Ever wondered about the tiny details that can make or break the first week in a chick's life? Whether you're a poultry aficionado or just getting your feet wet, our chat with poultry guru Jeff Mattocks is a must-listen. Together, we delve into the fascinating world of baby chicks, highlighting the necessity of close monitoring in the first week. Jeff explains how a chick's body weight increasing three to four times can offer valuable insights about their health. We also offer useful tips and share industry practices on how to ensure your chicks start strong, impacting their future performance.
Moving on, we shift the spotlight onto feeding chicks within their first 14 days. Did you know that the type of feed you offer your chicks can greatly affect their development and health? We discuss the benefits of using crumbles or mash as a starter feed and why you should steer clear of medicated feed. We also address concerns regarding feed particle size and choking, offering practical advice on moderating a chick's eating pace. Join us as we stress the importance of a balanced and appropriate diet for your chicks' healthy growth. This episode is a treasure trove of advice and insights that anyone interested in poultry keeping should not miss out on.
Ever wondered about the tiny details that can make or break the first week in a chick's life? Whether you're a poultry aficionado or just getting your feet wet, our chat with poultry guru Jeff Mattocks is a must-listen. Together, we delve into the fascinating world of baby chicks, highlighting the necessity of close monitoring in the first week. Jeff explains how a chick's body weight increasing three to four times can offer valuable insights about their health. We also offer useful tips and share industry practices on how to ensure your chicks start strong, impacting their future performance.
Moving on, we shift the spotlight onto feeding chicks within their first 14 days. Did you know that the type of feed you offer your chicks can greatly affect their development and health? We discuss the benefits of using crumbles or mash as a starter feed and why you should steer clear of medicated feed. We also address concerns regarding feed particle size and choking, offering practical advice on moderating a chick's eating pace. Join us as we stress the importance of a balanced and appropriate diet for your chicks' healthy growth. This episode is a treasure trove of advice and insights that anyone interested in poultry keeping should not miss out on.
Hi there, I'm Rip Stalvin. I want to welcome you to another Poultry Keepers podcast. Are you raising chicks now? Are you going to be raising chicks in the future? Well, if you answer yes to either of these questions, then this podcast will help you get your chicks off to a very strong starting life. This is part one of a two part series from one of our most popular poultry keepers 360 live streams we have done so far, so get ready for some really great content, because here we go. Welcome to another poultry keeper 360 live. We've got a really good show coming up for you because we're going to share with you how you can give your baby chicks a strong start so they can reach their full genetic potential later in life. I know you're wondering what you can do to ensure your chicks get that strong start they need, so Jeff Maddox is going to share with us exactly what we need to do to help them succeed. Jeff, take it all.
Speaker 2:
Thanks, rip. I'm not sure I'm going to share everything they need to know, but we're going to get some high points of, I think, things that we're often neglected. You need to understand that every infant doesn't matter whether it's human or other requires extra attention in the beginning of his life. So the chicks are actually no different than this. I think a lot of people fail to understand actually what's happening in that first two weeks or that first 14 days. But as soon as that chick pops out and we've got a couple of links for you that we're going to share and I you know, hopefully you'll go look at them, read them, things like that. But you know I'm referencing the Hubbard Breeder website as far as managing and leering specialty chicks. Premium chicks, you know and Hubbard starts right out with premium chicks need special attention the first week of life because they're different genetic characteristics. Okay, this is coming right out of large scale Breeder World data. They're telling people extra attention first week. Extra attention first week, all right. First week of life is key to ensure future performance and I want to reiterate that the first week of life is a key to ensure what that bird's going to turn out like.
Speaker 2:
I see a lot of birds that don't get the right attention. When they're, you know, day olds in that first week, you know they're just kind of throw them in a pan live or die. Here's your food and water and that body weight actually increases three to four times in that first week from when that chick is hatched, or should, right? So how many people are actually weighing your chicks when they come out of the hatcher? You know, don't raise your hand, caring probably is.
Speaker 2:
So yeah, we do have hitting, but you know, knowing that weight and monitoring that weight, and you know we did that weighing thing earlier. We haven't talked about it a whole lot since. I don't know where we're at with it, but weighing the birds throughout their life, and you know the industry does this. They do it on a larger scale. They're weighing the birds every seven days and you know so they're tracking that progress and once they have benchmarks and they know where that bird's supposed to be at day seven and day 14, day 21,. Etc. That can tell if there's an issue or if there's not an issue. So they're, they're using those again as benchmarks to know if they're doing it right.
Speaker 1:
Jeff, if I could just interject something here. Sure, and when I first got started in exhibition poultry, you know if there was a mistake to be made, I probably made it at least twice. But what Jeff is saying is absolutely right. It's paying attention to the small details and it's doing what Karen does. Weigh those baby chicks. You can't. You can't give them too much attention, as my philosophy, but you don't want to smother them at the same time. You want to let chickens be chickens. Make it as natural for them as you possibly can, but pay attention to the detail. Sorry to get carried away, Jeff. No, no, I got a question too.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 3:
So we're talking first seven days. Can we talk a little bit about the whole chip chicks thing? Like you know, chicks can go three days without eating. But that's not ideal, is it? I mean, we wait to feed them till they're three days old so that they can absorb their yolk.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, we really shouldn't do that. You know, and one of the points down below is actually feeding them within six to 12 hours after hatch stimulates the development of the chicks gastrointestinal system, right? So the sooner you can feed them, the healthier they're actually gonna be.
Speaker 1:
And it stimulates. No, I was just gonna say I saw one study where they're actually feeding chick in the incubator before they ever pull from the incubator to go to the breeder.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean the sooner you can get them on feed the better, you know, because that early that first feed is what's gonna stimulate that reabsorption and promotes the reabsorption of the yolk. So the faster that yolk actually reabsorbs once it finds feed and it feels more secure, so it can reabsorb that yolk much faster instead of being five to seven days or three to five days depending on the bird, right, but that all goes into weight and growth and development. So again, the faster you can get them on feed, the better off we're gonna be. And you know the industry's hoping to get them on feed within the first six to 12 hours, right, so they're hatching them, they're driving them like crazy to. You know, they're farming them. They're farming wherever they're gonna be. They get them out. Their feed and water is already in place and there's feed and water everywhere. Gary, you gotta where's that pan? That's for sure.
Speaker 3:
That's not for sure, but yeah, which one did you want?
Speaker 2:
Oh, that battery breeder where they had the feed pan on the floor. Yeah, so you literally want at least 50% of the floor space where the chicks are gonna be to be covered in feed. Now you can use pans like this, which is great. A lot of folks don't have the pan, so they actually put down brown craft paper like the nursery bag paper sacks the brown. You want it unfinished. You don't want, you know, you don't want to slick side to it, because you can. Actually the birds can slip on it. It can. You know, pop the tent out of the back joint. You've just lost a valuable chick.
Speaker 2:
But you're spreading feed out all over the place. Typically, we'll put the feeders that they're going to be eating in the middle of that paper and scatter feed around it. But we don't really want them to have access to bedding, we don't really want them to have access to the ground. You know we need them to be somewhat of a protective environment that first two to three days and we want to make sure that they've gotten something to eat. So everywhere they walk, they're either bumping into water or they're bumping into feed. And yeah, yes, sir.
Speaker 1:
How soon should they introduce grit to the chick?
Speaker 2:
I usually tell people day three because the chick doesn't really know what it is. So I want to get the crop in the gizzard full and quick as I can. You know, and do we have that gizzard or that crop picture that ripped? Did you pick one out? Hopefully after tonight folks will be looking at crop fill and within that first eight hours after the birds placed, you want to go in there and you want to look and it looks like they kind of swallowed a marble. Okay, and you can see the difference in these two chicks. You want at least 80% of those chicks to have their crops filled within that first eight hours and after 24 hours you're looking for a 96, 95, 96% crop fill, so that crop being full. The sooner again we're back to, the sooner they find feed, the sooner they get that crop going. This actually sets their appetite for life. You know how much they're going to want to eat and how frequently and all that. But the sooner we get food in their system and the sooner we get them growing, the healthier they're going to be Right.
Speaker 2:
So in that first week we're looking at, I mean that first week is going to set like the skeletal, the physiology, the immunity, everything that's going to happen in that bird. We're basically setting the blueprint for the entire life of that bird. So being in control and this goes a lot. This goes really good with our conversation about hatching eggs, buying chicks, buying birds. We don't know what happens. Two weeks ago, when we had that conversation, we don't know how that bird was treated in that first 14 days. So something's out of our control, hitting. And what I'm alluding to is, if it's not done right, the first 14 days we're going to see in maturity, we're going to see deficiencies in that bird that are responsible as far back as that first week of life and it's Let me throw this up here yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:
I know some of the folks in the exhibition world seem to think that they can take birds that didn't get this good start we're talking about. But they can correct all of that in the conditioning coop just before a show and that's not possible. If you don't set it right the first seven to 14 days, you can't make it up, you can't overcome what you've lost.
Speaker 2:
That's very true, pat, and I agree with you on this, shantron and I mean. We have generations of birds out there that may not have been raised right in that first 14 days and people, through selection and breeding and other things, have overcome that. I'm just curious this may even go to a current situation, because I know that she is taking good care of her chicks is her genetics? Now she's complaining about having overweight birds. Right, all of her birds are bigger than the standard. Well, the person that she got the breeding stock from 10 years ago may not have been taking care of that was birds correctly, so when she bought them they might have been in the standards the weights of the standards Now being fed better, being managed better, being taken the whole bit all the way through, or she and the true genetic potential and that's actually my biggest fear for the people that are listening or going to watch this later is you may end up seeing things in your breed and you may hate me when this is all said and done, because now you're going to bring out more of the real attributes that this genetic line that you have is there. So just know that there might be a skeleton in the closet that we don't know about, and it may show up For some of you. I'm sorry if that happens, but our job is to raise the healthiest birds as quick as we can day one and see what their true genetic potential is. So some things may show up, and whether it's there too, I kind of get a kick out of like on the Facebook page for poultry keepers and culture, breeder nutrition and so on.
Speaker 2:
People refer to they grow too fast. There really is no such thing as growing too fast. It's the genetic potential of the bird. Give them good feed, give them what they want from day one to about six months of age. There shouldn't be any feed restriction. That bird is still growing and developing for that first six months. So what you get is what the true genetics are. Now, you don't like what you got. I'm sorry, but that's what you got.
Speaker 3:
So then Well, you got it. You have to know what you have. I mean you can't call something that hidden under there. So I mean bringing everything out into the open is necessary.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, but I mean now you're selecting for smaller birds to get them back into the standard, Right? I mean, there's really nothing wrong with it. According to the standard, there's something wrong with your birds, but for somebody who wanted to use them in a real-world situation as egg layers, dual purpose for meat and other things, there's nothing wrong with the breed strain that you have being slightly overweight. It's just the person before you. That's what they selected for and that's where we're at and that's fine.
Speaker 3:
Talk me into that. They're going to be more productive when they're smaller.
Speaker 2:
Sure they're going to be more eggs, right I'm confident we're going to make them. I'm not, but that's okay.
Speaker 3:
In 10 years I'll get back to you, I mean how many eggs eat.
Speaker 2:
What's your average eggs? I don't know. Okay, yeah, all right, see how you are Okay.
Speaker 3:
Well, just each bird has their own. It's too complicated, so yeah.
Speaker 2:
Now, when the show's over, karen, is there a way to plop up these show notes at the end so people can come back and reference them or not, or they're just going to have to keep replaying the video.
Speaker 3:
Rip can upload the document to the Facebook group. Right yeah.
Speaker 1:
All those documents we're going to talk about tonight have been uploaded to the Polkare Keepers 365 section on our Facebook group, so you can go down. You can go there and download them as PDF.
Speaker 3:
They're ready to rock and roll whenever you want them All right, and I think he wants this one too, the one that's called Show Notes 10422.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 3:
Not 100. Yeah, uh-huh.
Speaker 2:
I can do it. It's giving me a hard time. Yep, all right. So let's talk about feed. In that first 14 days, the breeder hybrid breeders tells you to start out on a crumble because you have a more uniform piece in part, and so there's not going to be as much diet selection, you know, sorting, et cetera. That's fine. You can also do it with a mash, as long as it's a uniform particle-sized mash. There's no reason why you can't do that, and whichever way you want to go is fine. I'm not going to take sides here.
Speaker 1:
You know.
Speaker 2:
If it's easier for you to go buy a bag of chick starter crumbles, do that. Please, don't get medicated. People don't understand that. That medicated feed is actually and proleum is blocking thiamine, which is a B vitamin, so it's a thiamine inhibitor and you're not really helping your chick out and there's really no need, you know, to be fighting something that you don't have Right. All you're trying to do is prevent them from getting coccidiosis. There's other methods for doing that. A non-medicated chick starter is going to work just fine. So is there any questions at this point? Do you got that picture of that feed? People are going to lose their mind when they see this picture. So All right.
Speaker 3:
There you go All right folks.
Speaker 2:
You see that that's actually a chick starter. Okay, now I'm not going to argue with you. I'm telling you this person, this is real feed, real world. These people are using this from day one through finish. The chicks will not eat pieces that they're not capable of swallowing. So if there's going to be a few pieces of whole corn left in the feeder eventually and that's perfectly fine, you know you can throw away a few pieces of whole corn. You can take it out to your adult birds. They're going to love you for it. It doesn't matter. But good, chunky course.
Speaker 2:
You know you really want the bird eating the biggest particle size that it can get down its throat and into its crop and down into the gizzard. It's going to stimulate better gizzard function. It's going to get the gizzard working harder earlier. Then those birds are going to be fine. And there's people out there right now rolling their eyes thinking Jeff has lost his mind. But you see that powder Chickens don't like powder. How many people watch in this show? Actually, every one of you hates powder, right? I hear it all the time. Oh, my bird's hate powder, my bird's hate powder. It's like okay, so don't feed them powder. You know they're looking for a particle size about an eighth of an inch wide and a quarter of an inch long. That's pretty big and they can handle it. Okay, they can be perfectly fine.
Speaker 3:
You're talking large foul. I heard a rumor that Bantams really can choke on feed. Is that not?
Speaker 2:
Any chicken can choke on feed if it gets too excited when it's eating. So yeah, I mean they can choke on powder. So the people that are limit feeding and their cups are empty and they're limit feeding too hard, that their bird's appetite is that, you know? Just insane. Okay, so what? The next thing is when birds can see other birds. There's a sense of competitiveness as far as when it comes feeding time and they'll eat too fast. But they can choke on powder just as much as they can choke on a whole granulocorn. It's how fast they're eating and why are they eating that fast? So just slow them down and if you think they're eating too fast, make it a wet mash, just soak it in some water. I don't help it all Slide down.
Speaker 1:
I'm going to give to that, because I ordered some white old English trio, white old English game bannum and had them shipped here from Texas and I just put them in the pen, put the water in there, put the feed in there and that male apparently was so hungry, or he was just aggressively eating that feed, eating that feed, eating that feed, and I turned around and he was dead. I mean, he just joked on it.
Speaker 2:
Yep. So you almost need to. In your case, rep, you just kind of want to give them a little bit and just kind of work them up a little bit at a time. But yeah, he must have been starved, coming from. How long was he in trance?
Speaker 1:
About nine hours yeah.
Speaker 2:
He may have had anxiety issues too by the time he got there.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it also sounds a bit like like he said if he was cup fed in his previous life, where he's only gets a little bit at a time so he knows when that food's down there he better eat yeah. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:
He might have been conditioned to eat everything and no one where they came from. That entirely pop.
Speaker 2:
And we're not saying anybody did it wrong. It's just a difference in how things are done at different locations and all right back to the first 14 days. So actually, when you get done with the crumbles somewhere around day 14, if you haven't already started on a mash feed which I know most of you aren't going to because you got to have pellets and crumbles, but you can Hubbard Breeders actually says you can moderate that growth factor slightly by feeding match. Okay, give the bird a chance to sort through some feed. You know, look for pieces and parts that it's after.
Speaker 2:
And so that is always an option. If you feel like they're growing too fast, you can always switch them to a mash, although it hasn't been my experience, but you know they did note that finer mashed. You know, like that one powdery feed picture that we had there is that it will actually with a few course particles in it. So if it, if the particle size isn't fairly uniform, that'll actually reduce growth more than feeding that course mash picture. You know where there's a scoop called grain and it may also reduce the uniformity of the chicks, you know, by having too much particle difference in that feed in the beginning. So you want to feed. That's pretty. You know almost all the particles look similar to the chicks. Look, chickens are green buggers. No doubt about it. They've researched this time and time again. Chickens always eat for the biggest piece first. Okay, absolutely Always will Gonna pick out the biggest piece first. So just just know that that's the way it goes, unless, course, the biggest piece is bad. So I pulled up another. It was really hard to find information to support what I believe. You know, what I've observed, you know over my years, and but I was able to find one in this link will be available as well. Hatchabilitycom s5 PDF Jing done by Vern Christiansen.
Speaker 2:
So we're looking at development rates, different physiology system in the first seven days. First seven days right post hatch, right, number one, circulatory system. Okay, it's going to be rapid and early. I mean the first. One of the first things is that's building on is circulatory system. Same time it's working on kidney, kidney and body fluid systems, digestive system, right there. You know, within that first two or three days.
Speaker 2:
We talked about that earlier. You know that's happening right after hacks. This is all happening in the first seven days. Don't think it's going to happen. You know, six months down the road is the pattern for this. Birds life is happening, is happening in the first seven days. Okay, a bird can't can't regulate its own body temperature until it's about 14 days old. So, watching those birds, seeing how they behave, making sure the temperature is right, actually pick them up and feel their feet. If their feet feel cold, need to up the temperature a little bit, okay, and then reevaluate them four or six hours later, see if this feet are still cold. One way to tell Rip your ear for felt chicks feet to their cold or not.
Speaker 2:
All right, karen. Okay, well, we're 50, 50.
Speaker 3:
I'm terrible to my newborn chick. He said I treated him well, but I'm a fan of them not being very warm, so I don't. I just feel like they need to be tested.
Speaker 2:
You want to harden them off early, huh?
Speaker 3:
Not terribly, but I mean, yeah, I just kind of like Karen.
Speaker 1:
You know I go back to Broody Hens hatching baby chick. Those chicks are not up under that, broody Hens a lot. They're out and about there hunting stuff to eat. They're running around If they get cold and they'll come back. I try to arrange my brooder to where there is heat on one end and it Cooler on the other end.
Speaker 2:
And that's the right way to do it. Rip, they have the ability to go to heat and find heat, just like the mother hen was there.
Speaker 1:
But they have that ability to be out of that heated area at ambient temperatures or near ambient temperatures, and that's good, because that's how they started pushing that body temperature development anyway, right, but Jeff, I will say that for the first few days I'll put a partition in there that kind of keeps them confined to the warmer area, also to the feed mortar, until I know that they're eating and drinking the way they should, and then I'll take that partition out and they can do whatever they want to do at that point.
Speaker 2:
So, rip, did you always know that, or when did you learn that?
Speaker 1:
Mm-mm. I guess I'll kind of always knew that, and I've been one that felt like if we can mimic the way chickens would be raised in the wild, that we would have better birds. I think the one kicker to that was if we have better nutrition available to us now than the birds do in the wild. So, going back to what you were saying about genetics, it can cause some things to pop up that we might not know is in our line, and of course that can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. But if it's a bad thing, we know it's there, so we can eliminate it from our line. So that's the positive side of that, yeah, yeah and I think I straight from reptiles.
Speaker 3:
So they need a vassing spot, they need a cool zone, they need one in between Just what they need. How?
Speaker 1:
long did I just throw food? Otherwise, that's the way in which chicks do it.
Speaker 2:
Now I'm at the crowding park. How did you know to put a petition in there to kind of keep them in the worm zone and make them a lot closer? Because we didn't talk about crowding.
Speaker 1:
No, we didn't, and crowding is important. It's something that I kind of learned, because I would go out and I would hear chicks chirping their heads off and screaming in the hall, and because they were hungry or couldn't find water or were too cold. So I thought, well, I'm not going to give you an option, I'll just shove y'all down to one in the brooder box.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah. So since we brought that up, I want to just kind of push that issue a little bit more. So for the first three days, besides having the feed on cardboard or brown paper, feed everywhere, water everywhere, so they can't really go more than six or eight inches without running into food or water you want four birds per square foot, or one quarter of a square foot per bird. So you want to kind of pack them in there that first three days to make sure that they found food and water. The sooner they find food and water, the better they're going to be when they're adults. They're very no doubt about it.
Speaker 1:
So yeah, that crop field image that you had up there is something folks ought to burn in their mind and, incidentally, that document has also been uploaded to the file section on the Facebook group. There's a whole document on crop field. But, man, that can tell you so much about whether your chicks are eating the way they should or not. Right?
Speaker 2:
If we can get it. I mean ideally. We want the crop full, empty and refilled within the first 24 hours. So ideally you would want the crop filled twice in that first 24 hour and that's put a green Sharpie on them.
Speaker 3:
It's been full. Then you put a red Sharpie on them.
Speaker 1:
It was empty. That was full and gone. You know what this means, don't you? Since you're weighing your baby chick, you also need to, at least twice a day, scoop out all the poop and weigh that oh.
Speaker 3:
God.
Speaker 2:
I don't see this happening, but it sounded good when you said it. I thought it was good.
Speaker 3:
I like the Sharpie idea better. Yeah, I can see, karen.
Speaker 2:
Karen's a Sharpie fan. She'll be after tattooing her chicks. Good one Crop full yeah.
Speaker 3:
C-F-C-E C-F.
Speaker 2:
Let's not use red, though, because it may attract pecking by the other birds, so let's do something that's non-attractive. Also, in that first seven days I didn't finish my list, but a respiratory system and immune system starts developing. In the first seven days. You get a really big push on immune system from day seven to day 14. And you're probably close to 75% by day 21. But the biggest bump is day seven to day 14. So for immune systems and I can't tell you how important that first 14 days is I'm going to keep saying that until you all get sick of hearing me and I start seeing the viewer numbers going down really quick.
Speaker 1:
It's a good look. Now I'll do that.
Speaker 2:
I won't do that.
Speaker 1:
But I agree with you and I've kind of always felt that. But the more I learn, the more that's just reinforced in my mind. It's kind of like we don't get a second chance to do this. You know, you got one chance to set them up for success and if you blow it there's no getting it back. Make advantage of those first 14 days and just help your baby chicks succeed. That's what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultrykeeperspodcast at gmailcom and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the poultrykeepers podcast. We'll see you next week. Music.