter. Move that small shelter, maybe over your lawn or other grassy areas where they can get a lot of green foods and some insects and move it frequently enough so it doesn’t damage the grassy side. When we’re working in the garden, if we find grubs and earthworms, if we trap Japanese beetles, all of those can be used as high-octane feeds for our birds.

Spent plants in the garden are good to feed out or wrapper leaves of cabbages and lettuces, coal, squash and tomatoes, the still green vines that follow the sweet potato harvest. All of those are great feed. Speaking of sweet potatoes, understand I mean sweet potatoes, not regular potatoes. Those potato vines are poisonous. We would never feed those to the chickens but sweet potato vines, that’s candy to a chicken.

I mentioned that small mobile shelter. I mentioned that in regard to giving them back access to natural feeds as you move them from day to day, but you move them often so that you won’t damage the side they are on. What if you left them long enough to do exactly that to damage whatever is growing on that space? What I’m suggesting is how about using a small mobile shelter in the garden and then that constant scratching is good because you can make a small shelter big enough, wide enough to fit on one of your wide garden beds.

We should all be doing lots of cover cropping. When it’s time to turn that cover crop in, rather than getting out some buzzing, bucking mechanical tiller to till in that cover crop, let the chickens do it. The small shelter will keep them out of the garden beds. They won’t be eating the lettuces and tomatoes, but they will be tilling in a cover crop or a garden bed that’s heavily grown up and weeds.

Rather than getting out there and fighting the jungle ourselves, let them do it. They’re getting a green plant to eat and they’re finding earthworms and grubs. That’s a great way of intersecting their best interest with our best interest. You’re giving them the best access to helpful activities and good foods and getting work done for us. It sounds like a heck of a deal to me.

Yes, I’m thinking this is a big win-win. The reason it’s a win-win-win even is when the payoff is eggs. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Eggs are one of my favorite foods because they seem so perfect with all of their nutrients. From homegrown chickens, your own flock, it can’t get much better than that, I imagine.

Eat closer to the natural source, eat less processed food, eat food that has been cultivated and produced in more natural ways, and eat food that has been produced with love and concern for your health.

Hilda, you’re right. A vine-ripened tomato is the proverbial best home-produced food compared to that red thing in the supermarket labeled tomato, but you and I know better. It’s true with eggs too. The difference between your backyard eggs and any supermarket eggs is night and day. Yes, let’s consider the payoff, I call it. The first question people will want to know about level of production when they’re planning their small flock.

This is the basic rule of thumb. Just for planning purposes, think in terms of getting 2 eggs per 3 hens per day. Two eggs from every three hens in the flop per day. For planning purposes, think in those terms. Although, we’re talking about in the summertime when egg production is at its peak. In wintertime, egg production drops off greatly, more or less, depending on which breed of chickens we’re talking about.

Inevitably, people want to know whether they should wash their eggs. The answer is an emphatic no if they come perfectly clean from the nest. You need to see to nest sanitation. Put in fresh, clean straw frequently into the nest. Keep that renewed. If you do, most egss that are going to come from the nest perfectly clean. Do not clean. Do not wash such eggs. The hen, when she lays the egg, there’s a wet coating. It’s called a bloom and it has antibacterial properties. The bloom, when it dries, is helping to protect the egg from contamination at the microscopic level.

I bet most people didn’t know that, including me.

The shell of the egg is permeable to a gas exchange to the air at the microscopic level. Bacteria might possibly come in as well. That bloom helps to protect against them. If an egg does have a smear of mud or yes, occasionally poop, then I do wash those eggs with a 50/50 solution of white vinegar and water. Wet a paper towel in that solution and wipe the egg clean. If it comes clean from the nest, never do I wash an egg.

Another common misunderstanding is that eggs must be refrigerated. The egg, before it is cracked, is designed by nature to last a long time at ambient temperatures. After all, when that bird in the wild is assembling a clutch of eggs over the course of two days, she’s not laying an egg and putting it in the refrigerator, is she? The egg is designed not to spoil in ambient temperature.

If you’re going to eat those eggs within ten days, there is no need to refrigerate. Don’t put them in the bright light of a window. Don’t put them beside a heat register. Just cool normal ambient room temperature, if that’s where they’re going to be, they will easily keep for ten days. If you need to keep them longer than that, then yes, put them in the refrigerator and they will last for weeks.

Another question I think beginners might be asking is at what age does the chicken start laying? Did I read in your literature 22 weeks or so? Is that right?

That is your average benchmark. It will vary by breed and other factors such as nutrition, I’m sure. As for planning purposes, think of 22 weeks as that time when you’re going to first go out there and look into a nest and say, “Wow.” About 22 weeks. It is true that I call them super layer hybrids, the hybrid chickens that are bred for very high production and very early production. Some of those gals start laying at something like 17 weeks, even 16 weeks. Think of 22 weeks as about an average.

Harvey, your wow reminded me of the childlike enthusiasm I’ve seen with my friend’s kids who run to the chicken coop to gather the eggs. There is this amazing joy and understanding of nature and how we’re all interconnected that comes with having backyard chickens. Talk to us a little bit about those intangibles.

One intangible starts where you did and that is with getting your children involved in the project. I doubt I have to convince you or a lot of other Weston A. Price people that too many children are spending far too much time looking at the tiny screen. It behooves us like we want to get our chickens outdoors. We want to get our children outdoors out into the open, out into nature and its amazing networks and processes. One way to draw them in to that is to get them involved and this project of keeping a group of chickens in the backyard. They will be learning far more about natural life and natural processes that way than they will ever learn from looking at tiny screens.

We started by talking about how easy chicken care can be, so that’s a great advantage when you think. That means feeding, watering and collecting eggs are easy enough for the youngest children. It’s a way of getting them involved. You’ve seen it. They have fun with it. They look forward to it. If you have enough hands so that you’re producing some surplus, maybe your kids could have a little project of selling eggs to relatives and to friends.

That would be a great learning experience, even more so if they get into the details of calculating feed costs and what that implies for what you charge for your eggs and profit margins and so forth. There are lots to be learned in every direction. One thing we didn’t talk about earlier with regard to natural feeds is it’s possible to cultivate decomposer organisms such as earthworms, black soldier fly grubs, mealworms and so forth. These organisms help break down organic materials. They’re great chicken feed.

It’s possible to cultivate some of those, like earthworms, as feed high protein, high nutrient feed for chickens. This would be a great process for children as well to have an earthworm rearing project in which they get directly involved in seeing these recycling processes of nature. At the end of the process, there’s this feed that they can give to their chickens.

Finally, let me mention with regard to children. This may or may not turn out to be an option for many keepers, but from time to time, somebody may find that they have a hand that we say goes broody and settles into that mindset in which the hand wants to set on a clutch of eggs long enough, 21 days, to hatch out chicks and to nurture them and to rear them and protect.

If that should ever happen in your family, the family of any backyard block of chickens, Hilda, this is a chance to share with your children magic and miracle. The miracle of new life and of mother love. I love working with broody hens myself. In fact, I have never used an artificial incubator for eggs. Never once. For hatching out chicks here on my place, I have always used natural mothers, broody hands. It brings out the kid in me. It makes me gasp with joyous astonishment and that is something that would be wonderful to have the chance to share with children as well.

I am so thankful for all the things that you’ve instructed us. This has been an amazing conversation. I want to wrap up with a question I like to pose at the end here, Harvey. I don’t even know if you know that I usually say this, but I always ask my guests. If the audience could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do? I know you’re a farmer and not a doctor, but that’s even better. If you would offer one bit of advice for someone wanting to improve their health or their family’s health, what would you recommend that they do?

There are several things that come to mind, but you have said the one thing. I would say that the one thing is to eat closer to the natural source. Eat less processed food. Eat food that has been cultivated and produced in more natural ways. Eat food that has been produced with love and concern for your health, not just for the bottom dollar.

I think eating the greatest variety of foods you can manage that are as unprocessed and as close to the source and produced with as much integrity as is possible in your situation is a starting point for health. There are a lot of other things that follow, acting like you’ve got some good sense and loving and caring for the people close to you on and on, but it starts with the basis of life, what you eat.

Harvey, thank you once again. This has been a wonderful conversation and I’m sure you’ve inspired a lot of people, including me.

Thank you, Hilda, for having me. I enjoyed the conversation as well.

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Our guest was Harvey Ussery. His website is TheModernHomestead.us. You can find me and resources at HolisticHilda.com. Now for a recent review from Apple Podcasts. PeachInThePines has this to say, “Wisdom my heart resonates with. I finished listening to episodes 369 and 370. I have goosebumps in a good way. These episodes were so pure and delivered sound wisdom and truths that struck to the core of what is going on in the world, shedding light on what so many struggle to grasp and understand. I love how these episodes discuss wisdom and truths that my heart can resonate with but are delivered in such a simple and easy-to-understand way.”

“I love each and every episode and look forward to new ones. Hilda brings me peace and comfort to listen to her. I also love when Sally is a guest speaker because her advice and knowledge always bring me encouragement and inspire me to pursue new ways to better my health. Thank you with all my heart for consistently bringing this information to light and unapologetically discussing topics that need to be shared. I’ve been wanting to leave this review for a long time. I can’t even form enough supporting words to express my gratitude and appreciation for this show. Highly recommend listening to it and suggest you don’t wait another minute to get started.”

PeachInThePines, this is super special. Honestly, it makes me want to cry. I’m very touched. Thank you. Thank you for leaving that review. If you would like to leave us a review as well, go to Apple Podcasts and click on the Ratings and Reviews. Leave us as many stars as you like and tell us what you think of the show. Thank you for reading. That also means a lot. Stay well and remember that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

About Harvey Ussery

Harvey Ussery is the author of “The Small-Scale Poultry Flock”. He has just completed a revision of the book, to be published in the fall. His website is themodernhomestead.us.