DIY Outdoor Chicken Brooder

Follow these plans from 1977 to build a DIY outdoor chicken brooder. Start your chicks outside and foraging safely to keep your own pasture-raised chicks.

By Linda and Bill Bayliss
Updated on October 29, 2022
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by AdobeStock/wideonet

Follow these plans from 1977 to build a DIY outdoor chicken brooder. Start your chicks outside and foraging safely to keep your own pasture-raised chicks.

Right now — while the ground is covered with ice and snow — is the time to hike down to the workshop and whip out one of these simple outdoor chicken brooders. Then, when you’re ready to raise that mini-flock of homestead chicks next spring or summer, you’ll be all set to handle the job in style.

Most homesteaders would never think of crowding their laying hens together in a cramped, windowless enclosure (the way today’s commercial poultry-men do). And yet, a good many small-scale farmers willingly foster just such conditions when it comes to raising chicks.

Not us. After years of experimentation, we’ve developed a system that allows us to rear small groups of late spring or summer peepers (no more than 25 at a time) in natural surroundings, with or without a setty hen. Our secret: We start our chicks outside in portable chicken brooders.

Make Your Own Outdoor Brooder

An outdoor “peep box” can be made simply and inexpensively from scrap lumber, a couple of hinges, a porcelain light fixture, and a screen or iron grating (the rack from an old refrigerator, for instance). Our brooders cost us only about a dollar each to build, since we’re able to scrounge all their parts except for the hinges and light fixtures. (Even if you end up buying new lumber, however, your total cost per brood box shouldn’t be more than $6 or $7.)

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