We offer several informative training seminars on managing chickens and guineas:
Introduction to Keeping Chickens
In this three-hour class, we’ll teach you all the basics that you’ll need to know about
keeping chickens. Topics covered include housing, fencing, feed and watering, managing
bedding and manure, egg production, predator protection, and more. There’s plenty of time
for questions and answers about your specific needs and interests, too. This class is taught
at our farm in a hands-on format with our birds and facilities, so dress appropriately for
being outdoors and spending time around chickens. The cost is $75 for up to eight people.
Introduction to Keeping Guinea Fowl
The content and format of this class is very similar to our Introduction to Keeping Chickens,
but is focused on the specific needs of Guineas instead. These birds are both lovable and
useful, and you can read a (very) brief summary of what makes them different from chickens
on our site (www.farrhomestead.com/guineas.html). If you want
to get started with Guineas but would like some real-world time with them before you bring
some home, this is a perfect way to prepare. As with the chicken class, the cost is $75
for a group of up to eight people.
Poultry Butchering
Whether you want to raise a batch of meat birds, or need the skills to manage a dual-purpose
flock, this class will give you the confidence to butcher most types of poultry at home.
You will learn how to do every step of the process, beginning with a live bird and
ending with a whole chicken in the freezer, with an emphasis on food safety, simplicity,
and humane treatment of the bird. We teach skinning rather than plucking, so setup and
teardown (and mess) are kept to a minimum, and the only tool you will really need is a sharp
knife. A pair of poultry shears is also recommended, but not required. The class is taught
in a two-hour format at our farm and costs $50 for up to three people if you bring your own
birds, or add $25 per person to use our birds (available only late summer through Thanksgiving).
Breeding and Hatching Chicks For probably 8,000 years before the advent of incubators and mail-order chicks, the only way domestic fowl were hatched was on the farm, using broody hens and careful selection of breeding animals. That self-sustainability is not out of reach for the modern homesteader, although there are many misconceptions about how it works. If you want to learn how to maintain your own chicken flock year after year, this course will take the mystery out of chicken breeding and working with broody hens. You’ll also learn useful tips on setting up the housing properly, providing good nutrition, and reintegrating young birds into the main flock. When planned well, we believe that hatching chicks the natural way is less difficult and more successful than mail-order chicks. The cost for this two-hour class is $50, and it is available from late April through mid-July (the time of year when we’ll have actual broody hens to demonstrate with).