A POULTRY MINI-MANUAL
(Page 3 of 6)
Chicken litter must be kept dry. If it becomes damp or
soaked from rain or spilled water. remove the wet and put
down fresh. Disease germs thrive in damp litter and
chickens do not. Straw (even shredded straw, which we
tried) does not make good litter. It's not absorbent
enough. You can use newspapers in a pinch but they must be
changed every day. All this is not as complicated as it
sounds, by the way. Chickens help keep their litter dry by
scratching around and stirring it up.
RELATED CONTENT
One piece of equipment you'll need is a brooder. Chicks are
24-72 hours old when you receive them and, for the first
four to six weeks, they must be kept warm! Hold your
brooder at 90° F for the initial week or ten days, then
gradually reduce it to normal temperatures.
We were lucky enough to find a 25 year old electric brooder
that had been lying around an uncle's farm . . . and it
still works! The brooder has a thermostat, a removable
thermometer and a little fan inside to distribute the heat.
A small light bulb (also inside attracts the chicks to the
warmth and another bulb on the outside shows when the
heating element is on.
If you don't have or can't locate a brooder, you can find
or make a sort of hover or giant, reflecting lamp shade. By
using different sizes of bulbs and raising and lowering the
hover, you can regulate the temperature. It will, of
course, take a lot of watching and checking. Be sure to put
a thermometer down at chick level.
DICK SHUTTLEWORTH'S CHICKEN FEEDER
When chickens are little you can feed them out of flat feed
troughs but feeder that holds about 100 pounds of mash.
Here's a nifty feeder that dad designed and which we used
for years and years when we raised a lot of chickens. It's
made of scrap pieces of 1 X 12 and 1 X 4 and a few other
odds and ends. We'll have detailed plans for you in MOTHER
NO. 8.—JS
Since our chicken room is big and high-ceilinged, we
ordered the chicks to arrive the last part of May when the
weather would be warmer. Altogether, we used the brooder
about four weeks and it added approximately $8.00 to our
electricity bill.
The only other hardware you'll need right away are waterers
and feeders especially made for little chicks. Most poultry
books have specifications for feeders and you can build
them yourself. You can also improvise waterers of
mayonnaise jars and pie pans for a few days as we did.
Knock a little chip out of the rim of each jar, being
careful to keep the indentation shallower than the rim of
the pan in which it is set. Pretty soon, though, the chicks
will get frisky enough to knock over such a rig. Gallon
size waterers (they cost $4.00 to $5.00 new) are much
better and I'm sure there are old, unused ones around.
There are also chick waterers that screw onto mason jars.
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