USING A BROODY HEN
If you are going to use a broody hen, follow the directions in FIRST DAY (below). #1 (Clean), #3 (Drafts), #5 (Litter) and #6 (water) and then go to Broody Hen, putting chicks under on the "Feeding Your Chickens" page.

FIRST DAY

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.

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COOP SET-UP

CORNERS
Remember to make them round so that the chicks cannot huddle together and smother each other.
WATER
When they arrive, give them luke warm water with molasses in it. Keep the water away from the feed to stop the feed from getting wet.
HEAT
I always used a minimum of 2 lamps in case one of them burned out. I bought a ceramic light socket with the heat resistant wires already attached. Make sure the socket is rated for the wattage of heat lamp you will be using. I used 250Watt, infra-red heat bulbs. I attached the heat resistant wires to a plug and plugged it into an extension cord. You can then hang the bulb from the ceiling at the appropriate height to get the right temperature. Don't put the feed or water directly underneath the heat lamps.
FEED
Use crumbles to begin with. The pellets are too large for the chicks. Stand the chicks right on the crumbles, with the crumbles in a flat cardboard lid, so that they can find the food.

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SPACE NEEDS
Hens, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, need 2 square feet of floor space per fully-grown, mid-size laying hen. I, personally, find 3 square feet per bird is more comfortable.

• Day old chicks
  100 chicks arrive in a box about 24 inches x 24 inches. I give them a space about 30 inches x 10 feet because of the way I set up the heats lamps, feed and water.
• New born to 1 month - 1/4 square foot per bird.
• 1 month to 2 months - 1/2 square foot per bird.
• 2 months to 3 months - 1 square foot per bird.
• 3 months to 4 months - 2 square feet per bird.
• 4 months to adult - 3 square feet per bird.

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HEAT NEEDS
Measure the temperature at the edge of the heat circle created by the heat lamp, at the height of the backs of the chicks.
Ideally, the chicks should spread out around the edge of the heat circle. If they huddle under the lamps, they are too cold. If they go as far away as possible, they are too hot.
They must have ventilation without drafts to allow the escape of the moist air that they create. They also create a tremendous amount of very fine dust as they grow.
Layer Chicks
Start at 95° F for day old chicks. I found hanging a 250Watt infra-red heat lamp 18 inches above the floor was about right.
Broiler Chicks
Start at 85° F° for day old chicks. I found hanging a 250Watt infra-red heat lamp heat lamp 24 inches above the floor was about right.
Layer Chicks and Broiler Chicks
Reduce the heat by about 5° F per week (raising the lamps about 2 inches each week seems to acomplish this) until you get down to 70° F. After that, they should be fine on their own.

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PROBLEMS

• Broken Legs in Meat Birds
• Heart Attacks in Meat Birds
• Roosters, when to mix with the rest of flock - Roosters fighting
• Coccidiosis
• Hawks

Broken Legs and Heart Attacks in Commercial Meat Birds
The meat birds put on weight so fast that their legs and hearts cannot keep up with their rate of growth. Normal meat bird feed is around 23% protein. When I slowed down the growth by using layer grower feed, which is only 16% protein, I cut the losses considerably from around 30% to about 10%. This was still high when compared to the 3% mortality of the layer chicks, but the layer chicks seem to be stronger altogether. Sometimes you can get 20% protein. Just be aware that the reduction in the protein will definitely slow down their growth.

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When to mix Roosters with the rest of the flock - Roosters fighting
Roosters who have not grown up together will fight to the death. If you separate a rooster from the others that he has grown up with, even for a day, he loses his priviledged status, and the others will fight him to the death when he returns to the flock. I have always raised my chicks in the same barn as the old flock, with only wire netting between them. This is not a practice to be encouraged, in fact, it should be positively discouraged because of the danger of transmitting diseases from the old birds to the young ones. However, having said that, I was always able to mix my young roosters with the existing ones, so long as I did it when the babies were about 8 weeks old. By then, they were big enough that they were not picked on by the old birds, but the young roosters had not yet matured and so were not a threat to the old ones. I do not know if it would work if you brought in new ones that the old roosters had not seen growing up through the wire fence.

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Coccidiosis
Coccidiosis is a disease that seems to be much more disasterous in young chicks than it does in the old birds. It is a parasite which is carried in the chick droppings, and good hygiene can help to prevent it. You suspect you have it when you see blood in the droppings of the chicks. Medicated feed helps to prevent it, but if you do not want to use medicated feed it can be arrested fairly quickly by putting vinegar in the drinking water - 1 tablespoon of vinegar to a quart of water for 3 days. Clean out the litter and the drinking water. A friend who raises lots of chickens puts vinegar in the water from the start until they are almost grown up. Some strains are more lethal than others, and some only affect one breed of chicken and not another. Always disinfect the chick house between batches of chickens, but it is essential to do so if you have had coccidiosis in the last batch. Vacuuming the floor is not good enough, you have to kill the parasites.

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HAWKS
I was having a lot of trouble with hawks a couple of years ago, loosing almost one grown hen a day out of 200 that I started with. The hawks seem to sit on the backs of the chickens and peck a ring of flesh around their necks and kill them. You can put netting over the chicken run to stop the hawks getting at the hens.
The other thing that happened was that just as I had almost sold all the ready-to-lay hens, the rooster that I was going to keep also matured. To start with he did nothing, then as he matured properly he figured out that the danger was coming from the sky. When an aeroplane flew overhead he screeched and all the hens dove for cover. When the sparrow flew overhead he screeched again and again all the hens dove for cover. From that time on, I have had no more problem with the hawks or the sparrows or aeroplanes! The only problem was that he became so protective of the hens that even I could no longer get near them without being attacked. I put up with it for about a year because he was protecting the hens, running for my life when he came near, until a new rooster literally flew into my life. Remember that I live in the bush quite a long way from my nearest neighbour - too far for a normal hen to wander. He appeared out of nowhere at 4 o'clock in the morning, 20 feet up in a tree, crowing for all he was worth in the pitch dark. The original rooster is now in the stew pot and the new rooster is living happily with my small flock of 12 hens, protecting them from the hawk, but still allowing me near my hens.
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ABOUT THE BACKYARD CHICKEN FARMER
I started raising chicks in 1997 and was raising between 100 and 300 of them on a regular basis, selling them at 18 weeks old as ready-to-lay hens. I tried meat birds a couple of times, and originally kept my first 200 hens as layers, until I was washing eggs in my nightmares. I was getting 15 dozen eggs a day, and washing that many every day by hand was, pardon the pun, for the birds!
Most times I was able to keep the mortality down to about 3 in 100 birds. I was raising them in an old insulated, cedar-lined mobile home, using the end bedroom (10 ft x 12 ft) as a brooding room, and expanding into the rest of the mobile as needed. To start with, all I had were 2 infra-red light bulbs in ceramic sockets, a couple of extension cords, a hanging feeder, a waterer, some cardboard, wood shavings, and an old clean sheet.
Unfortunately, my allergies to the chicks were getting worse all the time and I sold the majority of the hens in 2001. I'm 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 14 left of my "old birds", two of which are from my first batch. Apart from those 14 birds, I am now left with only the memories, so I decided to share what I had learned with anyone who has the patience to read this web site.

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