<p>Poultry keeping is being practiced by majority of the poor and marginalized rural households as one of the promising subsidiary enterprise all over India. Under the existing production systems, farmers are struggling to improve their backyard poultry productivity and sustainability owing to many reasons. Hence, the present study was taken up with an objective to find out the knowledge level of the backyard poultry famers and their determinants. The study was conducted in 240 respondents randomly selected from 8 villages of Erode district of Tamil Nadu. An ex-post facto research design was adopted and a pre tested, structured interview schedule was used for data collection. The study indicated that majority of poultry farmers (55.00 %) had medium knowledge on various aspects of poultry production, followed by low (27.50 %) and high level of knowledge in backyard poultry farming practices. Also it indicated that knowledge had positive correlation with education, and flock size at 5% level and with Information seeking behavior at 1% level. The rural poultry farmers had poor knowledge about feeding, breeding and management practice, which led to poor performance of the birds. The extension agencies, public and private organisations, NGOs etc should concentrate on these variables for bringing about overall improvement in the knowledge level of backyard poultry farmers.</p>