Fall brooding is at least as easy as spring brooding, and maybe easier. The weather is usually drier. The season is winding down, so there are fewer demands on your time. And there's plenty of time for the chickens to become fully feathered and completely winter-hardy before the nasty weather sets in.

Pullet chicks brooded in October will be in full lay by April.

Mostly, fall brooding is just like spring brooding. If you've been brooding all summer long, you'll need to drop your warm-weather habits and remember how you did things in early spring.

Some tips:

• Many hatcheries hatch year-round, but the off-season selection is smaller: mostly commercial strains. That's okay. Buy your high-producing hybrids in the fall, and your exotic breeds in the spring.
• When in doubt, buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. I buy all my chicks there. Mostly Red Sex-Links, but their Barred Rocks are very nice birds.
• Take a good look at your brooder before the chicks arrive. If you're using heat lamps, always use two or more, never just one. You can get heat lamps as small as 100W, or you can use floodlight bulbs instead of heat lamps, so you can use more bulbs without using more electricity. (I've stopped using 250w bulbs. Too hot. Two 125w heat lamps or 150w floodlights are better.)
• Remember to use a brooder guard this time, even if it was too hot in the summer.
• Beware of rats. Fall is a good time to replenish your bait stations (I like the big weatherproof Eaton Rat Fortress bait stations). Yes, I know poison isn't nice, but having rats eat your baby chicks is far worse.
• Have a plan for dealing with the chicks when they get big. Don't assume that you'll magically come up with a winter henhouse for a group of chicks once they outgrow the brooder house. Winter construction projects need advance planning. At a minimum, plan to keep the chicks in the brooder house, and allow two square feet per chick.
• If you need to bould a new henhouse for your new flock, read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the only book that gets the basics of chicken-house construction right.
• If the chicks are going to be confined most of the winter, buy a non-cannibalistic strain of chicken. Crowding tends to bring on outbreaks of cannibalism, while free range tends to cure them -- but range often isn't available in the winter unless you're in a mild or hot climate.
• Last but not least, buy a copy of my book, Success With Baby Chicks, which goes into all the considerations very thoroughly.

All of which makes a long and slightly intimidating list, but when you do things by the numbers, your fall brooding will go like clockwork. Try it and see!

I've spent a good part of my life thinking about chicks -- by which, for the moment at least, I mean "baby chickens." It's just about the new year, which means that hatchery catalogs will start arriving in the mailbox any day now.

One thing I've been doing over the last few years is popularizing the insulated electric lamp brooder developed by the Ohio Experiment Station in the Forties. I have their paper on it here, and I devote two chapters to it in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. It's done us proud over the years and I routinely get fan mail about the design. Check it out. Your chicks will be warmer and you'll use less electricity, and the whole shebang only takes a couple of hours to knock together.

Another trick I'm fond of is using the little quart-jar waterers, but with narrow-mouth glass canning jars instead of the horrible plastic jars the feed store wants to sell you. Glass jars glint like water, and you can watch the baby chicks wander over and peck at the glass a couple of times before finding the actual water. Also, the plastic jars are hard to clean, and they're not clear enough to see when they've gone empty. Just buy the bases and leave the plastic jars alone.

I don't like bigger waterers (gallon waterers, say), because they have too much water area and day old chicks get soaked, then chilled. The quart-jar waterers are tiny enough that this pretty much doesn't happen.

If you're wondering about what kind of breed to buy, try one of the brown-egg commercial hybrids if you haven't already. Not only do they lay a lot more eggs, but they do this largely by laying in the off-season. If you've found yourself having to buy eggs at the store in the fall and winter, a handful of commercial layers should fix this. My personal favorite is the Red Sex-Link from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. They are just about as docile as Barred Rocks but lay a lot better.

Suppose you bought 100 pullets from the lowest-price hatchery you could find, and 100 pullets from an expensive hatchery. What do you think the results would be?

I don't know if anyone has tried this recently, but I found this very experiment in an old British poultry magazine. The results went like this:

The box from the expensive hatchery had more chicks in it (something like 106), and they were all alive. The chicks were energetic and did very well during the brooder period. The order was for pullets, and what was delivered were pullets.

The box from the cheap hatchery had no extra chicks in it. Some of the chicks were dead. The chicks were did less well during the brooder period. Many of the pullets were really cockerels.

(I wish I hadn't lost the reference to the article, because I'd like to quote it directly, but you get the idea.)

So what's up with that? The explanation goes like this: Suppose you're running a hatchery, but you're not very good at it, and you get complaints about quality. You need more money to put the kids through college. You have two choices:

• Clean up your act and produce a product that can compete with the best.
• Lower your prices to attract cheapskates. Cheapskates ignore quality and buy solely on price.

On the other hand, suppose you run the best hatchery anywhere, but profits are disappointing and you need more money to put the kids through college. Your choices are:

• Find more sources of efficiency so you can make enough money to live on without raising prices.
• Raise prices.

The difference between the options at the two hatcheries will eventually mean that the crummy hatcheries are all cheap and the good ones are all expensive.

Take-way: never buy from the low-price leader. It's not just that cheap chicks are more expensive in the long run, it's that it's so depressing to have them die on you. You should insure yourself against disappointment by buying quality chicks.

Actually, the best thing to do is to ask around and see where the most successful local poultry folks buy their baby chicks. If you're raising show birds, ask the show-bird raisers, since the commercial guys won't know, and vice versa.

I always buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales NM, since in my opinion they're the best hatchery in the West. I've tried 'em all, and their commercial-quality layers are very good. I use Phinney Hatchery in Walla Walla as my backup hatchery. I'm less familiar with hatcheries in other parts of the country, but I know that there are good ones and bad ones. Probably most of the well-known ones are good ones: Murray McMurray Hatchery, Ideal Hatchery, Stromberg's, Moyer's, Belt.

I go into this topic (plus many more) in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. If you don't have a copy, you should. I went through an enormous amount of source material and tried all sorts of different techniques before I wrote the book, and I can guarantee that even experienced poultrykeepers will find enough good stuff in it to justify the price. This goes double for beginners, because if you don't get good results with your first batch of chicks, you're likely to become discouraged and quit.