The other half went into a molt that ran too long, a dark November, a hidden nest in the hedge, and a feed bag with the wrong number on the tag. Forty fixes that close those gaps — each one with what it costs you and what it gives back.
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“You cannot double a number you have never written down.”
Otis MeadowsI have kept waterfowl for most of my life. I have raised them well and I have raised them badly, and the badly part is where most of this manual comes from.
I have lost birds to a raccoon that got through wire I told myself was good enough. I have watched ducklings go down on their hocks because I fed them chick starter for three weeks, like the man at the feed store told me to. I have gone a whole autumn wondering why the basket was empty and then found forty-one eggs under a spirea bush in November.
None of those were bad luck. Every one of them was a thing I did, or a thing I failed to do, and every one of them is in here as a fix.
What it means is this. The average backyard flock produces somewhere between forty and sixty percent of what the same birds would produce under decent management. The other half is going somewhere. Close those gaps and the basket fills — not by magic, by arithmetic you can check yourself.
Every fix follows the same shape: the trouble as it actually looks in a backyard, the fix walked through the way one person walks another through a job at their elbow, cost and return in dollars at 2026 retail, and the honest limit — what the fix does not do, and when the answer is to stop reading and telephone a veterinarian.
Feed is seventy to eighty-five percent of what your flock costs you. Light is the shortest section in the manual and is worth more per page than anything else in it.
136 pages. Four working sections and six reference appendices. You do not have to do them in order and you do not have to do them all.
Opening the manual: Before You Begin · How To Use This Manual · First, The Arithmetic (honest annual egg figures for nine breeds) · The First Weekend.
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“Fix 16 and 17 cost me about fifty dollars at the hardware store. We got eggs straight through January for the first time in six years of keeping Campbells.”
Dale R. · 9 ducks, Vermont
“The run had been a bog every spring since we built it. It was the roof the whole time. One gutter, one afternoon. I felt daft and delighted at once.”
Marian T. · Runners & two geese, Oregon
“I liked that he tells you where each fix stops working. Nobody else writes the limits down. The ledgers in the back are what made me stick with it.”
Ben O. · Small flock, Missouri
I keep ducks and geese, and I have done for most of my life. Not as a business and not as a showman — as a man who goes out in the dark with a bucket, same as you.
I am a keeper, not a veterinarian. Nothing I write diagnoses a bird or prescribes a medication. What I can teach you is husbandry: how to set a flock up so most of the trouble never arrives, and how to recognise the trouble that does arrive early enough to get real help.
The prices in the manual are American retail, current to 2026, and they will move. The egg figures are conservative — ordinary birds under ordinary backyard conditions, not the best result anyone ever recorded. Where I have given a range, the truth for your flock is somewhere inside it, and the ledgers at the back are how you find out where.
This manual is dedicated to everyone who lost a bird they did not have to lose, and went out the next morning anyway.
40 Feed, Light and Housing Fixes · 136 Pages · PDF
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It is not a trick that makes a duck lay more eggs than a duck can lay. There is no such trick, and anyone selling you one is selling you something. The average backyard flock produces somewhere between forty and sixty percent of what the same birds would produce under decent management — the rest is lost to darkness, an over-long molt, a hidden nest and the wrong feed. The manual closes those gaps. On a badly managed flock the difference is close to double. On a well-run one it is smaller, and I say so.
A video is one fix, once, and then it is gone down the feed. This is all forty in order, with the numbers written down — what each one costs, what it returns, and where it stops working. It is meant to live in the shed and be argued with, not watched.
Because the fixes are worth more than that in the first month and I would rather the manual were in a lot of sheds than a few. Fix 2 costs eight dollars and pays for the book. $27 is the launch price, struck from $47.
A PDF, delivered the moment you order. It opens on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and it prints perfectly well if you would rather have it on paper in the feed room. Yours forever — download it as many times as you like.
Yes. Geese run through the whole manual, and two of the fixes — grazing them instead of mowing, and rotating the pasture behind them — are the largest single saving in it. Geese are grazing animals that most keepers insist on feeding like pigs.
No. I am a keeper, not a veterinarian. The manual is husbandry: how to set a flock up so most of the trouble never arrives. Where a fix touches on a sick bird I tell you what to look at, what to change in her surroundings, and where the line is — and at that line the answer is a licensed veterinarian who sees waterfowl.
A bag of layer pellets costs you more than this manual does, and it lasts a fortnight. Forty fixes, 136 pages, and the ledgers to prove what worked. $27 while the launch promo runs.
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