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

Robert Plamondon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0972177000 ISBN 13: 9780972177009

Publisher: Norton Creek Press, 2003

Synopsis

Baby chicks—can anything be more adorable? So cute, so soft, so helpless! Give your baby chicks a great start by reading the only book devoted to them, Success With Baby Chicks.

Robert Plamondon had to read over a hundred poultry books to discover the sure-fire techniques in Success With Baby Chicks, and he tested them on his farm to find the ones that will work best for you. These techniques were used on millions of family farms in the golden age before factory farming, and were then forgotten—until now! Learn how to choose a good hatchery and a good breed, what kind of heat source to use, how to prepare the brooder area for your baby chicks, what to feed them, and how to avoid common mistakes. All of this is explained so clearly and completely in one slim volume that it has received praise from children, hobbyists, farmers, and poultry scientists alike.

Whether you brood five chicks or five thousand, this is the book for you, because its practical methods work with flocks of any size. And it will save you money. Learn how to build an insulated brooder in two hours for $20, keeping your chicks warmer and more comfortable than with overhead heat lamps, and saving two-thirds of the electricity into the bargain!

Robert Plamondon is a writer/farmer/engineer who has been awarded 17 U.S. patents and raises free-range chickens on his farm in Oregon.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Success With Baby Chicks was Norton Creek Press' first book and is still our best seller. It encouraged us to go on to publish more of the practical poultry books that drew upon the wisdom and knowledge of experts from the golden age of small-farm poultry, which was roughly 1900-1950.

From the Author:

When my wife Karen and I moved to the country, we knew we needed chickens. Our first batch of baby chicks was a complete success! And you know why? Because we were lucky! Brooding our second batch of chicks didn't work as well as the first. After that, results were just plain erratic: sometimes great, sometimes not so great. And we didn't know why! 
The books available at the time didn't spent more than a few pages on the nuts and bolts of brooding baby chicks. Brooding baby chicks isn't all that hard, but covering the topic properly can't be done in a few pages. (As it turns out, it takes about 150.)

But I had a secret weapon. I knew that, before the early Sixties, most American commercial farm flocks were small, often with fewer than 50 hens. And a great deal of high-quality research was done by poultry scientists, aimed at making these small flocks successful and profitable. Every aspect of poultrykeeping was studied, every conceivable method was tried, and the ones that worked were written up in detail. All I needed to do was to survey the poultry literature of the first six decades of the Twentieth Century, and it would all be there.It worked! I went through all the poultry science material in Oregon State University's Valley Library, and found one treasure trove after another. And we put the most promising ideas to the test, especially methods for brooding baby chicks. Soon our results got better and better.For example, we soon came to expect "negative mortality." How is this possible? Because, when shipping day-old chicks by mail, hatcheries routinely ship one extra chick for every 25 baby chicks ordered, to ensure that you'll get at least as many healthy baby chicks as you paid for, even though shipping is a bit rough on the chicks. But typically all the chicks arrive in good shape, so if you don't lose any during the brooding period, you end up with a mortality rate of -4%. That happened more and more often.Sometimes it's the simple things that matter most, and save a lot of cute fluffy little baby chicks. Simple things like:

• The litter under the brooder must be warm and dry to the touch when you put the baby chicks there.
• Use quart-jar waterers for the first few days, because day-old chicks find them easy to drink from without soaked and chilled.
• Use glass jars on the waterers, because the glint attracts the chicks (it looks like water). Plastic jars don't do this.
• Never use just one heat lamp. Use two smaller ones, in case one goes out.
• Chicks can be brooded in very cold weather if there's enough heat under the brooder and there are no cold drafts. 
• You can brood baby chicks indoors, but it's best to move them out after the first few days, before your house fills with fluff and dust and smell.
• A 250-watt overhead heat lamp is good for 75 chicks at a room temperature of 50 F. For every degree above 50, you can add one chick. For every degree below 50 F, subtract one chick. So at zero degrees, you can brood 25 chicks, and at 100 degrees, you can brood 125.
• A simple plywood box brooder that you can knock together in a couple of hours uses only about a third as much electricity as an overhead heat-lamp brooder.

And that's just the start!

About this edition

• Publisher: Norton Creek Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0972177000
• ISBN 13: 9780972177009
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 155