Robert Plamondon's chickens on range
In our extensive research of all things sustainable chicken, I finally stumbled upon Robert Plamondon, a farmer in Blodgett, Oregon who has done great thinking and writing on practical free-range poultry rearing. Robert and his wife Karen live on a 37-acre farm in Oregon’s Coast Range and raise 500-600 layers and 2000 broilers a year, something they’ve been doing since the mid-Nineties. He’s a skilled writer, with strong opinions that he backs up with facts, research and experience. I love the “Hi Tech and Overalls” theme to his blog.
His primary writing on free-range chickens can be found here. He has a nice FAQ page with well-written and helpful article on deep litter, coops, fencing, free range, yarding and confinement, and much more.
We will be excerpting and linking to numerous pages of interest to Sonoma County backyard chicken farmers. His extensive research into practical chicken rearing provides a helpful counterweight to the amateur fluff and speculation that is ubiquitous on most chicken websites.
Of great interest to the modern chicken enthusiast is Robert’s work recovering out-of-print books on chicken rearing written 50 to 100 years ago.
In his own words:
We’ve been rediscovering the old-time American free-range poultry methods developed during poultrykeeping’s Golden Age between 1900 and 1960. We read pretty much the entire collection of ancient poultry books and magazines in Oregon State University’s Valley Library, and tried or adapted as many of these as possible.
He has revised or “revived” several out-of-print texts under his Norton Creek Press label, including The Dollar Hen, Genetics of the Fowl, Fresh Air Poultry Houses, and Feeding Poultry. He also wrote Success with Baby Chicks, a helpful primer on raising chicks without the heartbreak.
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