Raising animals

Although vegetable gardening is usually where a homesteading family focuses their initial efforts to grow food, there's a case to be made for getting started with animals as quickly as possible. True, vegetables are small and prolific and easy to control, while animals are larger—sometimes very much so—and slower to reproduce, and slower to maturity, and have a mind of their own. But each of these traits can also be an advantage: animals don't need nearly as much attention as vegetables, being able to care for a lot of their own needs; animals plant their own seeds; and a single animal can be a bountiful harvest all by itself.

The best way to get a good start raising animals is to find a neighbor who already does it, and to pepper his with questions and pleas for help. But if you aren't fortunate enough to have such a neighbor, or if you'd like to go easy on the neighbor you do have, we can suggest some books that will teach you the basics of raising the most common animals found on a homestead.

• Pastured Poultry Profits. Joel Salatin is by now the best known small-scale chicken farmer around, and for good reason. He's been at it for forty years, and his model works. This book will teach you how to raise a healthy, tasty chicken with minimal effort and technology, and how to make some money selling them as well.
• Salad Bar Beef. Joel Salatin also raises beef on his farm, but he thinks of it as grass farming, i.e. turning pasture into meat. His approach is healthy, manageable, scalable, produces quality cattle, and progressively improves the land they are raised on. This book explains how he does it.
• Grass-fed Cattle. This book is a great companion to Salad Bar Beef, explaining in clear and detailed terms exactly what is going on when you raise a cow. Indispensable.
• All Flesh is Grass. Joel Salatin is the master, but sometimes his drive and competence can intimidate those of us who tend to take a more laid-back approach to our endeavors. Gene Logsdon is the perfect antidote, preferring to spend an occasional afternoon fishing rather than squeezing the last bit of productivity out of his farm. This book is a comprehensive look at grass farming, how to tend to the grass you have (not a difficult thing) and how to raise the animals that will be eating it.

• Anyone Can Build a Chicken Plucker . You'll want to slaughter that pastured chicken yourself, and like many others you'll probably find the job of plucking a chicken difficult and tedious. This book contains plans for a gizmo that will make plucking a chicken nearly effortless.
• Anyone Can Build a Chicken Scalder. Whether you pluck your chicken manually or mechanically, the secret to a good pluck is a good scald, dunking your chicken in properly hot water for the proper length of time. This book contains plans for a gizmo which will do just that, over and over again.
• Keeping a Family Cow. The best kind of animal to keep is a family cow, which will provide milk and butter and cheese and a beef cow every year. Joann Grohman’s book is down-to-earth, full of detail about every aspect of keeping a cow, and just plain friendly and encouraging; we knew after reading it that we would likely have a cow before long.
• Oxen: A Teamster's Guide. Interested in getting some useful work out of those cows who mostly stand and graze your pastures? This book will help you turn your cows into draft animals.
• Livestock Protection Dogs. When you are raising animals predators will be a problem, but one that can be readily controlled by a livestock protection dog. This book will help you to choose and train one.