Hi Everyone! I just signed up today! Well In May I am getting 100 Cornish X Rock Males. I do not have much experience with chickens and I dont know how to take care of 100. My family and I are gonna raise them and then sell them. So Far I have bought three 20inch reel feeders Two 1gallon waterers. A 4 gallon waterer to use when they are chickens. Two forty pound bags of Chick Developer. Non-Medicated. My 100 Chick are coming with vaccinations. I am also ordering 2 ecoglow heaters. Im not going to use heat lamps. Sorry if this sounds like a lot of questions. I just want to know these things and be prepared when I get them. Well my questions are: I cant use my chick reel feeders for when they get bigger right? So, what do I for a chicken feeder? And ideas on building one cheap? Does it need to be a hanging one? Or can it be that is on the floor? When picking starts what can I do to stop it? Besides having them dust bath in sand and having vegetables. I heard putting vicks on the back of there legs or something? Which do you prefer Chicken Wire or Hardware cloth for the run? If so what size of chicken wire or Hardware cloth do you use? How many hours a day appox. do you check on them? Since I am going to use EcoGlow do I still have to have a red light on them? When I get the chicks I am going to put paper towels down for the first couple day. After that what Kind of Bedding do you use? After they are 4 weeks old I plan on using Sand for bedding. If you have any more ideas or suggestions for me please tell me them. Thank you In Advance
I'll chime in with this. If I were raising 100 cornish X's I would have at least 10 4-5 gallon water stations with the likely-hood I would need a couple more. They go through a bunch of water with their gluttonous appetites. That feed won't last long as your going to find out. With that many birds you will likely want to ration their feed....14 on 10 off. You will want them out of your brooder sooner than you might realize. They begin stinking to high heaven by about 2.5 weeks. Get some more heat lamps. Get your run ready. They won't want or try to roost. You may get a couple out of the 100 birds that will try for a short while.] Wish you the best.
Hopefully you have a lot of room, because 100 broilers is a lot of stink! You can use those feeders but you will want to get more. We use the galvanized ones, I believe they are 3 feet long and we had 3 last year with 75 chickens, so if I were doing 100 I would have 4 of them. The CX crowd each other really bad when they eat because they are so hungry. We fed ours 12 hours on, 12 off. I think we switched ours to Meat Bird food pretty quickly, after 2 or 3 weeks if I remember. They don't have to be hanging feeders, CX tend to lay on the ground and eat as they get bigger anyway. For my hens, it's totally different, I only use hanging feeders or they scratch around in it too much. I think there's a lot of ideas around this site for building your own feeders you could check out. You will definitely want more waterers, you can't believe how they go through water especially when it gets warm as it will in June. We prefer the nipple waterers with 5 gal. buckets since they stay clean and are easy to fill. If you start the chicks on those when they are fairly small they catch on quick. Not sure if you are planning on putting yours outside, but if you are you will likely be able to do so at 3 weeks, unless it's unseasonably cold out. They feather out really quickly and they are hot little birds. In the coop I usually use pine shavings, hay works too but you have to clean it a lot as they poop so much it gets slick and messy if you don't. Good luck! If you have any other questions just ask, lots of good advice on here! We all have to learn somehow. We process ours at 6 or 7 weeks of age, especially with roosters otherwise they get too big and people generally don't want the huge 6-7 lb. chickens unless you are piecing them out.
Does pine shavings hold out pretty good? Do you change the bedding daily? When they get to about 4 weeks we are going to be using sand for there bedding. We were looking over feeders and we are going to build 2 4foot long feeders. that should be enough right? For waterers I was going to go with the nipple system but I seen Mcmurray has a automatic bowl waterer for pretty cheap. Just I havent figured out how they are going to get there Broiler Booster. Yes i will be building a run. how big should it be 100 chickens? Do you used chicken wire or hardware cloth? When you process them at 6 to 7 weeks how many pounds are they? Wow, I thought people would want a big bird. Do they taste better doing them at 6 to 7 weeks then doing them at 8 to 9 weeks? Do you charge extra for piecing them out? Do you make a profit selling birds?
