Public Interest: June 2008 Archives

The past two weeks my columns in the Tyler Morning Telegraph have focused on raising your own eggs at home. There seems to be a renewed interest in this topic and it might have something to do with the increasing food costs at the grocery store, a desire to know how your food was raised, or a little bit of both.

Before you start out, make sure your city or subdivision does not have any regulations keeping you from raising chickens. Also know that you might want to only raise hens in order to reduce stress on your layers and to keep the noise level down. Roosters are only needed if you are wanting to produce fertile eggs to raise your own chicks. So keeping them out of the henhouse will lower feed costs a little and keep the neighbors happy.

Under normal conditions, you can plan for at least 3 to 6 eggs per hen per week, so plan your final number of hens based on your family's normal egg consumption or if you plan to sell some to the neighbors.

FAMACHA, a technique for strategically de-worming, is being adopted by sheep and goat raisers in order to delay the development of resistence of the internal parasite Haemonchus contortus to antihelmetics.