Poultry Nerds on Brooding Part 2

Part 2 of Brooding, it’s a big subject and we had to break it up!

• Transcript

  Jennifer: 0:24

  And that's what you want. So those turkeys are like watching those chicks act like crazy people. And they want to go see if they need to act like crazy people too. Yes. And they can eat the same thing. So don't stress that. Just put them on chick starter, non medicated, which we're going to get to that in just a minute, but put them on chick starter, But now when you move the chicks out and you're down to just turkeys in the brooder, that's when you really want to do the game bird starter, but you don't have to. Again, don't stress it. chick starter, game bird starter, it, they're going to eat their fill. They'll grow better on a game bird starter, but they're not going to die on a chick starter. And then ducks need a lower. percentage of protein. Otherwise, you can get something called Angel Wing, which is a whole nother podcast. But so you want them, I use Chick Starter with them. Never feed them the high protein game starter. So you want a non medicated good quality chick starter like an 18 And leave them on that and you might even start mixing in some scratch with it just to lower that protein just a little bit more Don't go any lower than say 15 percent But I highly encourage you not to over protein a duckling and they're nasty So let me tell you a secret that I was told. I have, I asked a question to Jeff. I said, how do I know when I'm giving too much protein to a chick of any kind? and he said, your nose will tell you. I said, huh? He said, when your brooder starts smelling like your quail cages that you haven't emptied out in two weeks, the protein is way too high. You need to cut back quick. You'll mess them up. And so that's like for me, I start a lot of quail and I use a very high protein quail starter when, and I'll give it to chicks the first few days of their life too. And when I start smelling that smell, I cut it down to chick starter and they grow quick and they get, it helps them get a faster growth. But. People, a lot of people say I like to do this. Here's the thing. If it says game bird starter and it's a quail, give it that. But if it's a chicken. It's best to feed it chicken feed. Yeah, if you're completely new Do not know Just follow the bags. Don't listen to facebook. Don't listen to the clerk attractor supply. Sorry people just the bag if it's got a chicken on it and you have chickens then that's the one you want if it has duck on it Then that's the one you want. And please shop somewhere else too. Open your horizons a little bit. There's other places to get feed, but that's a whole nother soapbox. I like local feed stores. Yeah, those work really well. All right, so in, what are we going to brood in? Now, I know what I brood mine in, I brood in tubs. You have boxes, right? I've got a couple of boxes that are custom made out of wood for brooding. I have my overflow that's the 100 gallon water trough. My main brooding is done in the hatching time boxes. and I like them because they're off the ground. Which is something you told me was extremely important for all of them was to keep them off the ground because cold concrete will make their feet cold and you won't get it warm. I like it because they're stackable in the space. I can put, I can brood a lot of birds in a small amount of space. Being a hatchery, that's important. And I like the heat being adjustable. I can have chickens in one and have it set to one temperature. I can have quail in another and have it set to one temperature. And after my first week, I can start dialing it down a few degrees every week until it gets to where the heat only comes on if my barn heat fails. That is pretty handy. But I will say for a very long time, I use plastic storage containers that were sitting about a foot off the ground and some of those plates, the heat plates that you have on your website. I bought a few of them from you and use them. They work really well. I like the ones that you have because they're idiot proof. They do not have a temperature setting on them. All you can do is raise and lower them and plug them up. And that works out really well. So for people that are just starting with it being hatching season and then wanting some chicks, I would recommend the kit. I know you have one. and it has the plate. It's got everything you need. Find something like that, something that doesn't have a lot of settings, because when you start messing with settings, that's, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So let's talk about keeping them off the ground, what we're talking about there. Like in my barn, I have a concrete floor. And when winter time that concrete gets cold and when you set a brooder on cold that coldness just seeps in So all I simply do now I use furniture dollies from northern tool or what's that other one Harbor freight. Oh, yeah Ten dollars you can't buy anything with wheels for less than ten dollars anyway, and so you can move those brooders around So that's what I like. And then the air can circulate underneath of it. And so you get the ambient temperature of the room underneath of the floor. So I've had a lot of people contact me saying, Hey, my chicks are dying and I don't understand. And I say, send me a picture. And the very first thing I tell them is to get that brooder up off the floor and that fixes it 99 of the time. Stick your hand on the concrete if it's the least bit cold that cold is radiating all the way through your brooder. Yes Now I brood. I don't use the hatching time brooders. I like tubs I like to be able to see down in them. I like it's just more my style works better for my setup and for me You I brood I have, I think they're like 14 inches by, say, 24 inches, and then maybe about 18 inches deep, and my heat plates sit down in them, and these are small batches. I like to brood in smaller batches. It just works for what I've got going on here. And and they're set up almost hip high, so I don't have to bend over to the floor or anything. And and I, but now I run, people laugh. I'm going to run about 13 to 15 brooders at any given time, all the time. How many are you running? Right now eight. It adds up, doesn't it? I will say this though. I had a shocking moment. A very shocking moment. My incubator is empty. Oh, I had to get a fifth one. Only one of them is empty, but I was like I pulled some tray, some trays out and I was like, put them in the hatcher and I'm like, there's nothing in here. I need to fill it. Oh no, wait, I need to sanitize you. I haven't done that in a very long time. I need to sanitize you. And then I need to refill you. I'm sending your eggs out tomorrow. That's when you wanted them. Yeah. That'll actually, that'll be perfect because you'll send them out tomorrow. I'll have them in a few days. That's plenty of time to get that thing sanitized. You know what? Every day before the day before, are you talking about when I put them pointy side down in my hatching my incubator room so they can sit there for a few hours? No, after that, while I'm actually doing that, starting that process is when I'll be sanitizing it. I think you're lucky. Probably. Yeah. All right, so you're brooding in the hatching time, so they're up on wire, basically, and I'm brooding in tubs. Now, I use a puppy pad for the first week, but after that, my, the quail go up on wire. The chickens, turkeys, and ducks, I have barn pens inside on the concrete and I put them on shavings. At that point, if the concrete to me, if it's a little early in the year, I might lay some cardboard down just to insulate against the concrete underneath of the shavings. But right now I'm not doing that. Just putting a thick layer of shavings in and that's what I'm using. Make sure you use fine. I see a lot of misinformation on social media to make sure you use the large ones. I highly encourage fine ones. Information on social media. I got to say this when it comes to braider material, if it's something going in one of my hats and time boxes, they're going to be on wire. I have recently discovered peat moss. Oh yeah, I went through that phase, yeah. When I was, when I went to Mandolin's place and looked around at what she has concrete slab peat moss inside her barn, and she said that she does that and she does it for brooding and it goes straight to the garden. And I was like, hey, So when I started bringing these corners crosses, I got some peat moss and I put it in there and I'm It absorbs a lot. Yeah, I order it by the palate. And it doesn't smell near as bad as shavings that need to be swapped out. And so what I'm thinking, I was told that if I'm brooding like with a Cornish, they only need to be in there two to three weeks. If I put those in there for two to three weeks, I can take that, mix it up, and grow some monstrous vegetables out of it. So that's my plan. That's what I'm doing. I really like the fact that it does not smell near as bad. And when they get in there, brooders. and the ones that don't have the bale waters and when they start horsing around and spilling that all over the place, the peat moss just absorbs it quick. So the peat moss is fantastic. I order it by the pallet. I use a lot of it. I did use it in my barn one year. It was fantastic. Until you stand back in May and all the brooding is relatively done for the year and you think, Oh, I'm going to clean the barn before it gets to be 400 degrees outside. And you look around and your entire barn is black. Every cobweb is black. Every surface is black. Every buff colored chicken is black. Everything is black. I have noticed that some of my Cornish and some of my bresse that are white. are more gray color. And that's okay. I, if I, look, this is, this, we're going back to the wet chicken conversation a while ago. I actually took one of them, I freaked out because I'd never seen it before. I didn't even take time to Google it. I grabbed one of them, went into the kitchen sink, put the water on really warm, and held that sucker up underneath it to clean it off so I could see if it was the dirt or what was wrong with it. And then dried it with a towel and a hairdryer. I didn't want it to be wet when I put it back in the brooder and get, hawk feed. I wanted to eat it. I didn't want the bird to eat it. But I was like, my wife said, I thought you only did that to one of your reds when it was getting showtime or something like that. Why in the world are you drying a chick? I said I don't want to get sick. All right. We're jumping all over the place here, but I'm going to tell you a secret. And then when I do it on my Facebook page, it really does get a huge following and when people will trust me on it, it works really well. So in your coops. Once they're outside, off heat, they're grown, they're ready to go outside. You don't need shavings in your coop. You need to take one bag of stall pellets to one bag of peat moss. Yes, it's like a, was it a cubic yard you buy it from at Lowe's? Yeah. and one, yeah that's it. So a bag of stall pellets and a bag of peat moss. And you go out to your coop. Now mine are clay bottomed, hard clay bottom in the coops because I believe in dirt because it's free and I own it. And so it's already there. And then you put a bag of the stall pellets down just like a one pellet coating. And then you dump the bag of peat moss over the top of it. And then if you want clean eggs, you can put some shavings down over the top of that. And that's it. That's it, and then leave it. The chickens love it. They will break it up for you. It will absorb any moisture and keep them dry, and my main coop, which you've seen is what, 14 by 30 feet, I think? I did it in 2020, so this will be the fourth year. Saw pellets and peat moss. One time. Four years. Going strong. Yeah. That's it. I'm planning on using, and I'm, I've got 16 breeding pens, and I'm swapping out a lot of my breeders as I swap them out. I'm actually going in and tilling up the ground that's in there and throwing some lime in it. And then I'm putting some stall pellets, some peat moss, and I'm going to put a pallet in there. If it's in a low spot, just to give them something to play on. I got that idea from John Gutterman. He said that his love it. And I have a ridiculous amount of pallets. So I'm gonna put some of them to use. Yeah, we put our hay rolls on our pallets. That's a good idea. Now, I do barn lime too if I feel like, that I've had rats in there, or I've got something else going on. Barn lime, so we need to talk about barn lime real quick. There's two different kinds. You want the cheap kind. The cheap kind is Ag Lime. It's crushed limestone. It's perfectly safe. It's just crushed up rock. It should run you four dollars for 50 pounds. You don't have to buy the brand name stuff. I don't think we need to get into name calling, but you don't have to buy the 26 for a half a pound stuff off of Amazon. It's the same thing. 4 for 50 pounds at the co op, at the tractor supply, wherever it is that you shop is the same thing. Another soap box. The cool thing about that is when you're getting the straight up crushed lime, When they do find that it's just extra grit Oyster shell. It's all the same thing. It's just another place to make money Yeah but if you put that down first that all that does Is change the ph of the soil Which makes it inhospitable to other organisms AKA worms, protozoas like coccine any kind of bacteria, yes, mites, you're making it inhospitable and that's what you want. You want them to go away from your birds. All right, so we've talked about. Brooders, and tubs, and bedding, and okay, let's talk about water. That seems to be something else. I wouldn't have thought water would have been so controversial on social media for chicks, or for brooding. Me, I just give mine room temperature water twice a day. Do you do anything elaborate to yours? Do people do something other than room temperature water? Oh, yeah, they do probiotics and rooster booster and apple cider vinegar and honey. There's a crazy amount of stuff out there. So I do know that there's a lot with apple cider vinegar that helps the gut health of the bird. And stuff like that. But, some people, they get really funny. They'll measure it. One ounce, one gallon, one ounce. Or whatever they do. And, no. My when I go this morning before I came to work, I went to my watering tanks that are not automated, which are the only ones are in the barn. And that's just because the plumbing is not done in the barn yet. And I went in there with the hose pot that set outside my front yard all night, picked it up off the ground, walked in, filled them up. Boom. Yeah, now I will say, In the summertime, I will, in the summer, I'll get the, I call them the cheap water bottles, the ones that you get like the great value that are like, have the ridges on the side, the plastics real thin, the ones that you can freeze and they won't blow up, they'll just swell. On days that it's going to be over 100, I will have those frozen and put a couple of them in my five gallon pails. That I use to feed my water lines outside. I will do that to cool the water off because I do use black buckets and black lines, water lines, to keep algae out, but yeah that's about it. It's amazing chickens survive for so long without all that extra stuff. So if you're feeding a quality feed, They don't need anything else, right? If you contact me and say, Hey, your chickens, my chickens don't look good. And you tell me that you've bought the cheapest feed in the universe, but you're putting rooster booster in their water. I'm going to tell you to do it the other way around. To fresh water and by expensive feed. It does make a difference. So yeah, I've I've learned a lot about animal nutrition in the past year and I've learned how to read tags and what byproduct means and what filler is and all that good stuff. And it's gotten to the point where when people say my chickens that I got from you two weeks ago, they just. They're not moving around and stuff like they were when I first got them from you. What are you feeding them? How much do you pay for that bag of feed? Because in my area, I know a lot about the different feed here, and if I've never heard of what they're feeding them, I ask because I know to make a quality feed, how much it costs, and I know that if they say, Oh, I got them this from the such and such places, 1499 a bag. There's your problem, feed tag and look at how many times the word byproduct is in there that literally is in there because they can sweep the floor and put the trash inside your feed. And get away with it, still go about, still have an accurate feed tag. Feed them quality feed and give them water that comes out of the hosepipe. Okay. And then treats. I see a lot of commentary about treats. So this is how I equate treats to a chick. If you have a newborn baby, which you guys do, on formula, are you going to feed it Twinkies just because it's cute? No, because you want the baby to take up all the nutrients from the formula, so it starts off as healthy as possible. It's the same principle with the chicks. You want it to eat as much of that quality food we just told you to go ahead and spend the money on. You don't want to be filling it up with Twinkies, aka mealworms. Like for me, A treat or a chicken is appropriate in the summertime when they're outside and you have watermelon or cantaloupe, give them that because you are going to feed them, you're going to really hydrate them, and you're going to give them a little bit of extra sugar. Those are all things that are really good for chickens. But, They're, even people that have them as pets, I've seen stuff in some of the things that people sell as chicken treats that are, they're only good in moderation according to what the directions say on the bag, but they still want to, let me get a handful. Here you go. Let me get you another handful. They're feeding three, four handfuls at a time and that is not moderation. It's a. Yes. And I realized people treat them like pets, but you and I both show. So probably not very many people are going to pamper their chickens as much as we do. And mine don't get any kind of treats like what anybody is thinking about when we say that.

  Carey: 24:38

  Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released. And they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it egg citing. This is Carey signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.

  25:06

  Mhm.