One of the challenges for poultry farmers, especially those who operate their own hatchery, is how to effectively care for their chicks after birth to minimize the number of cases that can die to a minimum. Caring for chicks requires special handling skills. Skills may differ slightly from how you should handle chicks over 3 weeks old.
The bottom line is that if you want to maximize the profits from your poultry business, you need to learn how to care for chicks after birth. Usually, after 48 hours of hatching, the chicks must be removed from the hatchery and that is when the actual labor begins which will determine their survival.
After removing them from the incubator, you need to carefully place them in the incubator; the wanderer is expected to stay there until a few feathers grow.
The key to taking good care of your chicks after birth is to make sure they are healthy and if you plan to sell them in about three weeks, you can make a good profit. But if you decide to keep them and raise them in poultry, it will always be a plus for you, as you would be laying the foundations for raising healthy chickens.
Now let’s take a look at the steps to follow if you want to take good care of your chicks from day one after they hatch. ;
7 easy steps to take care of chicks after they hatch
1. Incubator waiting process
The chick care process begins when the eggs are placed in the incubator before they hatch. Once your eggs have successfully hatched after 21 days in the incubator, it doesn’t make sense to take the chicks out immediately. The best practice is to let the chicks incubate for at least 48 hours and then transfer them to an incubator. This will allow the little chicks to become a little stronger so that they are not injured during transport.
2. Prepare the incubator
Of course, your chicks should not stay in the incubator for more than 48 hours after birth. Therefore, you need to prepare an incubator in which you will keep the chicks until they grow up and develop feathers. You can use a cartoon, a wooden box, a steel box, or even plastic as an incubator.
It is something that you can create yourself. The general idea is that you have a safe enough place to raise your chicks. Just make sure you choose the right bedding; Sawdust is suitable because of the pillow effect it offers. You should also make sure that you have installed a proper heating system and water supply.
3. Go from incubator to brooder
Once you can prepare for the brooder where you will have to house the chicks for a few weeks, you need to plan for a successful transfer from brooder to brooder. You usually need to do this 48 hours after hatching.
It is important to note that you must be especially careful when transferring the chicks from the brooder to the brooder: you must wrap the little chick tightly in your palm; and place them carefully in the incubator, one by one. The truth is, these chicks will always try to get away from you, and if you’re not careful you can hurt them.
4. Choose the right food
Once you have placed the chicks in your nursery, the next step is to feed them. The most suitable food for chicks is starter food. You can buy it at the bird markets. The starter feed contains all the nutrients needed to raise the chicks. Although some poultry operations feed their chicks crushed grain, the truth is that this type of feed does not contain some of the nutrients that chicks need.
5. make sure you give them clean water
One area in which people misunderstand the care of chicks is when giving them water. Undoubtedly, the chicks drink a lot of water and at the same time, if given the opportunity, they will play and defecate in the water and pollute it. You are therefore expected to change the water at least three times a day. If you don’t change the water in time, your chicks can get sick.
6. Monitor the temperature of the incubator and adjust if necessary
Another very important factor that you shouldn’t joke about when caring for young chicks is their brood temperature, in fact you need to keep their brood temperature at 95 degrees for the first week. Fahrenheit then you can turn down the temperature 5 degrees Fahrenheit at the end of each week.
It is important to keep an eye on the chicks to make sure they are neither too hot nor too cold. You can tell by the way they behave. When the temperature is too high for them, they move away from the heat source, and when the temperature is too low for them, they fold up and restrict their movement.
So, caring for little chicks is not rocket science, it is something that anyone can learn and implement. If you learn how to take care of the chicks after they hatch and master what you have learned properly, you will surely have almost 100% success in your chicken farm.
