Advanced Brooding: Honing in on your skills

March 20, 2025 @2pmET

Diving deeper into the finer details of brooding to perfect the environment when chicks/poults/ducklings are first placed and how to transition them to prepare them for the pasture. For those who mostly know what they are doing when it comes to brooding. Discussing brooder design, ventilation, drafts, bedding, feed, brooding with brooder guard or whole house brooding, supplemental feeders and waters and feeder and waterer types. Basic health issues and behaviors to watch out for such as delivery stress, grouping/piling, panting, early starve-outs (3-5 days of age), late starve outs (10+ days of age) and how to correct or prevent it with management or supplements. Stressing the importance of sitting on the ground to watch how they are behaving to see where you can make tweaks that make a difference in livability and weight gain.