Becoming a chick expert
Last year, I faced a lot
of growing pains when it came to hatching our own chicks and keeping
them alive, but now I feel like an expert. Hatch rates this year
ranged from 80% to 
95%, and survival rates (how
many chicks lasted through their first month of life) were always right
at 95%.
To get there, I perfected my choice
of eggs to go in the incubator, tweaked my dry
incubation
technique, and learned
how to leverage my specific incubator. I also prevented a
lot of second-guessing by figuring out how
to tell if eggs left in the incubator on day 22 were late-hatchers or
duds. More
basically, I started taping
my incubator and turner plugs to the wall socket to prevent accidental
unplugging.
Once the chicks made it
out of the egg, we continued to have good results with an Ecoglow
Brooder instead of a
heat lamp. Mark built me an outdoor
brooder that did a
great job to keep
the chickens happy outside as early as week 1, which saved my sanity and
also let them enjoy
free ranging much
earlier in life. Turning the plexiglass toward the sun helped
heat up the brooder in the early spring, then flipping the window side
to face north (and 
putting the brooder in the
shade) prevented overheating for our summer flocks.
I feel like I've finally
got chick care figured out, which is why I wrote Permaculture
Chicken: Incubation Handbook to jumpstart others'
journeys. If you want to see more cute chick photos without
spending 99 cents, you might also want to check out this
post.
| This post is part of our 2012 Chicken Experiments lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.