Brooder Suggestions

[WashingtonWino]

Good point! It wouldn't be hard to tip, especially if you are Fred, my 120lb dog! Perhaps I should weigh down the base too. I don't have kids and the whole brooder setup is in a spare room with a door that closes\latches luckily. I'm expecting five chicks.

 

[Ashley Pederson]

What a great idea, WashingtonWino! Thank you for the pictures to show exactly what you were describing! I will have my husband incorporate something similar to our brooder to make adjusting the height easier. I was wondering how we were going to raise it as they didn't need as much heat and that setup is genius!

 

[lazy gardener]

Don't forget, you can also step down the wattage on the bulb that you use as they get older.

 

[Rose66]

LOVE the garden grow window brooder! I bet the chicks did too.

Ashley, you've gotten some good ideas on building a brooder. Please post pics of your brooder when you get it built! One more thing I've learned from experience...don't make the brooder any deeper than you can reach. My outside brooder is awesome except that it's four feet deep and even bending over into the brooder, I cannot reach the far back corner which is of course where the chicks go to that don't want to be caught. lol

 

[newchickenkid11]

I'm new and would like some help do you think a metal cattle trough from the fleet store will serve as a good brooder for 15-25 chicks????thanks,connor:

 

[azygous]

I would like to address the issues brought up in the last couple posts.

Some will need very large brooders in which to raise as many as 20 to 30 chicks. Unless a cattle trough or tank has at least 2 square feet for every chick you will be raising , it's too small. By necessity, you will need 40 to 60 square feet for that many chicks. That's around 6' x 10'. I'm a huge advocator of side-access brooders, and I believe that you can even set up a large brooder with side access. If I needed to build a permanent brooder for that many chicks, I would consider building a long, narrow one. Or put two or three cardboard boxes taped together with pass-throughs cut out so they all join to make one long brooder.

So, how to collect (I don't especially like the word "catch") chicks when your reach doesn't extend to the farthest spaces? This is a problem that even people with small brooders seem to have, and it's the easiest to solve. All you have to do is train chicks to come to you.

It's the first thing I teach my chicks. You use treats or even their crumbles. I hold it in my hand and call "babies!". Or I have a small container and it has treats in it, the same every time so they become addicted to the sight of it. Either a sight trigger or vocal trigger, associated with food, will train chicks to come to you. No need whatsoever to chase them down and "catch" them.

This training lasts into adulthood and makes it easier to handle your chickens when needed. It's even possible to train chicks to step onto your hand by placing the edge of your hand against its toes. A chicken trained as a chick to do this will continue to automatically step onto your hand when you place it against their feet. I've had call to need this handy trick the last couple nights in the coop when one of my youngsters has had problems roosting. She steps onto my hand and I can easily place her on the perch where I want her.

There are so many things you can do to make raising chickens easier and more fun.

 

[TalkALittle]

Good point! It wouldn't be hard to tip, especially if you are Fred, my 120lb dog! Perhaps I should weigh down the base too. I don't have kids and the whole brooder setup is in a spare room with a door that closes\latches luckily. I'm expecting five chicks.

Forget my dogs, I'm so clumsy I'd probably knock that thing over myself! One easy way to give PVC bases a little weight is to fill them with sand--just make sure your end caps and joints are really tight or glued.

 

[WashingtonWino]

Azygous, great advice! Just like training a dog, start with trust and a strong recall! Makes sense.

Talkalittle, great idea, that should do the trick quite well.

Good luck everyone!

 

[Ashley Pederson]

Sorry it took so long to get the photos of our finished brooder posted! Hubby ended up building a simple 2'x4'x2' wooden brooder with top access. He built two handles across the top of the lid to make it easier for me to lift the lid off and to provide some extra support in case the cat or munchkins (mostly the munchkins) got a little rambunctious. The heat lamp was able to clip in the top lip of the frame for the first couple of weeks while they needed extra warmth, and then to the post at the back of the brooder for the next couple of weeks. He also added a removable 1" wooden dowel roosting bar so they could "practice" and have something to play on. We also found that putting their food and water founts on a piece of wood was very helpful in keeping them cleaner. The size of the brooder fit perfectly in a little nook in our utility room in the basement to isolate the dust, although the 5 chicks have seemed a bit cramped the last couple of days. They get to move out to their finished outdoor coop today! Thank you all so much for your advice

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[Ashley Pederson]

We did notice that reaching in from the top frightened them when we first brought them home, but we were very careful to make slow movements and "reward" their confidence with some of their chick feed in our hands. They soon overcame their skittishness and reaching in from the top was no longer an issue. Hubby ended up nixing the idea of having a door that opened from the front because of how smart our 1 and 3 year old daughters are and how quickly they figure out how to open pretty much any kind of lock within their reach. Since the utility room is in the room next to our family room in our finished basement, the kids have easy access to the brooder and hubby was concerned that they would be able to work their way into the brooder box or open the doors by themselves. The reinforced wooden lid he built was heavy enough that there was no way they could open it by themselves.