Episode Details

Raising your own chicks can be an awesome experience, especially for a family to do together. Your children will enjoy watching the chicks grow and have a greater understanding of food production and the cycles of life.

You will also have the benefit of having hand-raised chickens! This means they, depending on the breed, will likely be very tame and happy to be handled. 

Choosing the Right Breed

In my chicken breeds Webinar, I go into a lot of detail on selecting the right breed, with the main points to consider being forage abilities, climate suitability, egg production, space requirements, noise levels, and breed availability. 

Choosing carefully can mean you have a flock that fits into your family and circumstances beautifully, ensuring a harmonious and thriving flock in your backyard.

Popular chicken breeds that are suitable for egg production include Australorps, Rhode Island Red, Plymouth Rock, Leghorn, Sussex, Orpington, and Wyandotte. 

All these breeds are stars of the backyard chicken-keeping scene with their size, temperament, and egg production all working well in backyard flocks.

Sourcing Day-Old Chicks

Day-old chicks are generally sourced from commercial hatcheries. This will mean they will come to you vaccinated and sexed if that's what you request. Some hatcheries are better than others when it comes to sexing chickens, but most will take any roosters off your hands if they have made a mistake. 

Don’t be shy to go to the hatchery and view the environment for yourself, just keep in mind this will be a commercial production and while animal welfare is a consideration, after all the hatcheries need healthy chicks to sell. You may be confronted with handling and living conditions that you are not used to. They are a business and the business is hatching and getting chicks out the door to their new homes.

Other options include your local produce store, which may well have older birds for sale also. I have also sourced chickens from Gumtree in Australia (I’m going to guess that Craigslist may be the US equivalent?). From these types of sources, it is buyer beware. I have purchased “fertile” eggs that were not all fertile, I have purchased 6 sexed chickens, only to have 2 roosters in the bunch. When buying from these sources you really don’t get any solid guarantees, but you can also get some bargains if you are on a budget.

Preparing the Brooder

To raise chickens from day-old up until they are 6-8 weeks they will need to have a heat source. This is called a brooder. It needs to be draft-free, with constant heat but also one they can move away from. If they cannot move away from the heat source they can overheat and die. The heat sources used by some people are a fire risk, and not recommended. We use a heat plate that will not burn you if you touch it and release an ambient heat the chicks really thrive on. 

The bedding needs to be absorbent and warm. We use pine shavings as we can add layers over a 2-week period to absorb manure and then clean it out and start again. The used bedding is a great addition to my compost.

You will also need feeders and waterers in the brooder, the kind that cannot be knocked over, spillage just makes more work. Also raising them slightly will prevent manure and bedding from being flicked i