Foundations - Farming and Homesteading + Pastured Laying Hens

Grow Your Own Future

What if your greatest investment wasn't something you could buy – but something you could learn?

Imagine knowing how to grow your own food, raise productive livestock, build practical systems, and create a more resilient future for yourself and your family.

Foundations in Farming and Homesteading + Pastured Laying Hens is a two-part series designed to help you turn the idea of self-reliance into practical action.

In a world of rising costs, fragile supply chains, and uncertainty, the ability to produce, provide, and adapt has never been more valuable.

Build Something You Can Depend On

Led by award-winning farmer Joel Salatin, Foundations in Farming and Homesteading takes you beyond the idea of simply "living off the land."

Learn practical foundations for building a productive homestead or small farm while developing skills that can help you produce food, avoid costly mistakes, and potentially create income.

With more than 60 years of farming experience, Joel shares lessons designed to help you understand the systems behind a successful farm or homestead.

Turn Eggs Into Opportunity

Pastured Laying Hens takes you into one of the most practical small-farm enterprises: egg production.

Learn the fundamentals of establishing and managing a pastured laying-hen operation, whether you're starting a backyard flock, building a homestead, or exploring a profitable farm enterprise.

Farming Skills • Homesteading • Food Production • Self-Reliance • Small-Farm Opportunity

Don't just prepare for the future. Learn how to grow it.

Here's What You'll Learn by the End of the Course

• Learn how to design your homestead around the land, using water, sunlight, terrain, access, and natural patterns to reduce labor and improve productivity.
• Discover how to build smarter, more resilient systems from housing, fencing, and water to mobile infrastructure that saves time, reduces costs, and adapts as your homestead grows.
• Explore how to make your homestead more productive and profitable by stacking enterprises, tracking profitability, using resources efficiently, and turning livestock into productive partners.
• Learn how to build a productive pastured laying-hen system, from choosing the right flock and housing to managing nutrition, ranging, sanitation, predators, and seasonal production.
• Discover how mobile and regenerative poultry systems can work year-round, using Eggmobiles, Feathernet, hoop houses, deep bedding, and natural chicken behaviors to improve egg quality, pasture health, and farm resilience.

The Path to a More Resilient, Self-Reliant Homestead

Building the Self-Reliant Homestead: From Dream to Design

What if your greatest investment isn't something you can put in a bank – but something you can learn, build, grow, and share with others?

• Explore how practical skills, knowledge, and relationships can help reduce dependence and build greater resilience in food, energy, housing, health, and finances.
• Learn why relationships and shared expertise can be among your greatest assets – and how surrounding yourself with people who can grow, repair, and build creates a stronger community.
• Discover how living within your means, protecting your nest egg, and making strategic investments can create the financial breathing room needed to build a successful homestead.
• Understand the key factors behind finding the right place to live and farm, including relationships, markets, climate, regulations, taxes, available resources, and future opportunities.
• Learn to observe your landscape, understand water and natural patterns, plan access, and work with the characteristics of your property to create a more productive and resilient homestead.

Designing the Homestead: Housing, Fencing, and Water

Create a more efficient, productive, and resilient homestead by designing your home, land, water, and livestock systems to work together.

• Learn how central placement, proximity to gardens and daily-use areas, hillside construction, and southern exposure can reduce unnecessary work while making your home part of the farm's overall productivity.
• Discover how thoughtful access lanes, fencing, livestock areas, and field layouts can make moving animals and equipment easier while working with the natural terrain.
• Learn why fences and paddocks should follow the land's natural contours and how observing terrain, sun exposure, and moisture patterns can help create more productive and manageable fields.
• Explore practical ways to capture rainfall and surface runoff through ponds and cisterns, store water for dry periods, and use gravity to create efficient water distribution without constantly relying on pumps or hauling.
• Discover simple, practical approaches for tapping springs, transporting water through piping, and developing systems that increase your property's water resilience while reducing energy and labor.

Building Smarter: Planning, Avoiding Mistakes, and Making It Work

Build a thriving homestead by focusing on what matters most, taking practical steps, and doing the right things in the right order.

• Learn to start before you feel ready by taking action, embracing imperfect beginnings, and building your skills through experience.
• Discover how to avoid costly mistakes by minimizing unnecessary spending and making practical, strategic investments.
• Explore ways to protect your time and energy by reducing unnecessary trips, movement, and inefficient daily chores.
• Learn how to build stronger relationships by creating clear roles, respecting different personalities, and giving each person meaningful responsibility.
• Discover how to embrace the journey by accepting setbacks, appreciating incremental progress, working with others, and focusing on what truly works for your homestead.

The Mobile Homestead: Building Flexibility, Resilience, and Profitability

Use mobility to create more freedom, resilience, and opportunity on your homestead while growing your farm without unnecessary costs.

• Learn how mobile infrastructure creates flexibility by separating the farm from the land, lowering barriers to entry, and allowing you to scale gradually without tying up your capital.
• Discover how mobility can improve animal health and fertility by using movement, rest, and sunshine to support sanitation while distributing nutrients across the landscape.
• Explore the power of stacking multiple enterprises by rotating different species and activities through the same space to increase productivity, support cash flow, and make better use of your land.
• Learn how mobile systems build resilience by making infrastructure easier and cheaper to repair, adapt, relocate, and recover from unexpected challenges.
• Discover how tracking profitability can strengthen your homestead by separating income and expenses for each enterprise so you can identify what works, improve margins, and make smarter decisions about what to grow or reduce.

The Egg Opportunity: Building a Productive Pastured Laying Hen System

What if laying hens could become more than an egg-producing enterprise – providing reliable cash flow, food security, sanitation, and valuable work across the farm while turning the chicken's natural instincts into an advantage?

• Discover why eggs can be a powerful gateway product that creates steady cash flow and introduces customers to your broader farm offerings.
• Learn how laying hens can turn waste into value by using food scraps, sanitizing pastures, reducing insects, and cleaning up behind livestock.
• Explore the key challenges of raising laying hens, including predators, flock control, sanitation, housing, seasonal demand, and feed waste.
• Learn how "thinking like a chicken" improves farm design by working with their natural instincts, social behavior, and nesting preferences.
• Discover how to choose the right ranging system based on land, flock size, pasture layout, predators, labor, and sanitation needs.

Starting a Strong Laying Flock: Health, Breeds, and Productivity

Build a productive, resilient laying flock by creating the right winter environment and using your hens to generate value beyond egg production.

• Learn how to choose between starting with chicks or ready-to-lay pullets based on cost, timing, and convenience.
• Discover how strategic flock timing can support more consistent winter egg production naturally.
• Explore how managing daylight, maturity, and comfort can improve winter laying performance.
• Learn how proper housing, nesting areas, nutrition, water, and winter protection support flock health.
• Discover why hardy, dual-purpose breeds can be well suited to pasture-based egg production.
• Explore how hens can add value beyond eggs by helping manage pests, flies, nutrients, and fields.

Mobile Egg Production: The Eggmobile, Feathernet, and Pasture Management

Learn how mobile poultry systems evolved and uncover the practical lessons behind designing, moving, and managing Eggmobiles and the Millennium Feathernet for profitable pasture-based egg production.

• Learn how the Eggmobile evolved from a small experimental shelter into a mobile pasture-sanitation system that works with grazing livestock.
• Discover the key Eggmobile design principles including weight distribution, ventilation, slatted floors, chicken ladders, entrances, and trailer construction.
• Explore the logistics of profitable mobile egg production including feed, water, automated doors, modular units, and proper timing for moving birds.
• Uncover how frequent flock movement improves pasture hygiene by reducing concentrated manure areas and interrupting pest and sanitation problems.
• Discover how the Millennium Feathernet improves mobility and production with easier movement, lower predation risk, and better commercial-scale efficiency.

Year-Round Egg Production: Winter Housing, Egg Quality, and Flock Protection

Winter doesn't have to mean simply protecting chickens from the cold – it can become an opportunity to create a warm, productive, regenerative system where the birds, bedding, sunlight, and even the greenhouse itself work together.

• Learn how sunlight, composting bedding, and proper space help keep chickens warm and comfortable.
• Explore how wood chips, scratch grains, and natural chicken activity work together to keep bedding aerated and composting.
• Uncover how high-quality hay gives chickens something to forage while helping reduce bullying and support egg production.
• See how chickens can prepare the space for vegetable production by incorporating plant material and controlling insects.
• Learn how an affordable, semi-portable hoop house can support winter poultry housing and seasonal crop production.

How to Build a Profitable Pastured Egg Enterprise

Joel Salatin explains how to create a stronger, more profitable pastured egg operation by making the most of every bird and every egg. Discover how to market older laying hens as flavorful stewing hens, develop value-added products such as quiche and egg noodles, breed a healthier flock, calculate profitable prices, and build an egg enterprise that supports multiple streams of farm income.

• Turn older laying hens into valuable gourmet stewing hens instead of treating them as waste.
• Create additional income from eggs by producing value-added foods such as frozen quiche, egg noodles, and pound cake.
• Build a healthier, more productive flock by selecting breeding stock for longevity, resilience, and strong pasture performance.
• Calculate the true cost of producing eggs—including feed, labor, packaging, overhead, and unexpected expenses—to set profitable prices.
• Grow a resilient farm business by combining the egg enterprise with other complementary income streams and scalable poultry systems.

Get Lifetime Access

Order your copy today and get instant access to all 32 sessions of Foundations in Farming & Homesteading + Pastured Laying Hens.

Start building your skills, confidence, and foundation for a more productive homesteading journey!

Here's what's included in the Package:

Foundations in Farming & Homesteading

This course includes:

• 7 Video Sessions (4 hours of video)
• Homework PDFs for each lesson that guide you through the essential steps
• Downloadable PDF transcripts for each video lesson

Included Sessions:

• Session 1 - Dreaming to Grow
• Session 2 - Determining Location
• Session 3 - Designing The Landscape
• Session 4 - Defining The Plan
• Session 5 - Dodging Mistakes
• Session 6 - Developing Mobility
• Session 7 - Deciding Profitability

Pastured Laying Hens

This course includes:

• 25 Video Sessions (over 5 hours of video)
• Homework PDFs for each lesson that guide you through the essential steps
• Downloadable PDF transcripts for each video lesson

Included Sessions:

• Session 1 - The Egg Opportunity
• Session 2 - Biggest Problems
• Session 3 - Thinking Like a Chicken
• Session 4 - To Range or Not to Range
• Session 5 - Eggmobile vs Feathernet
• Session 6 - Starting Your Flock
• Session 7 - Overcoming the 3 Strikes to Poor Lay
• Session 8 - Health and Sanitation
• Session 9 - Breeds
• Session 10 - Putting Hens to Work
• Session 11 - The Eggmobile
• Session 12 - The Eggmobile Logistics
• Session 13 - The Millennium Feathernet
• Session 14 - Poultry Netting
• Session 15 - Wintering in a Hoop House
• Session 16 - Nest Boxes
• Session 17 - Broken and Dirty Eggs (Profit Robbers)
• Session 18 - Predation
• Session 19 - Egg Efficiency
• Session 20 - Marketing and Sizing
• Session 21 - Stewing Hens and Adding Value to Eggs
• Session 22 - Hatching Your Own
• Session 23 - Vision for a Better Pastured Chicken
• Session 24 - Pricing
• Session 25 - Economics

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 his 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.

Joel has been featured in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Inc. and many others.

On his family farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Polyface Farms, Joel produces meat he describes as "beyond organic", which is raised using what the farm describes as environmentally responsible, ecologically beneficial, sustainable agriculture.