Lack of cash flow sinks many businesses. The product or service may be great, but without cash flow, the business can't operate.
Aside from dairying, the egg is the best source of cash flow in farming. Why? Because chickens lay eggs every day.
Egg production is a functional, practical enterprise for any farming endeavor. It's ideal for families and farms of all sizes.
This course covers everything you need to know to start and run your own egg operation. You'll learn about free-ranging, controlled-ranging, and secure systems, as well as the pros and cons of each approach.
You'll also learn about breeds, health & sanitation, defending against predators, marketing, pricing, and much more.
Eggs are a fantastic gateway product that attracts new customers and leads to sales of other products. With this course, you can learn the methods Joel Salatin has mastered over several decades at Polyface Farm.
Introducing the Pastured Laying Hens Course
Lunatic farmer Joel Salatin shares the insight he's gained through more than 60 years of farming. He'll walk you step-by-step through the process of setting up and running your own successful egg operation.
If you’ve ever dreamed about generating a full-time income farming, this is a realistic and practical opportunity. We want to help you avoid common pitfalls and achieve success.
The Pastured Laying Hens course includes:
- 25 video sessions
- More than 5 hours of video
- Downloadable PDF transcripts for each video lesson
- Homework PDFs for each lesson that guide you through the essential steps
- Expert insight from an award-winning farmer
Generate a Full-Time Income from Your Farm
While the course material at Farm Like a Lunatic is applicable to a homestead or backyard farm, our goal is to help students develop a full-time income from farming. We need full-time farmers throughout the world, and certainly in the United States.
Through all of our courses, we aim to encourage folks to jump into enterprises that are vocationally credible in the industry. A pastured laying hens operation is a practical, realistic approach, and we hope you'll join us on this journey.
This pastured laying hens model is an antidote to the concentrated animal farming operations (CAFOs) that are so prevalent today. Not only will you generate cashflow with your egg enterprise, but you'll also provide the community with a delicious and nutritional product that far exceeds what's sold in stores.
Purchase Foundations of Farming & Homesteading, and you'll get access to ALL of our courses, including this one. (You'll also get access to all courses we release in the future at no additional cost!)
About Joel Salatin
Joel Salatin calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.
Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don’t like him call him a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, charlatan, and starvation advocate.
With a room full of debate trophies from high school and college days, 12 published books, and a thriving multi-generational family farm, he draws on a lifetime of food, farming and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. He’s as comfortable moving cows in a pasture as addressing CEOs in a Wall Street business conference.
On his family farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Polyface Farms, Joel produces meat he describes as "beyond organic", which are raised using what the farm describes as environmentally responsible, ecologically beneficial, sustainable agriculture.
Joel has been featured in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Ominvore’s Dillemma, Food Inc. and many others.
"He's not going back to the old model. There's nothing in county extension or old-fashioned ag science that really informs him. He is just looking totally afresh at how to maximize production in an integrated system on a holistic farm. He's just totally innovative."
- Author Jo Robinson
An Egg Worth Eating
"Few enterprises hold as much opportunity as a pastured egg enterprise. Commercial pastured egg enterprises offer our whole culture an alternate food item in a pastured egg that doesn't exist in most stores.
"The reason we need this course is because we need to understand how to actually make an egg that pops, and egg that's got pizazz, an egg that's exciting. This type of egg is nutritionally and emotionally exciting to sell. It can create a new enterprise for you, for your family, your farm community, and our culture as a whole. It's an egg worth eating."
- Joel Salatin
What Others Are Saying:
"In all my years of homesteading, I have never seen anything like Joel Salatin’s Farm Like a Lunatic series!
"From conferences, to YouTube videos, to magazine articles, there are many resources out there to learn various aspects of homesteading, but most fail to address the more serious and less-talked-about issues of homesteading. Yet Joel tackles these common issues in this series. He covers topics like: how to manage finances, interpersonal relationships, increasing farm profitability, how to design a landscape, and so much more.
"I only wish that this series was available when I first started homesteading. Foundations in Farming and Homesteading can save you thousands of dollars, as well as can save you a countless amount of time and energy."
- Mike Dickson (The Fit Farmer)
"Since we started Apricot Lane Farms a decade ago, Joel Salatin’s innovative and inspiring philosophy has deeply influenced the way we see our own farm. From soil building and grazing strategies to modeling how to sell your product, he’s a “nose to tail” farming system resource.
His new online course “Farm Like A Lunatic” is a treasure trove of practical knowledge for aspiring farmers. He’s especially good for those interested in understanding unique methods of farming that regenerate both the land of the farm and the spirit of the farmer.
I wish a course like this existed when we started Apricot Lane Farms. Anyone who has a fantasy to farm but isn’t quite sure which steps to take to make it to reality should consider this course."
- John Chester, creator of The Biggest Little Farm
Pastured Laying Hens Course Curriculum
- 1 - The Egg Opportunity (11:18)
- 2 - Biggest Problems (10:29)
- 3 - Thinking Like a Chicken (10:37)
- 4- To Range or Not to Range (15:12)
- 5 - Eggmobile vs Feathernet (14:13)
- 6 - Starting Your Flock (14:15)
- 7 - Overcoming the 3 Strikes to Poor Lay (8:43)
- 8 - Health & Sanitation (10:44)
- 9 - Breeds (12:34)
- 10 - Putting Hens to Work (13:24)
- 11 - The Eggmobile Idea (12:44)
- 12 - The Eggmobile Logistics (17:10)
- 13 - The Millennium Feathernet (15:55)
- 14 - The Electric Poultry Net (25:06)
- 15 - Wintering in a Hoop House (14:47)
- 16 - Nest Boxes (11:18)
- 17 - Broken and Dirty Eggs (12:29)
- 18 - Predation (19:45)
- 19 - Egg Efficiency (29:14)
- 20 - Marketing and Sizing (16:14)
- 21 - Stewing Hens & Adding Value to Eggs (12:33)
- 22 - Hatching Your Own (20:57)
- 23 - Vision for a Better Pastured Chicken (9:33)
- 24 - Pricing (11:19)
- 25 - Economics (10:15)