[.ca] Farm Animals: Your Guide to Raising Livestock (ISBN 0971617406)

this is really awful:
This has got to be the worst book on "farming" I have ever read. Amazingly, the cover reads "Compared to All Creatures Great and Small" well yeah it compares...it compares POORLY. If this were merely a memoir, I'd let the poor grammar and randomly-generated thoughts pass...after all, I'm not one to stifle creativity. However, when someone passes off copious "borrowing" from Storey publications, inter-dispersed with reminiscing from their barnyard, and chock-full of misleading or mistaken "facts"...that's too much. For instance: Pg 37: "Make sure every animal has clean, fresh water daily. You wouldn't want to drink dirty defecated water..." (Is she referring to drinking water fouled with feces? You'd think an author would phrase themselves better) Pg 69: "If you stagger breeding dates, you could have milk all year long" misleading... does (except for the Pygmy breed) only come into heat in the fall - winter. I have never heard of any Dairy Goat breeding in the summer. Pg 220: 1 gallon of milk does NOT weigh 8 lbs...A gallon of milk with 2% butterfat weighs about 10.2 lbs (by the way- NO mention of pasteurizing milk apparently this author is fine with Tuberculosis, Brucellosis, and Toxoplasmosis...all transmittable to people in milk, if your animals are infected) Pg 246 "I keep a cheap pair of scissors on hand in case I need to cut away the excess skin around a wound. The scissors I use have a flat and a sharp edge" ?!?! Have you ever used a scalpel blade??? Try it sometime! Overall, it is a difficult read given the poor grammar, fragmentary sentences, and general randomness of the (albeit few) nuggets of real information. As an aside....I do like "chatty" books, and an informal read can be fun. This is neither. A much better buy is Backyard Livestock by Steven Thomas. Don't waste your money with this one...

Want To Raise Chickens?:
A quick fun book to read for anyone who's fantasized about raising livestock in their back yard, but never quite got up the nerve to do so. Full of interesting little tips, presented in a readable format. This is not the "dry" book you would expect.

Covers almost everything imaginable:
Farm Animals: Your Guide To Raising Livestock by animal husbandry expert Jeanie Peck-Whiting is a no-nonsense guide filled with hard information on the care, feeding, and breeding of cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, ducks, or chickens. From what records a small farmer should keep to milking goats to animal first aid, Farm Animals covers almost everything imaginable in direct, straightforward language understandable to farmers of all experience levels. A first-rate, salt-of-the-earth guide, Farm Animals is also highly recommended for students in 4-H programs.