62 Books Like The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

The author and her husband are pioneers of one of the best-known rewilding schemes in Britain at their estate at Knepp in West Sussex. They began a quarter century ago, after financial losses from conventional farming of their heavy clay soils, with its reliance on expensive oil-derived inputs, became unsustainable.

She describes rewilding as restoration by letting go, although with the help of grazing animals such as pigs, ponies, and longhorn cattle. The book is a rich evocation of a landscape evolving as a remarkable array of wild species flourish. It is also a valuable record of the debates about rewilding. In 2023, it was made into a documentary film. 

This book sounds the alarm on an often overlooked and misunderstood aspect of modern agriculture: the cost and availability of fertilizer. Our soils have become severely depleted by overuse, but the artificial fertilizers that have kept them going for the last 70 years are running out.

This leaves animal "waste" as an option, but serious problems exist due to the modern system of confining and feeding animals in remote feeding pens. Mr. Logsdon's back-to-the-future solution seems like the only one available, but one wonders if it can be implemented quickly enough.

Joann considered the chapter "Your Child Has the Right to Be Beautiful" one of the most important essays ever written. It shows the relationship between diet, bone structure, and beauty. At a time when she had five children under five, this book completely changed her approach to nutrition and motherhood. It turned her into the iconoclast she very much became, known for putting all accepted wisdom through the crucible of common sense.

For instance, despite the conventional wisdom of the ’50s and ’60s, she was one of the very earliest to challenge the idea that you should eat margarine in preference to butter. She never believed that processed food was a healthier choice. Many of Joann’s strongly held and fiercely defended convictions about the positive health effects of unprocessed grains, fats, and whole milk and cream have been vindicated, and it all started with this book. 

This book was important to Mom's evolution of her thinking about cows. Originally, she emphasized the milk cow's importance as a kingpin of farm life (the original title of Keeping a Family Cow was The Cow Economy) and, of course, milk was a kingpin of family health. 

After reading this book, she came to see cows as a critical center of the problem of carbon sequestration. The grass is our best way of capturing excess carbon in the atmosphere, but the sequestration process requires that the grass be grazed, fertilized with dung, and trampled. The last several years of her life were spent writing articles to alert people to the concept.

One of the main characters of this novel is a horse whisperer whose traumatic experiences on his eighth birthday have left him unable to speak. When he hears about stallions who are kept entirely indoors in order to produce a new drug, he sets out to ease their suffering. In the process, he meets Karen Lawford, the workaholic heir to the drug company, and tries to reawaken her love for horses so she can see that what is happening to the stallions is wrong, and tries to help her too. I love this well-crafted story of love and healing, but feel I should mention that it includes horses dying and being badly treated.

This book traces the connections between horse breeding, biological science, international commerce, and foreign relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Derry focuses on three large topics: the breeding of large draft horses, international military horse markets, and government breeding programs. The horse market was essentially a warhorse market. I love how this book shows that looking at something like horse breeding leads to a better understanding of things like political economy and foreign relations. Breeding beliefs and practices reveal a lot about society and culture, and the military material is fascinating. I also recommend the chapter on horse culture that looks at literature and painting (the author is herself an accomplished painter).

Michael Brandow has an agenda. He wants to change radically how pedigree dogs are bred and valued.

He argues that the preference for standardized fancy forms and coiffured coats should be replaced with a priority for dogs’ health and well-being. Dogs should be valued as companions, not commodities.

Brandow develops his argument historically, starting with the Victorian invention of multiple breeds and the very idea of Dogdom as composed of discrete, standardized, physically uniform breeds.

Not everyone will agree with Brandow, but his strength of feeling and the thoroughness of research makes for an engaging, often witty, and thought-provoking read. The narrative combines social and animal history, psychology and ethics, and stories, most entertaining but some shocking.

This book is a practical guide to raising a small flock of chickens in your backyard or on a small piece of land. The authors clearly loved their chickens and imbue them with all kinds of personalities and behaviors.

I loved this book because when I moved to the land, I had only vague memories of my grandfather raising chickens in Australia when I was six. I had no idea how to build a henhouse or manage a flock of chickens on my 5-acre piece of land. The authors also started from scratch, so I felt confident that if I followed their instructions, I would be able to do so, too.

This detailed book deals with many animals but shouldn’t be overlooked regarding goat health. I refer to it regularly if I have a sick goat and can’t find the info elsewhere. It is broken out by body systems and is the only book that addresses medications in depth.

It has the added bonus of serving as a resource for other livestock and pet care and is comprehensive in its coverage of poisoning—providing information that may be hard to find elsewhere when trying to determine what is making your goat sick. 

I love Jan Thomas’s books! This one starts with three charming cows who are excited to see a red sofa. “Look!” they say. “It’s chicken’s sofa!”

Why are they excited? One page-turn later and PLOP! The cows are all squished together, sitting on the sofa. “Is everyone ready for fun?” they ask. 

Turns out, the cows have lots of plans for this sofa. Jumping! Dancing! Wiggling! Poor chicken tries to get them to stop, but these fun-loving cows don’t notice the effect of their “fun” on chicken’s sofa. 

I love having the kids act out each scene of jumping, dancing, wiggling, and the final satisfying page. Books that get kids engaged, whether with a catchy refrain or physical actions are fun. (And like those cows, we are ready for fun!)