Brooding Baby Chicks in Winter

Brooding baby chicks in cold weather — how low can you go?

As it turns out, cold-weather brooding can go very low indeed. Back in the Fifties, when the electric companies were promoting electric brooding as safer, more reliable, and more convenient that the coal and kerosene brooders that folks used to use, one group did a demonstration:

They suspended four heat lamps in a walk-in freezer at a constant -20 F, and brooded a dozen or so chicks there. It was so cold that ice formed on the waterers on the sides away from the heat lamps, but within the circle of light the chicks were snug and comfy and did just fine.

The rule of thumb for overhead heat-lamp brooders is that one 250-watt heat lamp can handle 75 chicks at 50 F. If temperatures are lower than that, subtract one chick for every degree below 50 F. For example, -20 F is 70 degrees lower than 50 F, so you would be able to brood five chicks (75-70=5) per heat lamp. With four lamps, the freezer demonstration could handle 20 chicks!

Stop for a second and realize how much more confidence you have in all-weather chick brooding, now that you’ve grasped this little-known fact. And that’s just a tiny fraction of the chick-raising lore I’ve collected in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. Don’t forget that we all brood chicks in the late winter or early spring, when it’s still cold! Baby chick season is upon us, so you need to buy the book now, before the chicks arrive.

The “Youngest-First” Trick

I always check my youngest chickens first, then work my way up to the oldest ones.

One reason is that baby chicks are more fragile than older birds, so they need to be watched and cared for without fail. As the chickens get older, they need less and less attention, since they’re sturdier and know the ropes. By checking the youngest chickens first, you ensure that they’ll be taken care of before you discover any crises or distractions with the more rugged birds. This helps make sure the youngest chickens don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Then there’s the issue of disease. If you buy only from reputable hatcheries (which I recommend), then the odds of your youngest chickens arriving on the farm with any new diseases are small. This means that it’s not a disaster if you carry material from the brooder house into the henhouse on your boots or gloves. But your older chickens have had the chance to be exposed to various diseases and parasites from wild birds, to the reverse isn’t true. Baby chicks start out with a weak immune system, which gets stronger day by day, so keeping them separated from the older birds really helps. For a while, anyway.

So remember: always take care of your youngest chickens first, and then move on up in reverse order of age.

I’ll be at Mewcon over New Year’s

I’ll be attending the M.E.W. multi-genre science fiction/fantasy/anime/role-playing/whatever convention at the Red Lion in Vancouver, Washington this weekend.

I’m sharing a table in Artist’s Alley with Beth McBeth — I’ll be pitching my Heinlein-esque SF novel One Survivor and my role-playing handbook Through Dungeons Deep, and Beth will be displaying her artwork. I’ll also be offering free writing and publishing advice to anyone who’s interested.

I’m also giving three panel/workshop sessions:

  1. Self-Publishing for Fun and Profit (12/31, 5 PM)
  2. Turn Your Hobbies Into a Career (1/1, 11:00 PM)
  3. Role-Playing Without Rules (1/2, 1 PM)

M.E.W. con is only in its second year, with a projected attendance of just 500 people, so it should be pretty intimate. Anime fandom appears to be the dominant theme, and plenty of people will be attending in costume.

Hope to see you there!

Admission is $40 at the door for all three days (12/31 – 1/2) or $15-$20 for a single day. For more information see the Mewcon Web site.

(Almost) Christmas on the Farm

We have a quiet Christmas on the farm. Sometime after December 20, we cut a tree from the stand of Douglas Fir at the top of our property. Here’s a picture from a few years ago:

Gift giving is low-key: we go in for a drama-free Christmas. When I was growing up, the extended family had a rule, which as I recall was: “Gifts for adults can’t cost more than ten bucks. Go wild on presents for the kids if you want.” The focus on mere token gifts for adults kept the focus on the kids, which, I think, is how it should be.

Christmas dinner is either turkey from our farm, ham from our farm, or sometimes exquisite steaks that a friend sends us. (We don’t eat much beef, so it’s more of a treat than you might suppose.)

Back when we had goats, the end of the Christmas season was marked by taking the decorations off the tree and giving the tree to the goats as a snack!

Let Your Livestock Test Your Feed Quality

Suppose you don’t know which of two brands of chicken feed is the best. What do you do?

Here’s a very simple test: set out two identical feeders, right next to each other, one filled with Feed A and one filled with Feed B. Note which feed the chickens prefer. Keep it up for a while (say, a week), so that any initial hesitancy the chickens might have had because of some trivial difference in texture or flavor has been overcome. Buy the feed that the chickens like best.

The idea here is that chickens, like people, can detect small differences in feed quality through their various senses — sight, smell, taste, and how they feel after eating. Discriminating between good food and bad is something that creatures are very good at.

There are large differences between different brands of livestock feed. Some vendors bulk up their feeds with cheap filler ingredients, while others use semi-spoiled ingredients because they’re cheap. Chicken feed made with moldy corn or rancid soybean oil meal is not going to work as well as feed made with quality ingredients. Fortunately, the chickens can tell the difference.

(See also my other blog posting on feed quality.