http://www.permies.com/

http://www.richsoil.com/wofati.jsp

A lot of good info there, even if some of it seems like it might be a little too "new agey" for me. I read that article on raising chickens, since I raised them when I was a kid and know a little about them. (Actually, I know enough about them that, if given a choice between raising chickens again and burning my eyes out with a hot poker, I'd have to think about it.)

Anyway, it looked pretty good. The author mentions that he tried to capture predators (in his case, raccoons) raiding his chickens in a cage trap. I doubt he had much success getting a raccoon or any other critter to walk into a cage trap anywhere in the vicinity of a chicken house or any other major food source. I'm sure the transplanted hippies won't like it, but you really need body-grip or leg-hold traps.

Still, it was a good article, and he's right about the cost of chicken feed. We usually had to buy feed for ours during the winter months, which was a major expense for us back in those days. And I really do think that adding bugs to a chicken's diet is both more natural, and healthier for the chickens.

I just saw that video on rendering lard. Maybe these folks aren't as the irritating hippies I thought they were.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Yep my chickens was 100% free range they would poop on everything, their talons ruin paint , and the skunk I shot was 50 pounds, he ate a lot of chickens, everyday was Easter when it came to finding the egg nests.

But he dispelled a lot of myths and how easy chickens are for permaculture use.

Chickens are nasty little critters. It's been half a century, but I can still smell our chicken coop. The cold didn't seem to bother them, but an Oklahoma summer was definitely hard on them. But on the plus side, I took a lot of fur with a board-leaning-against-the-chicken-house set. Enough to pay for their feed, anyway.

If you're having a problem with skunks or 'possums (I don't even know if you have 'possums in your neck of the woods), a recipe for a good bait can be found here .

There are no fur buyers who will buy skunks on-the-carcass or "green skinned," so if you want to sell their pelts you'll have to skin them, flesh them, and stretch and dry them yourself. And if you do have 'possums in your area, they're most likely not worth skinning anyway. But you can always extract the skunk scent with a hypodermic needle and store it in a clean glass jar. Just about any lure manufacturer will buy it, and sometimes the essence is worth more than the pelt itself.

Onward and upward,
airforce

I always liked the Idea/ dream of building one of these Eco-cabins for a bug-out /hunting cabin... Place to secure some preps away from the city.