Everything you need to know about raising baby chickens, simple, easy and fun

folks today on the Stony Ridge Farm Channel we got new peepers coming into the farm today we have brand new chickens coming into the Farm These are baby chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery we're going to tell you everything you need to know these are white leghorn laying henss and we also have Cornish cross meat birds 134 chicks today let's get busy look how [Music] cute welcome back to the Stony Ridge Farm Channel if this is your first time here your 50 millionth time here please hit that like button subscribe the channel love to have you back it's not so bright in here I guess I can take my shades off it is a warm spring day here on the Stony Ridge Farm and this is our Bruder setup so our Bruder setup right here is a 400g rubbermade stock tank now you can use a Steel stock tank a tartar Farm and Ranch Steel stock tank but for this amount of birds we want to have plenty of space so the Steel 100g stock tank will house about 50 Birds comfortably this will house about 100 to 150 Birds very comfortably we've got sawdust down in here and we have a few little tricks that we're going to show you to help you out with your Birds now what you really need to be thinking about is cleanliness and cleanliness and Warmness so you need to have a good warm and clean environment for your baby chicks you don't need all these hippie recipes of apple cider vinegar and all this and if you guys use that stuff let me know let me know what you do we don't use that we just use good clean fresh water and good clean fresh food we use chick starter and we're just using regular old chick starter that you can pick up at your local farm store or you can go to an organic feed store and buy your chick starter we use little crumbles and we use 20% chick starter for these birds so zip ties are your friend here guys if you don't know what a zip tie is and you're new to everything related to farming and handyman type stuff this is a zip tie I'll post links to all this stuff down the video description in case you guys are wondering this is a standard fluorescent light bulb it's so warm out right now that the garage is somewhere around 95° and that's the temperature you want your birds for the first couple days so anywhere from 95 to 98° even down to 85 would be okay now as you see zip ties are your friend and I'll show you why they're your friend here in just a second we have a thing called an Irwin Quick Grip and I'll show you that I think I have it right here this is a quick gripper that we use on the side of our stock tank to hang things from so we'll hang our light from here and we can adjust the height of the light to the warmth of the birds in other words if the light is shining down and all the birds are bunched up around the light it means they're too cold so we need to bring the light down a little closer to them and it's normal for the first probably two or 3 hours for them to all huddle under the light and then they'll start exploring and warming up a little bit now we have a fluorescent bulb in this again because it's so warm in here but you can get a standard heat lamp a red heat lamp or a white heat lamp will do just fine it's a a 250 W heat lamp bulb understand that you have chicks dust and dry sawdust and a heat Source what does that equal that equals a fire hazard so understand this is a major fire hazard and you really have to pay attention to what you're doing so you don't accidentally burn your barn down or burn your house down so pay attention what you're doing and put that guard that's supposed to be in place on your lamp in there you can pick this up at your local Farm Store Tractor Supply wherever you like so this is a quick grip and this is how it goes on we go right on the side of our Brer we squeeze this handle until it latches into place just like so now you can see our heat lamp is down here inside of our Bruder we can adjust again the height of the heat lamp by tightening up our zip ties this is sturdy enough to support it and as the chickens get older they will get taller and thus they'll need less heat down low and we can slowly squeeze these down and raise them up we also do this with our feeders and our waterers later on it's not that complicated to have baby chicks and you think about it if they had a mother H they'd be out there scratching through and eating dirt but we need to be sure our water is clean there will be a slimy residue that builds up inside the waterer and inside the dish that will make the chickens sick so this is the dish flip it over here we don't need any magical hippie concoctions guys we don't need apple cider vinegar and all these vitamin packs or anything we just need good fresh clean water and good fresh clean food we'll set this over in there after we put some Rock in it let me show you this real quick so just down here in the gravel driveway I just place a few Stones inside here many a chick has lost its life to drowning in water so we need to think about that and just put stones these are just clean Stones uh clean by Nature that will be inside the water or baby chicks just came out of a nice warm wet egg they want to go back to a nice warm wet spot and they can drown so don't put like a dog dish in get a chicken waterer this chicken waterer doesn't have anything for us to hang it up by but we will use a hanging chicken water once the chicks get a little bit bigger so that they don't mess up the water we'll show you there's a little trick with a piece of cardboard that we put under here so they don't kick shavings all up into their water this is the feeder that we use right here to get them started okay this is not what we use use three four five weeks down the road what we use three or four or five weeks down the road will be hanging because these chicks naturally instinctively dig okay so they'll be in here digging and kicking around shavings we put the waterer on top of cardboard and we replace that cardboard as needed and as this gets dirty we simply add more litter now the litter that you see is sawdust and you can use sawdust shavings anything but don't use cedar shavings just use pine shavings and use the coarse G grit shavings if you can find them that will put less dust in your garage barn or house we'll set this guy in here and these birds will be eating in just a second so these are our feeders and our Waters again on zip ties so that we can tighten them up we'll put them on the Irwin quick grips and show you exactly how this works this is the most simple way I've ever found to do this guys and I've been raising chick since I was 12 years old simply go right over top of your Quick Grip and your waterer will hang just like so it will hang and it will self level okay same thing with our feeder we're going to do the exact same thing our feeder will self-level and it'll be down here where the chicks can get their feet you don't want them right side by side and you want to be careful guys to not spill a bunch of water in your Bruder because that'll make it get foul stinky and nasty so we're ready to put our chicks in our Brer this is so simple don't over complicate it in your head and if you have questions post them down there and if you guys see questions you can answer answer them down there here's our Chick Box it has holes in it Guys these chicks come from the Hatchery they ship it usually takes about 72 hours for them to ship to you typically you will have some birds that may not survive now this looks like we have no losses which is super cool guys don't be very hard on yourselves if you lose a baby chick sometimes baby chicks die they're very very fragile creatures so you need to understand that they're not toys don't let your kids drool all over them or handle them and wash your hands when you get done because there's a salmonella risk in here because salmon naturally occurs in the chicken's gut okay here we go just gently lower them right in there you go baby chicks peepers everywhere now let's look down inside this box this is the first poop okay it's called marconian it's going to be blue or green or black it's kind of gross looking right save this stuff okay so this is a synthetic straw that can be used for bedding for your chicks so hang on to it hang on to your chick boxes okay we're going to go ahead and put in another box these guys are really active already next box here and this is the reality I haven't seen in these boxes if we have any losses they will be in here looks like we didn't lose any chicks here guys birds of a feather birds of a feather flock together they like to be close they like to huddle up together birds of a feather like to flock together so when you think they're overcrowded they're not guys they enjoy being in a flock this is a flock animal now you guys will notice these chicks are very very curious little critters they're already pecking and digging and drinking water so you really don't have to do too much one chick is curious and where one chick pecks the other chicks go to so you see they're already drinking water now what you also need to know is that mother nature takes care of baby chicks after two or 3 days they do need feed but you think about a mother hen a mother hen hatches her chicks out and there could be 10 eggs or 15 eggs under a mother H and they're not all going to hatch on the same day so a baby chick can survive comfortably for 3 to 4 days without food or water the final contestants are here I do believe yep these are the Cornish cross meat birds they're a little bit bigger now there are fewer of these birds there's about 35 of them and you see how the Hatchery put this block in here so that they'd stay warm so that they could huddle together and that's how they stay warm in shipment these came from Iowa and we're in North Carolina that were here in less than 72 hours there we go 100% survival rate on these chicks that is super awesome man kudos to Murray McMurray Hatchery and the US Postal Service so guys if you need to know anything else there's a link to a playlist for everything chickens we take our meat birds we put them on pasture our laying hins are going to go in behind our Cows as pasture sanitation you'll see the whole chicken CP build you'll see tons more chicken content so hit that like button come on back and see me here on the Stony Ridge Farm Channel and if you have any questions post them down there I'd love to hear from you thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on the Stony Ridge Farm here's the [Music] babies bring kids living and sweet that's the way supposed to be [Music]