How To Raise Chickens

Even though there are some important things to take care of before you get your chickens, the raising of your chicks from little babies to producing hens is so much fun it’s crazy. As long as you can keep yourself from smothering them with attention, and can muster a little common sense, then they basically raise themselves. There are, however, a few things that you should keep in mind.

First, proper temperature is crucial– especially when the chicks are young. For the first week of their lives, you’ll want to keep the temperature in your brooder at around 90 or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Every week after, you want to lower the temperature by about five degrees until you get the brooder to room temperature. Even after you get the brooder to room temperature, you may want to keep the heat lamp above them for use during the night if you’re housing them in an area that sees a drop in temperature when the sun goes down. To make it easier to change the temperature of your brooder, I recommend putting your heat lamp onto a small chain and hanging it on a nail. You can move the chain up a few chain links as needed, making the brooder cooler as you do.

When it comes to food, the circular trough I mentioned in my last post works great for their entire developmental process and doesn’t take a lot of work to use. The water bottle will take a little more work to keep up and out of the way. Here’s what I do:

Start with any water bottle, but I usually use a bottle from a sports drink because they’re bigger (hold more water) and I’m lazy about filling up water bottles.

Buy a watering gasket from your local farm store or online, they’re really not that expensive (a few bucks).

The size of the gasket will dictate the size of the hole you need to drill for your water bottle, but if you have standard set of drill bits then you’ll probably be fine. Drill a hole into the cap of the water bottle that corresponds to your gasket size, then insert the gasket.

Drill a hole into the bottom of the bottle that’s large enough to facilitate refilling, but small enough to make it easy to find an anchor that won’t slip through it. The purpose of this hole is to refill the water bottle, but also to make it easier to hang it above the chicks. What I did was lace my small chain through the hole and attach it to a spring that is too big to pull back through the hole. This provides the security I need, but also allows me to refill the bottle fairly easily.

Now just put it all together and you’re ready to go. Remember to keep raising it as your chicks get older, keeping it just high enough that they can peck about halfway up the gasket.

Once your chicks get a little older (I say about a week), you want to start introducing grit into their diet. They need this grit to help pulverize food inside their stomachs to aid in digestion, so it’s important to add this to their food. I’ve heard this also helps in gizzard development, and I know some people who start using grit as soon as 3 days on, but I would stick to about a week personally.

Also, when they start getting older they will start to STINK. They start pooping more regularly and as they get bigger so do their poops. Make sure you have something in place to mitigate the smell since it can get kind of overpowering.

Finally, you need to start working on ideas for chicken pens. Even though your chicks are just babies now, they’ll soon need a larger, more permanent home. Chicken pens are a very important part of raising chickens, and you’ll need to get a move on with setting one up. Now, you can start building one on your own using one of the many plans for chicken pens that you can find online, however I recommend that you have a certain amount of experience to take on this project. Even if you don’t have the right amount of experience, it’s still a fun project to take on– up to you to decide the best course of action. No matter how you design your pen, you really need to put a lot of thought into the chicken fencing you use. Chicken fencing comes in a wide number of gauges, and you want to make sure you don’t get a gauge that’s too thin. Keep in mind that chicken fencing is less about keeping your chickens in, and more about keeping raccoons and possums out. Any chicken fencing that you get has to be of a decent gauge and you should give it a good tug with one hand after it’s installed. Raccoons are much stronger than you may imagine, so you need to make sure your chicken fencing is really on there.

Really, raising chicks is more about socializing them to you and letting them get on with their development. Hovering over them constantly and worrying about them constantly will only stress you out, and it may be detrimental for your chicks. Just look at it this way: people were raising chickens in small, unlit wooden boxes before electricity was harnessed. It’s only fairly recently that people have been taking this modern systematic approach to raising their chickens. If they could raise chickens in a shack 200 years ago, you can raise them in your garage with modern technology. Just don’t fret over it too much, and let them do their thing.

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Similar equipment to what I use:

Heat lamp

Chicken wire

Chicken Watering Gasket

Chicken feeder