Why brood your own chickens?

Any number of chickens can be brooded successfully as long as their three basic needs are met: warmth, feed and water.

Good results from chickens being reared for egg production, the poultry fancier or poultry breeder, all start with good brooding.

Many people who keep small flocks, and even not so small, flocks of layers like to brood their own birds. I am very much one of these self-rearing from day old people. When done with tender loving care, rearing your own chicks has many advantages. By brooding your own chicks you can avoid problems with vices such as feather picking and cannibalism.

Debeaking layer or breeder bird to overcome feather picking or cannibalism is a no, no, in my way of poultry husbandry. For broiler growers I guess it is a sensible part of production for a 6 week brooding and rearing cycle, but not for adult birds that are going to spend their life on the floor under the deep littler or barn system of housings. For birds that are going to be kept in your back garden and fed on household scraps as well as their layer mash, or pellets, debeaked birds is not what is required. Over a number of years I have kept a small number of genetically bred layers in my back yard, some had been debeaked when I bought them at 17 weeks, others which I reared myself were not debeaked. For length of lay and total number of eggs the one I reared myself and left un-debeaked out performed the debeaked birds every time. This would need a more systematic testing to be conclusive, but my own commercial experience for 12 years as a flock owner of 12,000 breeders, all brooded from day old and never debeaked, has made me a strong believer in not debeaking birds, and always brooding all your own flock. But for now back to the advantages of brooding your own chicks for the backyard poultry keeper.

By brooding your own birds they become used to household scraps and lawn clippings from a younger age, which is a saving in feed costs. Also self-reared chickens develop a natural immunity to coccidiosis, so that you do not have to search round for drugs for treatment. Another advantage in brooding your own birds, they stay in the one location and so protect the birds from the stress of shifting and even a setback in their development. By rearing your own birds they learn to perch at an earlier age before they develop the habit of sleeping on the floor.

One great 'non-commercial' advantage of brooding your own chicks in your back garden, for a family, is having the children care for day old chicks right up to their laying stage, it is an experience all children should have. This applies to 'children' up to 80 years and beyond.

Choosing your stock.

It doesn't matter what time of year you decide to start your chicks off, the main thing is to choose stock from hatcheries or breeders who have chicks bred from genetic selected parent stock, so that your hens have the inherent potential to be good layers.

It is then a matter of having a clean warm place to brood the chicks. A batch of 25 chickens can easily be brooded to five or six weeks of age in an area 2m x 2m, for example the family garage, with the car outside for a few weeks.

Use a good brooder.

My suggestion here about brooding the chicks in the family garage takes me back to my first attempt to do this. I had set-up a kerosene brooder in my parent's garage. After about an hour the inside of the garage caught fire. Luckily the garage was used as a storage room, the car always being left outside. I later learnt that I had overfilled the kerosene tank; the fuel expanded and caught fire. My dear Mother was not amused. Dear 'old Dad' took a more philosophical approach; he managed to fit an electric light bulb inside a cardboard box for the few chickens that were lucky enough to escape the inferno.

With today's electric brooders there are no such dangers. For small hatches of chickens an in fro-red globe is about the cheapest and most satisfactory. There are also plenty of small electric hover type brooders on the market suitable for small batches of chicks.

The chickens will soon let you know if they are too hot by moving away from the source of heat or if they are cold crowding together under the source of heat and chirping. The normal temperature at the hight of the chicken's back should be about 35 - 37 c. With any Infra-red lamp follow the manufacturer's instructions. Chicks usually only make a noise if they are cold or hungry. By observing your chickens for a while you can soon make them comfortable, both in warmth, the correct food, and clean water always being available.

Perhaps a word about litter, litter is essential to provide a warm bed and to insulate the chickens from the cold floor. It also absorbs and dries out the droppings. If you can get wood shavings from dry hardwood it is good, or you can use rice hulls or cut up straw. To make the straw suitable you could run your lawnmower over it on your garage floor. The litter should be at least 7-to10 cm deep and be topped up as the chickens grow

Chickens should have food and water in front of them as soon as they arrive. I read somewhere recently that a bit of milk powder sprinkled on top of the food will attract the chickens to eat, I have never found this necessary, but you may want to try it. Do not place the food directly under the rays of the brooder heat. The water likewise should be placed near the brooder, but not so close to the lamp that it heats the water.

Some Brooders I have 'met'!

The first 'brooder' I ever experienced was of course my grandmother's broody hens, usually with chickens, but sometimes with ducklings. With the ducklings I can still see and hear the hen, very stressed, clucking back and forward along the edge of the water, while her brood of ducklings swam in the dam.

My first experience of 'artificial' brooding was the day I set my parent's garage on fire. I never again tried to rear chickens with kerosene until I had my own poultry farm some 14 years later, by then it was a much more sophisticated kerosene brooder

On our farm the first brooder was what were called 'Red Robbins' Brooders, like an infra red shield that worked off a master tank of kerosene, kept under pressure with a pump that required pumping a couple of time a day. It worked very well while we were building the farm up and had no brooder shed. We just reared the birds in their laying shed and moved the brooder on to the next shed with each hatch of chickens. From memory I think each brooder held 200 chickens.

Occasionally the lamp would go out or some other malfunction would occur, so that when you turned up early in the morning the 200 chickens would be huddled together covered in kerosene. Yet for the first three years of farming all our chicks were reared this way, which amounted to about 4000 chickens each season.

I was away chick sexing for most of the chick-rearing season, (in Australia from June till mid-October) and the chick rearing was left to my wife. Except for the last pumping of the day, which I did when, I arrived home about 10 or 11 each night. When getting kerosene from the 44 gallon drum to fill the brooder tanks, it was a matter of sucking the liquid out through a length of hose into a carry can, the skill was to be able to judge when to stop sucking if you did not want to end up with a mouth full of kerosene. When our farm got big enough to employ a full time man, he refused to suck the kerosene out in this way, so we had to buy a pump. This story of my wife getting a mouth full of kerosene at each filling, and then when we had a man doing the job we got him a pump, was one of the stories my wife always told at parties for years afterwards. The theme being of course 'it didn't matter if a wife got a mouth full of kerosene but once a man had to do the job we had to get him a pump.

We eventually had a briquette hot water brooder, which ran the full length of a six-room brooder house, a pleasure to run and a pleasure to work in.

One of the farms I sexed chickens for, Carter Brothers of Werribee, (a 250,000 bird egg layers, all White leghorns on the floor), had a very large cellar briquette boiler which fed hot water pipes to several very ling brooder sheds. Each shed was divided into separate brooder rooms of 1200 chicks, each with an outside run. (See photo).

Sometimes I would not finish sexing chickens there till about 2-30 am. Most times about 1-am Peter, one of the sons, would arrive in his tuxedo from a night out, and go down into the boiler room to stoke the furnace and damp it down. As a result the last one and half hours chick sexing was done in a smoke filled room, the sexing was done in a large passage way at the back of the brooder rooms and the smoke from the newly stoke and damped furnace seeped up to us. I could still see okay but my counter and 'chicken bringer and taker away man' or woman sometimes, was just a haze in the distance until they were standing next to me. What we though of young Peter for those last couple of hours could not be repeated here. Peter's argument if I had complained, would be well you could have got here earlier and I can't wait around for a couple of hours for you to finish, which was fair enough I guess. They were the days of hard work and very long hours, but working with my own counter as company, and a kind of love of day old chickens, the job was never boring or lonely.

My largest chick-sexing customer was a hatchery who had many small breeders supplying them with fertile eggs. I sexed just on 600,000 chicks during the six months hatching season they had each year. They sent day old and small numbers of started chickens all over Victoria by rail, they had a very good business.

They had what was then a unique brooder system, which they had copied from an American poultry journal. One of the partners had built the seven-room brooder system based on the American hot room battery system; they did it with the scantiest of plans to work from. Three of the brooder rooms consisted of wire draws, for the day old to 10 day olds, the draws were 7 tiers high. As the chickens grew they were moved into cooler rooms, in these rooms the draws were only four tiers high. They stayed in these weaning rooms until they were sold at 4 weeks, some at 6 weeks and the balance at 8 weeks old. It was a good system for rearing large number of birds in a very small area. The hatchery was one of the largest in the State at that time, yet it was situated in a suburban street in an out suburb of Melbourne.

Hot water pipes from a briquette heater heated the rooms, with electric boosters on the ceiling when and if the temperature dropped too low. Surprisingly these rooms had very little smell, the management kept them very clean, the droppings that fell through the wire bottom of the draws onto trays below each draw, were cleaned twice a week.

The manager was relating to me one day the trouble they had when they first ran these rooms to capacity. The rooms that brooded the 7000-day-old chicks, started to lose chicks by the hundreds, even up to a 1000 on one occasion. When they lost such a large amount they blamed the food and got the food company to come and replace the food. This did not make any difference; there were still large losses of chicks most nights.

In desperation one of the partners decided to place a couch in the brooder room and sleep with the chickens all night to try and find out what the problem was.

During the middle of the night he woke up because he could hardly breathe; it was so stuffy and quite. Then it struck him what the problem was! The day old rooms had thermostats fitted, which turned on, or off, the electric boosters on the ceilings when the room temperature became too cold, and off, when the room became too hot. During the daytime with people always working in the rooms, the temperature in the room was kept fairly constant from the main briquette boilers and the boosters seldom came on.

The rooms never got too hot, but at night the rooms overheated and the thermostats turned the roof heaters off, it also turned the exhaust fan off. This was the problem, the exhaust fans must be kept running all the time, particularly when the room is overheated, otherwise the oxygen is depleted resulting in many chickens suffocating during the night. During the brooder house wiring the room thermostats were wired so that they not only cut off the roof heaters but also the exhaust fan. Once they had the exhaust fans running continuously they had no more problems.

I visited and sexed chickens for 17 hatcheries and poultry farms most weeks of the hatching season. Some were very small by today's standards, but they all made a good living. They had many individual type brooders, some they made themselves, but most were purchased. There were battery brooders, each with its own heated section one end, and they were in sets of three and four tiers, with drop trays underneath. Some had floor brooders with hot water pipes, while others had hover type canopies that held about 1000 chicks each. One farm even had 'Red Robbins' kerosene pump brooders; similar to the ones the Martins started with.

With all these different types of brooders right up to the current massive broiler sheds with their thousands of chicks brooded in one batch, it is still the three basic needs of brooding chickens: warmth, feed and clean cool water. But you cannot claim to be 'an old time poultry farmer or poultry fancier' unless you've experienced a broody hen and chicks, and are familiar with the smell, and taste of kerosene.

References and thanks:
For photos.

1. Bode, Charlie of Eltham, Victoria: for photos from his family and farm collection.1938 - 1955.
2. Carter W.M.S. 'The Carter Family of Werribee' Corporate Printers 1997Melbourne.
3. Martin R.D. "The Specialist Chick Sexer' Bernal Publishing 1995 Melbourne.

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