Farm Animals: Your Guide to Raising Livestock

Rating:
Summary: Want To Raise Chickens?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Probably not worth your time
Review: Although the author's love of animals, her family, and farm life infuse the text of "Farm Animals", in my honest opinion, it's not enough to make it worth reading. This is underscored by the existence of such good alternatives.

My first complaint is the poor editing and proof-reading. The book is poorly organized and it's a rare page that doesn't have a grammatical error or typo that really does get in the way of the reader's understanding. The author's conversational tone often stretches what would be a short concise statement into a long and hard to understand exchange between author and reader. A serious investment in editing followed by thorough proof-reading would go a long way to improving this book.

But I can forgive poor writing and editing if there is some useful information or entertaining stories in the text. After all, I believe the modern small-scale farm is a worthy subject. The problem with "Farm Animals" is that there just isn't much that is useful or entertaining here. The book is mostly stories drawn from the author's farm, but rather than being entertaining or enlightening, many of the stories are downright horrifying.

An example is an account (the bulk of the text is made up of these stories) about Rosie, the author's sow. The author watches while Rosie gets more and more agitated as her male piglets are castrated nearby and (at the same time) a visitor antagonizes her. Eventually the sow turns on the author's daughter, trapping her in the shelter, and then attacks the antagonistic visitor. This story wouldn't surprise anyone familiar with pigs... Well, it is surprising that anyone working with pigs would make such obvious mistakes and then write about them in a book about how to raise farm animals, but the fact that the saw acted as she did is far from shocking.

These stories do illustrate mistakes that the reader should try to avoid, and to the author's credit she does eventually make her point after each story's conclusion. However, it is surprising how many mistakes the author made in caring for her animals.

The book is definitely not competitive as a reference. Any of the Storey's Guides would be much more useful to the beginning livestock farmer or hobbyist. Infact, much of the books factual content will seem eerily familiar to anyone who has read the relevant Storey's Guides. There is some useful information here, it's just that the information is in no way complete.

In my opinion, this book would have been better if the author completely forgoed any intent to write an informative book. As a collection of funny stories about what *not* to do on the farm, it could have value. Even as a collection of stories about her farm raising experiences, it would be better, but by using stories to illustrate points about raising animals, it just doesn't work.

The book does paint a picture of a family trying to succeed at something they love. The author obviously holds a special affection for, and a desire to write about, both her children and her animals. A particularly important lesson that it does contain is to investing time early in an animal's life to help develope a (two-way) bond between itself and its caretaker. This is a point made in "Farm Animals" that I haven't seen given due attention elsewhere.

For the dedicated reader of literature about modern small-farms, this book has some value. But, in my opinion, most others should give it a pass.

Rating:
Summary: Covers almost everything imaginable
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: this is really awful
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: this is really awful
Review: 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...