Keeping chickens - an introduction
SMALL FARMS NETWORK - AUTUMN 2021 - ANIMAL HEALTH
By Eve Hall
District Veterinarian
P: 0439 078 989 | E: eve.hall@lls.nsw.gov.au
Backyard chickens are becoming increasingly popular across the country – and for good reason. They play a valuable role in backyard garden ecosystems, and offer a range of benefits to keepers – producing eggs and home-grown meat, using food scraps and reducing kitchen waste, generating excellent fertiliser, and helping to control garden bugs and weeds. And they also make wonderful family pets.
Keeping backyard chickens can be incredibly rewarding, but keeping them happy and healthy depends on good poultry management, feeding, biosecurity, and health and disease management.
In this short video Local Land Services Veterinarian, Dr Lou Baskind provides an overview of the essentials to having healthy chickens.
NSW DPI has some excellent resources on-hand for amateur backyard poultry keepers as well as small-scale commercial producers:
- Poultry keeping on a small scale
- Small-scale poultry keeping - feeding
- Small-scale poultry keeping - brooding and rearing chickens
- Small-scale poultry keeping - housing layers
- Building the poultry penthouse
- Poultry health – keeping diseases out
Your private or district veterinarian are often also a great source of advice when it comes to poultry biosecurity, health and diseases. There is a range of health conditions, including several infectious diseases, which can affect backyard poultry - it’s important to always seek veterinary advice if your chickens are showing signs of ill-health or you have losses in your backyard flock.