1. Clean and disinfect the area where the chicks are going to reside. Lysol is good, bleach makes terrible fumes. I used a plant mister to get a fine mist into all the cracks and crannies. One time I did not disinfect and the coccidiosis stayed in the room and the new batch of chicks started dying.
2. Turn on the heat lamps (See Heat Needs) at least a day or more before your chicks arrive, so the walls and floor have a chance to warm up, as well as the air, and the disinfectant has time to dry.
3. Make sure there are no drafts.
4. Make an area (See Space Needs) for the chicks with cardboard walls 2 feet high and round corners, if they are in a large chicken house or barn. If they get frightened, they will try and huddle in the corners and some often get smothered. If there are no true corners, it is harder for them to do this.
5. You will need some litter for the floor. Wood shavings, chopped straw, or chopped corn husks will work. If you leave the straw too long to start with, they may find it hard to walk on. Don't use anything slippery. They are not strong enough while they are small to keep their legs from slipping in opposite directions, and they get straddle legs. Their legs go sideways and there is no cure. They can no longer walk.
   Put a few inches of litter on the floor, covered with an old sheet. You can get these at a thrift store for a couple of dollars. The chicks peck at whatever is at their feet, so if you don't cover the litter they will eat it and die. After about 3 days they will have learned what is feed and what is not, and you can take the sheet away, leaving the clean litter underneath. As the litter gets dirty, you can add more on top, or if you start with about a foot deep, it can be stirred very slowly each day with a rake to keep the dry litter on top. Be very slow about your movements, especially with the meat birds. They frighten very easily and are prone to heart attacks. If you want to remove the litter and replace it, again, be very, very slow about your movements.
6. Add 1 tablespoon of molasses to 1 gallon (4 litres) of warm water. Give this to the chicks for the first day or so. It will help them to recover from the journey. They are able to survive for 3 days on the yoke sack that they draw into their bodies just before they hatch, but they need water on their arrival. You can usually buy chick waterers at the local feed store. Some screw onto the neck of a quart canning jar. I dipped each chick's beak into the water when they arrived to let them learn faster where the water was.
7. NEVER LET THE FEED GET WET AT ALL. Ergot fungus grows rapidly (overnight) on wet feed, and the chickens literally drop dead. If you clean up all the wet feed, and disinfect, they should stop dying within a day or so. Don't let them eat the disinfectant either.
   Put the feed (see FEEDING YOUR CHICKENS) on the lids of the shipping boxes to start with, or make your own. The shipping boxes are made of cardboard, about 24 inches x 24 inches x 2 inches high. Keep the feed on the cardboard for the first few days, until the chicks know what they are looking for. After the chicks have had a drink, stand them on the feed. They instinctively peck at whatever is at their feet.
8. Check on them regularly to see that they are not too hot or too cold.

In 1997, I bought my first 200 day-old chicks, never having raised chicks in my life. I was born and bred in various cities throughout England. I have a B.Sc. in Physics, started out my working life as a computer programmer way back in the days of the dinosaurs, raised two children, and became a realtor for 12 years so that I could finish bringing up my children without babysitters. But all my life I have wanted to have a farm. As a child we had a holiday cottage on a farm in Herefordshire, and that was where the rot set in and I started yearning for a farm.
The first chicks that I bought were Warren Sex Links, which are one of the commercial laying hen crosses, and I believe they were a six way cross between a Leghorn and a Rhode Island Red. I raised them until they were mature and were laying almost one egg a day each. I was getting roughly 15 dozen eggs a day, which all had to be washed by hand. If, for some reason, I was unable to get to them one day, the next day I had to wash 30 dozen eggs. I was washing eggs in my nightmares. I decided that washing that many eggs every day by hand was, (pardon the pun), for the birds!
I put an ad in the local paper in October and sold 100 of the hens immediately, and could have sold more. The 7½ dozen eggs that I now had to wash each day was more manageable, but soon I realized this was still too many. I put another ad in the paper in December and sold all but a couple of dozen hens, again almost immediately and again I could have sold more. It made me realize that there was a market for ready-to-lay hens all year round here, even though I had been led to believe they were only in demand in the spring. I began raising 300 of them at a time, selling each batch at 18 weeks old as ready-to-lay hens. I tried meat birds a couple of times, but it turned out that selling meat birds was not my strong point, and most of the birds had to go into my own freezer. I decided to stick with the ready-to-lay hens for the most part, having a few experiments on the side with incubating chicks and using a broody hen.
Unfortunately, my allergies to the chicks were becoming unbearable, and I sold the majority of the hens in 2001. I am not so bad with the mature hens, but the chicks give off a phenomenal amount of very fine dust while they are growing. I still have my young rooster and 12 of my "old birds" left, two of which are from my first batch, and the others are from various experiments with broody hens etc. Apart from those 12 old hens and the rooster, I am now left with only the memories, so I decided to share with anyone who has the patience to read this book, that which I had had to learn by trial and error.