10 Best Books on Raising Chickens in 2024 – Reviews & Top Picks

Raising chickens at home is an enjoyable and fulfilling experience, and having fresh eggs from your very own chickens is incredibly rewarding! Thanks to Google, there is no shortage of information on raising your own chickens at home.

That said, nothing beats having an informative and illustrated book to hold in your hands and refer to occasionally. Books on raising chickens are usually written by experienced chicken keepers with a wealth of hands-on experience and knowledge and contain information, pictures, and anecdotes that can be difficult to find elsewhere, even on the ever-expanding internet.

Raising chickens at home has become even more popular in recent years, and as such, there are a ton of books available on the subject. If you’re looking for a great book on raising your own backyard chickens, you’ve come to the right place! We narrowed the myriad available options to 10 of our favorites and created in-depth reviews to help you find the best book on raising chickens to suit your needs. Let’s dive in!

A Quick Glance at Our Favorites (2024 Update)

Rating	Image	Product	Details
Best Overall		Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens	Number-one bestseller Comprehensive guide to raising chickens from start to finish Up-to-date fourth edition	Check Price
Best Value		The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens: How to Raise a Happy	Inexpensive Ideal for beginners Up-to-date information	Check Price
Premium Choice		The Homesteader’s Natural Chicken Keeping Handbook	Comprehensive guide from start to finish Helps with starting your own egg and poultry business Contains information on treating and preventing ailments naturally	Check Price
Best for Beginners		The Chicken Chick’s Guide to Backyard Chickens	Great for beginners Advice from poultry veterinarians, nutritionists, and professors Contains vital info on chicken care and health	Check Price
		The Intermediate Guide to Raising Chickens	Available for free on Kindle Unlimited Great for keepers looking to expand their flock Up-to-date information	Check Price

The 10 Best Books on Raising Chickens

1. Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens — Best Overall

“Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens” has been one of the bestselling books for raising chickens for over 2 decades, and it has now reached its fourth edition. The book provides up-to-date details on chicken shelters and enclosures, what to feed your chickens, chicken health care, raising chicks, and getting meat and eggs. It also contains recent research on chicken behavior and communication. The book is packed with color illustrations and photographs, and almost every aspect of chicken care is covered by this thorough and information-packed fourth edition. It’s almost too thorough, though, as the book can get somewhat repetitive at times.

2. The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens: How to Raise a Happy Backyard Flock — Best Value

“The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens” is the best book on raising chickens for the money. If you’re new to raising chickens or simply want to expand your knowledge — and your flock — this book contains key information to get you started. The book was published in 2019 and contains up-to-date information on raising your own flock. It has plans on building a coop, choosing the right chicken breed, and raising chicks, along with what to feed your chickens and detailed chicken care advice and illustrations. This book is a great first addition for any first-time flock keeper!

The only issue we found with this book is that at only 192 pages, it’s not as comprehensive as some other available books and is aimed at beginners. If you have even a rudimentary knowledge of raising chickens, this book will not provide much new or unique information.

3. The Homesteader’s Natural Chicken Keeping Handbook — Premium Option

“The Homesteader’s Natural Chicken Keeping Handbook” may seem pricey at first glance but is a comprehensive guide to raising a backyard flock from start to finish. The book will give you all the information that you need for raising a healthy flock, including understanding chickens and their behavior, producing eggs, starting your own poultry or egg business, preventing and treating ailments naturally, and setting up your property, brooder, and nesting area. The book also provides delicious recipes to make with your eggs and poultry!

This book is great for beginner and intermediate chicken keepers, but seasoned chicken keepers may be disappointed at some of the repetitive information.

4. The Chicken Chick’s Guide to Backyard Chickens: Simple Steps for Healthy, Happy Hens — Best For Beginners

“The Chicken Chick’s Guide to Backyard Chickens” is an ideal companion if you’re just beginning to raise your own backyard flock and is written specifically with beginners in mind. It covers all the essential aspects of raising chickens, from coops and chick care to breed selection and chicken health. The author, Kathy Shea Mormino, partnered with poultry veterinarians, nutritionists, and professors to provide readers with up-to-date, expert advice on chicken care. Mormino has been running an award-winning chicken care blog for years, and this book is a culmination of those years of research and contains all the same accurate and hands-on knowledge, complete with an abundance of illustrations.

Much of the information in this book is common knowledge to novice chicken keepers and focuses on small-scale egg farming and keeping chickens as pets — there is no information about raising chickens for meat production.

5. The Intermediate Guide to Raising Chickens

If you’ve already raised your own backyard chickens and want to expand your knowledge and flock, “The Intermediate Guide to Raising Chickens” is a great book to help you move forward. It was released in 2021, so it contains the most up-to-date information on how to grow your flock, provide for your chicken’s needs at scale, breed and raise chicks, and turn your growing flock into a small business. It also contains vital information on keeping your flock healthy, dealing with ailments, and ensuring that your flock gets proper nutrition, but it is not the book for you if you’re just looking to get started in keeping chickens.

6. Backyard Farming: Raising Chickens: From Building Coops to Collecting Eggs and More

“Backyard Farming: Raising Chickens” is a comprehensive primer for first-time chicken keepers and will help guide you in raising chickens for eggs, meat, fun, or profit. The book is packed with detailed illustrations and photographs that help you plan and build your first chicken coop, along with details on raising chicks, choosing the ideal breed, and keeping your flock healthy and happy. It also contains tips and tricks from experienced farmers to help you avoid common mistakes and get your flock going the right way from the beginning.

This book is fairly short and provides a basic overview of raising chickens, so it will not provide you with any new information if you already have experience raising chickens. Also, it was printed in 2013, so it doesn’t contain the most up-to-date information.

7. How to Speak Chicken: Why Your Chickens Do What They Do & Say What They Say

“How to Speak Chicken” is a unique look at how to understand the minds of your birds and thus, be better equipped to take proper care of them. The bestselling author, Melissa Caughey, has spent a great deal of time around chickens and has observed that they are much like our other favorite pets. With this guide, she provides hands-on insights into how chickens communicate and interact with vocalizing and behavior. This book includes how chickens use their senses to understand their environment and how they establish a pecking order in the flock. It also contains in-depth information on chickens’ anatomy, emotions, and their ability to solve problems.

This book is a great addition to any chicken keeper’s library but does not detail much information on caring for and raising a flock if you’re a beginner.

8. Raising Chickens for Dummies

The “For Dummies” books have taken the world by storm, exploring almost every subject imaginable, and “Raising Chickens for Dummies” is the franchise’s foray into raising backyard chickens. The book was published in 2019, so it contains up-to-date information on everything from choosing and purchasing chickens to constructing coops and controlling pests and predators. This book will also teach you how to optimize egg production and combat laying issues, along with feeding for optimal health and dealing with common health issues. It also has a comprehensive guide on raising chickens for both eggs and meat, with tips on collecting and storing eggs and butchering meat birds.

The only issue we had with this book is that it reads more like a textbook or encyclopedia and lacks personal stories and anecdotes from experienced flock owners.

9. Raising Chickens: Beginners Guide to Raising Healthy and Happy Backyard Chickens

“Raising Chickens” by Janet Wilson is ideal for beginners wanting to dip their toe into the world of raising their own backyard flock. The book has a detailed FAQ to help you decide if raising chickens at home is the best choice for you, along with detailed step-by-step instructions to help you decide on a style of coop and how to build it, where to put it, and how many chickens to keep. It also details how to choose the right breed for your needs and how to keep your new flock healthy and happy once they’re established.

While this book contains helpful photographs, they’re all in black and white. Also, it’s a great guide to raising chickens for beginners but doesn’t contain much about producing meat, scaling your flock, or starting a business.

10. Backyard Chickens: A Practical Handbook to Raising Chickens

“Backyard Chickens: A Practical Handbook to Raising Chickens” is an in-depth guide from a fourth-generation chicken keeper and is suited to novice chicken keepers and veterans alike. The book provides a practical guide to everything from raising chickens and selecting the perfect breed to feeding your flock and dealing with common health issues. It also goes into detail about chicken behavior, including bullying, to help you gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of your flock. Lastly, it’s packed with color illustrations and photos that provide specific examples of health and behavior.

This book contains a great deal of narrative into the author’s personal experiences, rather than a comprehensive manual for raising chickens. Also, the material is fairly generic in places and is suited to beginners more than experienced keepers.

Buyer’s Guide – Purchasing the Best Book on Raising Chickens

Do You Really Need a Book on Raising Chickens?

There are so many books on the market on raising backyard chickens, and it can be overwhelming to choose which one to buy. With so much information freely available on the internet, many novice chicken keepers choose blogs and articles over books, which is understandable, considering how simple it is to do a Google search.

That said, books are still valuable, especially when it comes to raising animals. Books on raising chickens offer detailed, step-by-step instructions on raising chickens, without the need to trawl through hundreds of blog posts before finding what you’re looking for. Of course, this is not to say that the internet does not provide any value when looking for information on chickens — it most certainly can — but a book can be a more concise and simple way to get what you’re looking for, especially when you’re first starting.

Many of these books also offer personal experiences and anecdotes on raising chickens, which is priceless information to help you avoid making the same mistakes that others did, so you can be successful from the beginning.

Things to consider before buying a book on raising chickens

Author

This is arguably the most important consideration when buying a book on raising chickens. The author should have personal experience with raising chickens and provide personal anecdotes, successes, and mistakes for you to learn from. While the usual information on chickens is essential too, it can help so much to learn about the personal experiences of other chicken keepers.

Content

Are you a complete novice when it comes to chicken keeping? Do you have a bit of knowledge already and want to grow your flock? Or are you a chicken-keeping veteran who would simply like to learn more about chickens? These are important questions to consider, as some books are catered completely to beginners, while others contain unique, in-depth information that’s helpful to chicken keepers with some experience.

Illustrations

Illustrations and photographs are great tools in conveying knowledge, especially when it comes to things like choosing chicken breeds, identifying health issues, and building and maintaining coops. Books that detail subjects like building coops should have highly detailed instructions and photographs of the steps to do. Similarly, books helping identify breeds and health issues should be the same, especially with color photos.

Many of the books listed here are available as audiobooks too.

Conclusion

We highly recommend any of these books on raising chickens, but “Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens” has been one of the best-selling books for raising chickens for over 2 decades, and as such, it is our top choice overall. The book is packed with color illustrations and photographs, and almost every aspect of chicken care is covered, making it ideal for beginners and veterans alike.

“The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens” is the best book on raising chickens for the money. If you’re new to raising chickens, this book contains up-to-date information on how to build a coop, how to choose the right chicken breed, what to feed your chickens, and detailed chicken care advice.

“The Homesteader’s Natural Chicken Keeping Handbook” is a premium, comprehensive guide to raising a backyard flock, with all the information that you need for understanding chicken’s behavior, producing eggs, starting your own poultry or egg business, and preventing and treating ailments naturally.

With all the available choices of books on raising your own chickens, finding the right one can be overwhelming. We hope that our in-depth reviews have narrowed the options and helped you find the best book on raising chickens, whether you’re a complete beginner or seasoned veteran!

Featured Image Credit: Elena Blokhina, Shutterstock