Joe Claborn has extensive experience with all types of poultry. He is a backyard poultry enthusiast, having kept a backyard flock for more than 20 years and, for the past 19 years, he has worked extensively with a large rare breed chick hatchery.
Claborn is the founder of Claborn Family Farms, which currently takes care of flocks numbering more than 4,000 birds, has a hatching capacity of 3,000 eggs per week, and during the past five years has raised and shipped more than 32,000 birds. He is developing productive flocks of birds bred according to the American Poultry Association standard.
His current area of research is developing flocks and methods of feeding that require little or not off farm inputs. Claborn is also an instructor for the Ploughshare Institute, where he shares his vision for sustainable poultry flocks at Ploughshare’s annual fair and in classes on the Ploughshare campus.