How to Hatch, Rear, and Raise Chickens

Hatch, rear, and raise chickens

If you have passion, dedication, and commitment in whatever it is that you set your mind to do, then the task of hatching, rearing, and growing chickens is, as the idiom goes, “chicken feed”.

For hatching purposes, you need fertilized eggs which you place under the brooder.

You can get your fertilized eggs from your favorite farmhouse or simply have your own set of cock and hen, using your favorite breed.

Guaranteed Eggs raising Chickens

once you have the fertilized eggs on hand, it is much easier to have a live hen to do the brooding because it knows exactly what to do without human intervention.

For some reasons, however, not all breeds of hen, like the Leghorn, are brooders, so you will need an artificial brooder to hatch the eggs.

A small artificial egg brooder with full temperature control can cost from $100 to $500, depending on the features. As a startup, you can try this before moving up to the more sophisticated machines on a need basis. In this price range, you can hatch 10 to 20 fertilized eggs at a time in 21-day intervals.

If you have a budget, you can also buy a heater with temperature control at less than $100, but a 95-watt red bulb with enclosure will likewise suffice. However, you will need a handy thermostat to monitor the temperature in the brooder.

Once the eggs are hatched, the chicks are left in the brooder for another 24 hours to allow them to dry off before gently transferring them to a warming box, which you can buy or build yourself. A warmer box can be a small box inside a larger box with a “door” cut between the two.

The lamp hovers over the small box, while the unheated part is for starter feed, which you can buy from a feed store and continuous supply of clean, fresh water. The chicks can instinctively move about between the heated part and the unheated side with food and water.

This is the fun part. If you have kids, this is the part they will enjoy the most. I still have to encounter a kid who has not been fascinated by chicks.

They can help out in caring for them. As days progress, the chicks become livelier and may even jump out of the warming box, if it is not secure enough – and this is endearing for the kids.

For some chicken raisers, this part is reason enough to raise chickens in their backyard.