Chook. The Podcast

A sneak peek at upcoming guests during Season 2 of Chook. The Podcast. 

For almost 40 years, Phil and Anne Westwood have run Freeranger Eggs in Grantville, 90 km south east of Melbourne.    What’s super interesting about Phil and Anne’s operation is that growth has never been part of their business model.    They have stayed deliberately small, deliberately avoiding automation including a total lack of autodoors and rollaway nest boxes.    There were several motivatio...

Brendon Murphy presides over the Australian Facebook group dedicated to Cream Legbar breeding.    In this conversation, we discuss: How Cream Legbars were created in Australia How to tell the difference between Australian and import bloodlines Egg colour Ways to work with faults like high tails and floppy or twisted combs  Perhaps the most interesting thing Brendon shares in this chat is why some...

Roosters can be tragic figures.   The reality is, for every hen in a backyard flock, there is a rooster, her brother, that almost certainly didn’t live happily ever after.   Lisa Short, from the Victorian-based Rooster Warriors Rehoming, tries to make a small dent in this unfortunate aspect of chicken keeping by helping find homes for hundreds of roosters.    Most of those roosters, she says, come...

Belinda Burgess tried having a regular job. She tried retiring. Neither stuck.  Despite 12 hour days, 7 days a week, she says running a commercial poultry farm is a good job, a passion. Therapy, even. She sells 30-40+ dozen eggs per week at the height of the season, and hatches hundreds of chicks per week. She sells year-round.  Ask her how many breeds she keeps and she'll have to check.  In this...

If we could avoid it, we probably would but dispatching a chicken is something every chicken breeder really needs to know as an unavoidable part of their repertoire. If you’re building a homesteader lifestyle, working towards sustainability or even if you’re keeping just a few chickens in your backyard it’s an indispensable skill. It can be tricky though to know how to get started. For permacultur...

The second in our series of conversations about Cream Legbars, the increasingly popular blue egg laying chicken.  This is a really illuminating conversation with the experienced British Cream Legbar breeder Emma Middleton. Emma knows more than anyone I’ve been able to find about the origins of the breed and more importantly the genetics behind the various traits that make this such a challenging a...

Horse breeding and chicken breeding may seem like completely different endeavours but it turns out they have quite a bit in common… and of course they’re underpinned by the same genetic principles. With more than 50 years' experience raising foals, esteemed Australian stock horse breeder Jeanette Gower knows a thing or two about genetics and its practical application. I was keen to find out and fi...

Worms are often the chief suspect when a backyard chicken gets sick. But how often are they to blame? This is the starting point for my conversation with poultry vet Grant Richards who has spent his 40-year career in chickens and chicken health. Grant sits at the helm of Parasite Diagnostic Services where you can send poultry manure for worm testing so you might think he’d be talking up the danger...

Cream Legbars are one of the most sought-after chicken varieties among those of us who love coloured eggs. They’re also one of the more complicated chickens to breed well. That’s why I went straight to the source, to the Cream Legbar’s home country of the UK where they were originally created at Cambridge University. There I found experienced Cream Legbar breeder Ethan Rivers who's been breeding t...

If you’ve ever needed help with or had a question about a Brinsea-brand incubator, Loi Truong is the man who will have come to your rescue. One of the loveliest and most helpful people working in chickens in Australia today, he holds the Brinsea distributorship in this country and has been incubating for decades. So I couldn’t think of anyone more qualified to talk about the ins and outs of incuba...

From 20 chickens as a homeschooling project at the age of 8 to a million dollar business with 5000 chickens, certified organic. As the brains and the brawn behind Madelaine's Eggs, the broad strokes of Madelaine Scott’s story are well known to Australians.  She burst into the public eye as a 19-year-old launching a crowdfunding campaign that raised 60 thousand dollars in 60 days to purchase an egg...

Alf Woods is a singular figure within the Australian poultry community and someone who, in show circles, truly needs no introduction. He went to his first show at the age of 7 and, now 98, he’s been a fixture at the Melbourne Royal ever since. Having spent 9 decades in poultry, participating at just about every level of the fancy, it was a priceless opportunity to sit down with Alf and pick his br...

As I was researching the cover story for the debut issue of Chook Journal, I kept uncovering question after question. It wasn’t until I met Paul Rodgers that the answers started to really flow. Paul knows probably more than most people about the history of Marans in Australia. When he saw his first Marans, he says it was love. He went on to cofound the short-lived Australian Marans Club. Paul rema...

Jeff Mattocks deserves an award for services to the poultry community, worldwide. He's so much more than a poultry nutritionist. In this conversation, he describes the brooder trick the world’s best poultry keepers use to raise healthy chicks, explains why he can’t recommend any store-bought chook feed and shares his go-to response at the first sign of illness in a flock. 

US-based Black Copper Marans breeder Shane Hardy has been breeding the variety for ten years and what he knows is a mixture of experience and education — he’s been mentored by some of the best. You only have to look at his birds to realise he knows what he’s doing. He’s also had success using a stacking technique to darken eggshell colour in his line. To see Shane appraise a Black Copper Marans co...

What makes a good egg and how to get your hens to produce their best work is a major preoccupation for most of us chicken keepers. Peter Tisdell is one of Australia’s leading egg judges. We get down in the weeds a bit in this conversation— Pete knows a lot. But from egg faults and their causes to what kind of nesting box is best, Pete’s is a useful perspective not only if you’re showing your eggs...

Fiona Barca is a recognised name in the Australian Marans community and a bit of a rare commodity. She’s one of the few people exclusively breeding not just a single breed of chicken, but a single variety: black and blue copper Marans. Fiona was lucky enough to obtain some birds from Avgen, the company that imported copper Marans and other rare breeds from the UK. In this interview Fiona shares: H...

Jeff is a poultry nutritionist who’s spent three decades working with pastured poultry producers. He’s done more than anyone else to raise awareness about the need to feed your chickens digestive grit. Digestive grit is very different to shell grit. To see pictures of the kind of stones he’s talking about, check out his article in the September 2025 issue of Chook Journal, a fully digital experien...

Heather Soane was the first person to show black copper Marans in Australia. She'd been breeding the birds for several years by the time they were officially imported, and believes her bloodline was smuggled into the country from Belgium or Poland. In this conversation Heather discusses: Why she believes her black copper Marans were smuggled into Australia rather than being "Aussie line" recreatio...

Doyenne, grand dame, matriarch. However you encapsulate her, there is only one Megg Miller. In this candid and wide-ranging interview, Megg: — Reflects on her adventures over 35 years at the helm of Australasian Poultry magazine including how she navigated what was a male-dominated culture in the 80s when she began showing — Speculates on challenges facing the future of chicken keeping in Australi...

Meet your host, former foreign correspondent turned heritage chicken breeder Jane Cowan and get a first listen to highlights from season 1 of Chook. The Podcast, a show for backyard chicken keepers and serious breeders.