Success With Baby Chicks

A Complete Guide to Hatchery Selection, Mail-Order Chicks, Day-Old Chick Care, Brooding, Brooder Plans, Feeding, and Housing

by Robert Plamondon

In Success With Baby Chicks, I cover everything you need to know about raising chicks through the brooding period (starting with day-old chicks and ending when they no longer need extra heat), with an emphasis on clear, upbeat, practical advice. The book includes many "Lost Secrets of the Poultry Masters": pieces of advice that were once widely publicized but have been largely forgotten.

No aspect of chicken keeping is as crucial as the brooding period. You can't be successful with chickens unless you raise happy, healthy baby chicks. Everyone knows this is true, but no one else gives it the attention it deserves! You won't get this information anywhere else.

I devote entire chapters to subjects that are normally dismissed in a paragraph or two, such as litter or waterers. Overhead infrared lamp brooding has a chapter to itself. Cold-weather brooding is discussed in detail. I do it because these things are important. Skimping on detail, which is what most books do, leaves the reader in the dark, and the chicks suffer.

My Early Baby Chick Troubles

Like many people, I'd have a good baby-chick experience one time and a bad baby-chick experience the next. There didn't seem to be any pattern to it. It was very frustrating, and it made me shy away from raising as many chicks as I needed for my farm. I had gone into free-range egg production almost by accident, and I was never going to get anywhere unless brooding chicks went from a dreaded chore to a high point of the year.

Never knowing whether your baby chicks are going to live or die casts a terrible pall of uncertainty and gloom over any poultry operation. No one can enjoy a poultry hobby or maintain an interest in a poultry business if their flocks suffer from high mortality year after year. I don't even want to think about the effect it has on kids, who go into a poultry project brimming with optimism.

How I Turned Things Around

I had the good luck to meet a retired lady who had raised 30,000 chicks a year for many years, and insisted that raising chicks can be done with almost perfect success on any scale. She claimed she lost 1% of the chicks during the first week (from shipping-related stress), and the rest all survived to maturity. Bold claims, but she wasn't the only one to report such results.

I have the good fortune to live near Oregon State University, which has hundreds of poultry books and magazines in its library, dating back to before 1900. I flipped through all of them, read most of them, and learned all kinds of things that used to be well known, but are now forgotten. Small farms and small flocks used to be the norm, and agricultural research then as now focused on the mainstream. This means that the literature of 50-100 years ago is filled with tested, proven, practical small-farm poultry techniques. Our grandparents' generation knew a lot about chickens. First I read about their techniques, then I tried them. Then I read some more. A lot of concepts didn't sink in all at once, because the information was scattered, and sometimes really crucial ideas were mentioned only in passing. But I kept at it.

My results with baby chicks got better and better. It wasn't that I had been doing just one or two things wrong with my initial batches of chicks. I had been doing dozens of things wrong! My initial reading of "modern" poultry books hadn't prepared me. And not only did I lack knowledge about techniques -- I didn't know any of the warning signs of trouble. Things would get really bad before I knew that anything was wrong at all.

How Well Does it Work?

Here's an example: I bought 150 pullet chicks in May. When I moved them out of the brooder house on July 2, I had 154 live pullets! Negative mortality! It's not really a miracle (hatcheries add extra chicks to cover losses in shipping), but it's pretty good by anybody's standard. And with the techniques I give in my book, these results are typical.

Example: Build a 200-Chick Brooder in Two Hours for $20

Not only do these techniques work better, they can save you money. In Chapters 7 and 8, I tell you how to build an insulated electric brooder in two hours for about $20, which uses only about one-third the amount of electricity as overhead heat lamps, and does a better job besides. It's an easy construction project that anyone can build, and uses infrared heat lamps or reflector floodlight bulbs. Many people have told me that this information alone is worth the cost of the book.

You Can Have The Same Success

None of these techniques are very complicated. I can and do explain them fully in Success With Baby Chicks. My goal is to give you the same kind of results and understanding in just one book that took me hundreds of books and more than five years to achieve.

My goal doesn't include getting you to buy lots of expensive equipment. Being successful with baby chicks depends on your understanding of the chicks and their needs. The actual equipment and housing requirements are quite basic, and are much the same whether you are brooding ten chicks or a thousand. So buy the book right now! You can't benefit from its information until you do.

About My Farm

I have a flock of 600 free-range laying hens, and my wife Karen Black raises about 2,000 pastured broilers per year. Our enjoyment of farming and the financial success of our farm depend on raising large numbers of chicks successfully.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Brooding Quick-Start
Chapter 3. Breed and Hatchery Selection
Chapter 4. Chooosing Profitable Breeds
Chapter 5. Brooding Basics
Chapter 6. Overhead Heat Lamp Brooders
Chapter 7. Insulated Heat Lamp Brooders
Chapter 8. More About Insulated Heat Lamp Brooders
Chapter 9. Battery Brooders
Chapter 10. Other Brooders
Chapter 11. Feeding
Chapter 12. Waterers
Chapter 13. Litter
Chapter 14. Brooder Houses
Chapter 15. Health Problems and Predators
Chapter 16. Useful Tables
Chapter 17. Recommended Reading
Chapter 18. For More Information

Read the Sample Chapters!

Chapter 2. Brooding Quick-Start
 

A Testimonial

Thanks for your help. The book is an excellent resource.

Ron Theusch
Alden, MN
 

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