How to Raise Baby Chicks

it's baby chick insanity day guys come along as we show you how we set up our brooders for our baby chicks we've got 90 new babies on the farm today hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer welcome back to another beautiful day here on the stoney ridge farm and today is baby chick day so an awesome fun day here on the farm we've got 90 baby chicks coming in from murray mcmurray hatchery and this applies to whether you buy your chicks from your local farm store or whether you buy your chicks from murray mcmurray like we do so what we're going to do today is go over all this stuff and we've already got one brooder set up we've got 90 baby birds coming we've got a bunch of cornish cross meat birds and we've got a brown egg layer assortment so come along as we show you how to set up for your new baby chicks all right [Music] so whether you're a seasoned vet or brand new to keeping baby chicks or keeping chickens this is all great advice we use two different types of feeders when we first get our baby chicks and we'll transfer over to a larger feeder after this so we use the hole type and we use this type right here that has this little spinner on the top that prevents the birds from jumping up on here and pooping in their feed which is something that you really don't want it's not going to hurt them too bad but it's something you really don't want so this type of feeder basically and i painted this because i don't know i was just having fun with some spray paint one day you just slide that open i'll post links to all these feeders and stuff down the video description and then you just pour your feed in your feeder just like this right here okay and slide it back slide it on back that's it now typically when i do this i'll do it right over top of the brooder once i've got my baby chicks and the baby chicks will be in the shop in the garage here on the ground and i did move the jeep out of the shop because they will be covered with chicken poop so you want to fill this thing basically as full as you can get it it doesn't really make too much of a difference except for day one and day one is discovery day it's discovering the feed it's discovering the water it's discovering everything so this will go right in the brooder we will graduate up to a feeder about this big for that many chickens and this holds about two gallons where the other one holds just about a gallon scoop right there all right and this one holds just a little bit less i'll put two of these in with our 50 meat birds and they will gobble that stuff up it's all about food waste also so these little birds instinctively will paw at or scratch at these feeders so we need to think about that and that's why i like the feeders with the holes for their heads okay we're gonna go get the baby chicks here in a minute so stick around uh anyway we'll graduate up to a bigger feeder like this and this will hang from inside the coop this one's already set up for hanging it has some zip ties on it and this is a waterer so we'll graduate up to a larger waterer for the meat birds they're going to consume a lot of food and a lot of water so the bigger the feeder than the bigger the water you put in with them the better off you're going to be now inside the water you'll notice rocks okay these birds just came out of a wet place they just came from a uh egg so the egg was wet inside a manny a baby chick has lost its life drowning in a waterer guys so don't just put a pan of water in there you can go spend a couple bucks and get one of these this will be what i use for the egg laying bunch because they won't eat quite as much and they don't make quite as big a mess but they have to stay inside just a little bit longer so that's the feeders and that's the waters we use two different types of heat sources here on the farm we use a heat lamp set up like this with the red heat lamp the red is a little bit less noxious to the birds it's not so bright blasting them in the face and also if your birds get pecking behavior in other words if they see red and they peck red if they see blood they'll peck blood so if one of your chicks starts getting pecked on that red lamp will help to basically confuse them to think everything's red so that they won't seek out blood and pec a baby chick to death and that stuff does happen it does happen chickens have a pecking order and you'll notice as your chicks get older so let's show you how we put our sawdust inside our tartar farm and ranch hundred gallon tank we'll show the other way that we keep our birds warm it's a little brooder like box it's electric box that burns a lot less electricity so in one brooder we'll have the heat lamp and the other brooder will have the brooder box i'll show you for lack of better terms this is a heat pad this is from k and h and it's a heating pad that you put in for your baby chicks and basically you set it up it's just like a mother hen i call it an electronic mother hen so you set it up in this position it has these adjustable um holes right here where you can set this up inside your chicken coop we're going to put it on hole number two so first day our baby chicks need to snuggle up down underneath there and get warm this thing gets to around 85 degrees underneath or 85 90 degrees and that's the temperature that you're shooting for with your birds if you have a heat lamp versus one of these and this is a little more expensive than a heat lamp if you have a heat lamp then you need to know this if the baby birds when you first get them they're going to crowd around the heat lamp but if later on about an hour and a half later if they're all balled up under the heat lamp then they're not getting enough heat so you need to move that heat lamp a little bit closer be careful the heat lamp is a fire hazard so please please many a barn is burnt down from keeping baby chicks warm put this guard on there so if it does fall down it doesn't fall in direct contact with the shavings that we're getting ready to show you so this is the brooder and this is the lamp for the brooder pro tip use good clean water good clean tap water is just fine find the hole right here where the water comes out and tip it up like that either do it right over the brooder or do it outside don't do it in your living room because you're gonna make a mess same goes with the other water so next step easy step fun step so we take these are premium pine shavings we don't use cedar shavings because they can be a little bit noxious to the birds they're really really strong and i've heard they can cause respiratory problems although i've never experienced any respiratory problems with cedar shavings in case you bought cedar shavings already maybe next time these pine shavings now they make two different grades of pine shavings these are the low dust coarse threaded uh where are we here flake it's called flake the low dust flake and these are from my local tractor supply and we'll spread these out inside the brooder just like so make sure you got a nice thick layer for that first layer of sawdust because or wood chips or whatever you want to call them because that is your base layer what we're going to do is as this gets dirty as more poop builds up uh and more debris builds up we're just gonna add another layer on top until this stuff is probably about that thick the chickens will pack it down and then we'll put it on a bare spot somewhere here on the farm or you could put it in your compost bin that chicken manure is insane for making grass grow so if you've got a dead spot in your yard perfect rake it out on there put some grass seed down you'll have a nice place so another little trick that we're going to show you for feeders and waterers is with cardboard let me grab my x-acto knife and i'll show you so it's no secret that chickens make a mess chicks baby chicks make a mess you're going to have a bit of a smell now if you keep this clean and nice you won't have a bit of a smell but as the chickens get older and this packs down firmer you're welcome to take them out put them in a box put them in the sunshine but don't put them in direct sunlight because you can roast them okay so you guys got to be really careful you want to keep your brooder 85 to 90 degrees maybe even 95 degrees so here is a tip a pro tip for you for putting your waters because they're going to make a mess they're going to get in that water and they again they paw at things they like to dig at things so we've got our box cutter right here and we've got everybody's got amazon boxes and stuff like that laying around we're recycling them this is the ultimate compost recycler for boxes so you'll take your box cut out some little squares like this and if you start with a little waterer just like this you set it right on that little water just like so so it's about matched up to the right size and we'll set it down here in the coop and just sit it right on the box and that will help keep shavings out of your waterer so we might make it a little bit bigger say this big for the bigger water which is right here so this size for this water so you just you'll learn what size piece of box to use you can also set your feeders where'd that feeder go on cardboard two so we don't waste any feed so if we set our feeders on a piece of cardboard like that and they rake feed out they're gonna eat that feed and we'll just sit that right down in the coop also very simple very easy they can poop on cardboard just as good as they can poop on shavings i promise so goal one keep the birds safe goal two keep the birds fed goal three keep the birds watered with clean water and goal four is to keep the birds warm and here's how we're gonna keep these birds warm we have the brooder little uh pads the mother hen pads is what i call them and we also have the heat lamp most commonly people are going to use a heat lamp okay so the heat lamp is going to go down in here where do you clip it because most of these heat lamps come with a clip like this well you've got any option you want you can hang a broomstick over top of the middle of this this is why i love using these tartar farm and ranch tanks because you can make those necessary adjustments that you need to make so take your heat lamp and put some zip ties on this little hanger right here just like i have and eventually the birds will need less and less heat and you can bring your lamp further and further up off of the bottom of your brooder very very handy very simple you can also use something as simple as like a 1.99 yardstick a broomstick anything you have that will lay across here but i prefer using this it's an erwin quick grip i'll post a link in the video description you can pick them up at lowe's or any of your basic hardware stores so i used a quick grip and i squeezed the grip snug on here so it's not going to go anywhere and that way my birds are safer i can run the quick grip through here or for today's purposes i'm going to take my little clamp and i'm going to clamp it right into place with my quick grip now you got to think about this put this close to the center or a little offset from the center of your tank okay from the center of your brooder and i don't care what you use for a brooder you can use a storage tote whatever you want to use i just find that these are used year after year after year it's a one-time lifetime purchase and it's awesome and they have a secondary use because we can water our livestock with them after we get done with the chicks so you don't want your light which is right here you don't want it right over top of your feeders or your waters because you'll melt them or you'll give the baby chicks hot water you don't want to do that so you want to make sure that your water is off away from the light and that your feed is off away from the light if you're using the cardboard method i wouldn't suggest using the cardboard on day one but by day four these birds are going to need a little piece of cardboard in there so keep your feeder and your water away from your heat lamp because you will melt it and you could potentially cause a fire you don't want to do all this the day of getting your chicks okay the reason i'm showing you i already have one brooder set up and it's warmed up reason i'm showing you this is because it's all happening in the same day so we'll go ahead and set our brooder down on the garage floor over here and we'll get it warmed up we're going to go to the post office and pick up our baby chicks all the peepers are peeping guys you hear them so we got two big boxes here let's open them up and show you guys what comes in the box all right two big boxes some of these are layers and some of these are meat birds for our family's consumption this year so we're gonna go ahead and open up box number one and see what we've got going here hey birdies oh isn't that cool check it out that is so cute guys so mixed intermingled in here are two little black chicks in each one that's awesome i don't know which ones these are whether these are the layers or whether they are the meat birds we're going to set them to the side you see them all huddled up together uh now this is really honestly the first time i've opened these boxes so there sometimes might be a bird that did not make the trip just so you know oh yeah yep so we've got our brown egg layer batch right here and these guys are ready to go in too i don't know what the black chicks are in here but it doesn't matter so let's go ahead and we'll get these guys into their prospective brooders you can do this many different ways but the way i like to do it in the safest way i think is to bring the birds down here into the brooder bring the box down in that's why we use these big hundred gallon water tanks because you can bring the birds right down into the tank there we go so these guys will get used to the heat we've got the heat mats in here i call them heat mats or mother hens and they're already discovering the food and the water you can see these birds are really curious that the first few hours they're in here they're going to learn where the heat is the food is and the water is so they'll do great now into the other brooder we'll put the rest of them now if you've got enough room inside your brooder and we do have enough room let's just lay them out all you got to do is just tip your box up and out goes the birds now you can reuse remember how we talked about keeping shavings out of your water you can reuse these mats and set your water on there you can also lay them in and set your feeder on there they can't scratch this and get it into the feed these guys are already eating and let's see if we can get one drinking so you take them and you dip their head just their beak right over into the water and they'll discover it really quickly that's it now when you first get your birds expect them to huddle up around the heat source for the first little bit they've got to recover from their trip expect a little bit of poopy butt i call it poopy but it's when the poop gets caked to their butt so you want to monitor these chicks for poopy butt make sure they don't get poopy butt because that can be bad i've got videos out there subscribe to the channel follow the everything chickens uh playlist and you'll get all sorts of information on chicks this is not our first time raising baby chicks this is awesome guys really love it baby chick day is one of the most exciting days on the farm please pound that like button jump in subscribe to the channel now you know everything if you have any questions post them down there guys don't hesitate to respond to comments if you want to neaten up your area right here i'll show you a quick way to do that after the credits that's the way it's supposed to so if you want to neaten up your area if you get that full-on martha stewart thing going on you can always take zip ties and this also makes your coop a little bit safer too your brooder a little bit safer take some zip ties and get these cords up out of the way so that they don't land on top of the heat lamp the heat lamp the outside shroud on the heat lamp is going to be hot so same thing goes over here and i'll show you a cool tool to instill these zip ties and it makes it look so neat and nice take your zip tie put it on there and this is a zip tie tool really cool let me just put this on here you want to rock it full martha stewart style that tightens up your zip tie and it cuts it really really handy tool so we can zip tie that stuff up get it all out of the way and we're all plugged into a surge protector right here in case something were to surge or fall down in there and cause a problem so use a surge protector that's it guys thanks a lot we'll see you next time