Welcome to episode 2 at Urteaga farms. Today we're talking about how to raise chicks. For moral support, I decided the bring some of the easter egger chicks I bought today into the studio. You should be able to hear them in the background. These particular chicks have cute little beards, and hopefully lay some blue or green eggs when they grow up. First of all, raising chicks is something that requires a proper method and a little bit of your time every day. I assure you, it is a lot of fun. You can start off with day old chicks. Usually, your local tractor supply store or farmer's coop will carry chicks anywhere from February to August. It is important to decide what breeds you need depending on the en viroment you are providing them. Day old-to week old chicks usually go for about 3- 5 dollars each. When you're buying chicks, remember that chickens are very social birds, and they will easily get bored without company. 1 or two chicks is definitely not a good idea. I would go with a minimum of 4. Also, make sure you check with your city for laws regarding chicken keeping. Some cities and neighborhoods don't allow chickens. If you're thinking egg numbers, remember that they don't lay every day. Depending on breed, they can lay anywhere from 3-6 eggs a week. If this is your first time raising chickens, I would start with started pullets. You can jump on craigslist or even read the newspaper adds and look for 4-5 month old chickens. Best time to start chickens like that would be Spring. Then they will start laying soon, and you won't have to wait too long. It usually takes them around 6 months to start laying eggs. Chickens do have a day-light requirement to keep laying. They usually need around 12-14 hours of daylight. So they will stop in the winter if you don't provide additional light. Rule of thumb is, you let them rest in the winter. Its definitely healthier for them. But most people just give additional light so they keep laying. These are just some of the things that you would have to think about before starting off with chicks or chickens. We usually order chicks from an online hatchery. Well, we also buy from local stores. Our first order this year was 27 chicks from Mcmurray hatchery. We got 4 white leghorns, 9 buff orpingtons and 9 white rock pullets. We did put in one each of dark cornish, buff orpington and leghorn roosters. The hatchery gave us two extra roosters for free, a buff cochin and a white leghorn. Now we're upto 5 roosters in the brooder! The advantage of ordering from hatcheries is, you can ask them to vaccinate your chicks. I had ours vaccinated for marek's disease and coccidiosis. Coccidiosis is a pretty bad disease that 3-8 week old chicks can get. It will kill off entire flocks. Same with Marek's disease. We will talk about these diseases later. Local stores usually don't vaccinate chicks because some people want to raise chicks organically. I don't really mind about vaccinating them, especially if that means I can save its life. Lets move on to your brooder. You need to make sure you give them appropriate heat. Chicks need 90 degrees farenheit for the first week, and reduce the temperature by 5 degrees every week until you reach 70 degrees farenheit. This is very important. I've had chicks die because they didn't have enough heat. You need a thermometer to regulate the temperature. And make sure its accurate. You can use a heat lamp for this purpose. Its good if you can get an infra-red lamp instead of the usual white ones, because for one thing, they give more heat, and it will reduce the stress inside the brooder. This is because you will have to leave the white light on at night, and they can't sleep well with the light on. They're just like us, they turn into monsters when they don't get enough sleep and it'll soon turn into a bloody mess, literally. Now, to regulate the temperature, you don't NEED a thermometer. Its quite easy to tell if they are cold or too hot. If they're cold, they will all huddle together really tight and sleep. This will usually be under their heat lamp if you have provided any, or on the warmest spot. Somehow chicks know how to find the warm spots and to stay away from the cold spots. Some say its good to give a variation of temperature inside the brooder. Like I would keep the water and food on the one end the brooder and the heat lamp on the other. What happens then, is they get accustomed to cold and they will actually be hardier little chickens. So, to reduce stress, another important thing is to give them enough space. I would give them around .5 to 1 square foot per chick. THat way they can stay in the brooder for 2-3 weeks. You will have to give them more space as they grow up. We designed our brooder so they can stay in there for at least 5 weeks. We have a wire mesh floor for them, so I don't use bedding. While we're on the topic, I'm gonna mention this real quick, you should not use pine shavings for the first couple days. Newspaper is a better idea. Also you will need to change the bedding when it gets dirty and that means at least once every 2 days. Wire mesh floor in our brooder definitely saves us a lot of money that we would have otherwise spent on bedding. Their poop falls through the mesh into newspaper that I've laid underneath. This definitely reduces disease spreading as well. I will post pictures to our facebook page, so you can checkout the design of our brooders. Some people use plastic storage bins for brooders and that works too. Moving on to feed requirements, its pretty straightforward. You can buy any commercial starter feed. BUT, if you bought your chicks from a hatchery and they vaccinated the chicks for coccidiosis, you should NOT feed them medicated feed. For other chicks you can feed medicated feed and that should prevent diseases like coccidiosis. For the first couple days, I would recommend crushing the feed a little bit so the crumbles are smaller... I had to grind mine and I kept doing it for about a week and then decided to just give them the regular feed. You don't have to do this, but it would be easier on them. Especially if you have any bantam chicks. oh bantams are half the size of normal chicks, i mean TINY. So, About water. Make sure you have clean water available for them at all times. For the first couple days, you can put marbles or rocks in the water so they don't drown themselves, which they will sometimes. I honestly have not had that happen to me, but its something that everyone on the forums recommend. You can also get little electrolyte packs that you can get from the feed store and give it to chicks, that way they can recover from any difficulties that come with travel and so forth. I gave my chicks electrolytes for about a week and a half. You have to mix it in a gallon of water, and you can keep giving them that water for 2-3 days. If you don't want to give electrolytes you can give them sugar water, that would be around 12 tablespoons of sugar per gallon. I have not tried this, because I kind of trust the electrolytes. I even give electrolytes to my adult chickens. Moving on I promised I would talk about the diseases that chicks can get. Coccidiosis is one of my biggest fears to be honest. I had a few chicks die from it and some survived and now I have to keep them separate from the big flock. The sign that told me that they had coccidiosis was blood in their poop. This is why you need to spend some time with your chicks. You got to watch them, see if they are acting lethargic, or check for blood in their poop and stuff like that. I was new to raising chicks when my little ones got coccidiosis, so I didn't know what I needed to do. I got the medicated feed , and that is kind of what saved the two chicks I have right now, but I was kind of too late. The best thing to do is to get Corrid, you can usually find this drug in the feed store. Also, this is normally on the cattle section. I have a bottle of liquid corrid on the shelf at all times, just because I'm worried about my chicks, I don't want them dying on me. Corrid will definitely help if you see blood in their poop. If you want to avoid coccidiosis, you can just get the medicated feed and call it good. But again, don't feed them medicated feed if they are already vaccinated, because then it will reduce the strength of the vaccine. So that was one disease that I came across, the other one is pasty butt. This is not quite a disease. Sometimes their poop can stick to the fluff in their fluffy butts. If you see this, then you have to clean it out, or the chick can die from it. The poop can dry up and they won't be able to pass. So in that case, you can get some warm water and a paper towel or a cotton ball, soak it in the warm water and rub their butts until all the poop is gone. I had to do this several times a day with my 27 chicks. This will go away after a few days, but the first few days are critical. Once you clean them, you can place them right under the heat lamp with the wet butt and keep an eye on it. They should dry out in about 15 minutes. Next topic is Marek's disease. I personally have not seen Marek's, but I know that Mareks can kill entire flocks over night. It only applies to chicks, well until approximately 8 weks, but some dangerous cases can affect chickens upto 40 weeks old. There is no medication for this, but the vaccine can prevent it. There are so many diseases that chicks can get, but I'm telling you, you can easily prevent most diseases in chickens by giving them space. Stress is a big factor in chickens, because they are very social birds. So, if you reduce stress that means you reduce the possibility of disease hitting your chicks. Next, we're gonna talk about treats! You will realize that they will most likely be terrified of this alien looking hand coming to get them every time. The best way to brfriend them is treats. I give mine oats. But treats should start when they're at least 2 weeks old. If they look really bored and are pecking on each other, you can give them some grass to pick on. They will play with anything. My little ones love oats. You can also give them meal worms, but not too many. To reduce stress, I put a small branch in the incubator. They love playing on it. So these are some of the things that you can do, to entertain them. Just don't leave treats available for them all the time. I gave up feeding them directly on my hand, because they peck so hard it hurts. So I wear a glove when I give them treats, that is once a day. Ok, so at around 2 weeks, you need to give them some grit. Makesure to buy chick grit and mix it in with the food. This will help them digest their food better. Their little gizzards will need grit to grind their food. The last thing I want to talk about today is incubating eggs. I have about 14 eggs in my incubator right now, and this would be my second time incubating. The first time, it didn't work out. The conditions need to be exact at all times, and you need to check the temperatures every day. Its a lot of work, but I'm definitely looking forward to when I can get a successful hatch. I will keep you posted about the eggs in my incubator. Right now, they are on their 3rd day, and looking good so far. If you are looking into incubating, you want fertile eggs from a flock with a rooster, and you got to make sure the eggs are not washed. The fertility rate drops if you wash the bloom out of the eggs. The other thing is, if you have a full time job, you will need an egg turner. You have to turn the eggs at least 3 times a day on equal intervals. This is mainly why I couldn't get my first batch to work. I purchased an egg turner recently so now I can make sure that's out the way. The normal period of incubation for chicken eggs is 21 days, but at 18 you have to stop turning the eggs, increase humidity and put the eggs on lock down. WELL, I will let you know how my second batch goes, and will do a full episode on incubation later. So, all this sounds like a LOT of work, I know, but really its not. I'm sure you will enjoy it a lot. Watching little chicks with their big personalities are very entertaining to me. So, this week's episode has been about raising chicks, and what you need to know to take care of them. We will be doing more episodes on chicks later, but this episode should give you enough information to care for them in the first 3-4 weeks. Our next episode will be about our experience with homesteading in the first 6 months.