Backyard poultry ownership provides a great opportunity for improved self-reliance and small-scale agricultural sustainability through home egg and meat production. One issue with backyard poultry ownership is managing the waste products of your birds, particularly the manure and bedding mixture (termed “litter”) that builds up in the coop. If not managed properly, this waste material can creat...

This is a study of how members of a collaborative group interested in promoting convivial civilisation in human society took up exchanging practice stories – stories of doing something or seeing something done as examples of convivial backyard civilisation – in order tacitly to create an informal learning environment where practices of such a convivial backyard civilisation could seem normal, d...

The expanding distribution of African swine fever (ASF) is threatening the pig industry worldwide. Most outbreaks occur in backyard and small-scale herds, where poor farmers often attempt to limit the disease's economic consequences by the emergency sale of their pigs. The risk of African swine fever virus (ASFV) release via this emergency sale was investigated. Simulation modeling was used to ...

BACKGROUND Poultry represents an important sector in animal production, with backyard flocks representing a huge majority, especially in the developing countries. In these countries, villagers raise poultry to meet household food demands and as additional sources of incomes. Backyard production methods imply low biosecurity measures and high risk of infectious diseases, such as Newcastle diseas...

The spatial pattern and epidemiology of backyard pig farming and other low bio-security pig production systems and their role in the occurrence of classical swine fever (CSF) is described and evaluated. A spatial Bayesian model was used to explore the risk factors, including human demographics, socioeconomic and environmental factors. The analyses were performed for Bulgaria, which has a large ...

A year ago, biofuel was a buzzword, a reasonable technical solution to many of our environmental problems. Politicians across the European Union and in North America were busy setting targets, deciding what percentage of transport fuels should be replaced by biofuels by what time. The corn-ethanol industry in the US went into overdrive, and many governments in the developing world set up fuel c...

In recent years the economic damage inflicted by several avian influenza (AI) subtypes (primarily H5N1 and H9N2, but also H7N1, H7N3, H7N7) on the commercial poultry industry and backyard poultry is beyond simple calculation. In response to the continued losses suffered by commercial poultry producers large scale vaccination has been introduced in many affected countries for the commercial sect...

The major contribution of backyard poultry consumption in improving per capita nutrients level is well documented. Further improvement would be possible by crossbreeding with the highly producing breeds like white with the locally used in backyard poultry which is low producer. Fertility and hatchability are important parameters that should be studied before finalizing the cross breeding progra...

Backyard gardens, dump heaps, and kitchen middens are thought to have provided important venues for early crop domestication via generation of hybrids between otherwise isolated plant species. However, this process has rarely been demonstrated empirically. For the majority of polyploid crops, it remains uncertain to what extent hybridization and polyploidization preceded domestication or were p...

Present study was conducted to evaluate the quality traits of poultry eggs collected from various sources i.e. market, commercial farm and backyard farming, in Karachi. A total of 250 eggs were analyzed for external and internal qualities. A significant difference (p <0.05) was recorded in quality parameters except percent shell, shell thickness, egg width, egg weight, shape index and Haugh uni...