Larger scale chick brooders

Looking for ideas for chick brooders that can hold 600+ chicks. I have an unused barn at the moment that I am looking to convert into brooding space and already have some ideas in mind. But want to see if anyone here has a set up that could spark some new ideas.

If you look up "Polyface farms chicken brooder" you find many videos of folks who have used that design.

Some of the features may be helpful as he does things at a pretty large scale.

Andrew Vlcek wrote:Looking for ideas for chick brooders that can hold 600+ chicks.

Things to consider:
1. All the same age, or at different stages of development?
2. All the same type, or different breeds?
3. Meat birds or layers?

We have a small brooder that can handle 135 meat chicks. They start off at 96-98 degrees F, but by day 5 we're starting to reduce that temperature. Joel Salatin has a chart in one of his books regarding how to regularly reduce the temp such that the birds get used to colder temps without it being a big shock.

One problem is that they're growing rapidly, generating huge amounts of high nitrogen manure, and air quality can drop quickly if you don't find a good way to manage that. Subdividing your space so you 'shift' the chicks to a new, clean area, and then clean the old area is one approach.

Our goal is to have them out of the brooder and onto grass between 2 and 2 1/2 weeks of age. As a back-up, we have a run attached to the coop and we can let them outside for a few hours in the heat of the day if the issue with moving them to the field is bad weather. An alternate sort of back-up, is that they don't grow evenly - we siphon off the largest chicks and move them outdoors, leaving room for the smaller ones to grow for an extra 1/2 to full week.

Much depends on your goals where meat chickens are concerned. If you simply want them to grow fast and then harvest, I'm sure there's lots of info out there on feed conversion and how to get that to happen quickly.

If your goal is quality meat, getting the birds on pasture (I've seen *very* young chicks try to catch bugs, and older ones are very happy to see fresh grass for nibbling on), and giving them a reason to get exercise, will result in better texture to the meat and less tendency to drop dead for almost no reason. We do that by giving them a 12 ft long shelter with at least as long a portable run and put the feed at one end and the water at the other during the day. (everyone gets locked in the shelter at night, as we're not the only ones who think chicken is yummy!)

If your plan it to raise point of lay egg birds, they grow much more slowly. Hubby runs a small scale egg business and we have 2 farmers who raise quality POL layer chickens, so there is a market for that in some places. The one couple is semi-retired and only raise one lot per year available mid-July. The other fellow is similar, but is still able to raise 4-6 groups per year staggered out.

Jay Angler wrote:

Andrew Vlcek wrote:Looking for ideas for chick brooders that can hold 600+ chicks.

Things to consider:
1. All the same age, or at different stages of development?
2. All the same type, or different breeds?
3. Meat birds or layers?

2 different sets at once of meat birds. Each batch will be 600 chicks and a new batch of 600 comes every other week and we do 15 batches through the season. We do raise them on pasture, so they would be moving out as new groups come in and spend the rest of their time on pasture. Sometimes there is some overlap so we have different brooders set up that can support 2 groups in the brooders at once. Our current set up only handles 2 groups in the brooder at once and up to 300 per group.

I like the run idea. That is something I can make work too with how the unused barn is.

FYI - Hubby built a platform with home-made underfloor heating in it. This doesn't cover the whole floor area of our current brooder room, but guarantees the day-olds have warm bedding to move into. It has a temperature controller so we can adjust it based on both the outdoors temp and the age of the chicks. It has the advantage of keeping that area dryer, so it's also where we put the waterers.

Underfloor heating also has the advantage that 'night' is 'dark' which since we want the birds to grow more slowly for a better textured meat and better health for the chicks. You may feel that's not an asset if your goal is big birds fast.