Success With Baby Chicks: A Complete Guide to Hatchery Selection, Mail-Order Chicks, Day-Old Chick Care, Brooding, Brooder Plans, Feeding, and Housing

by Robert Plamondon

Baby chicks—can anything be more adorable? So cute, so soft, so helpless! Give your baby chicks a great start by reading the only book devoted to them, Success With Baby Chicks. Robert Plamondon had to read over a hundred poultry books to discover the sure-fire techniques in Success With Baby Chicks, and he tested them on his farm to find the ones that will work best for you. These techniques were used on millions of family farms in the golden age before factory farming, and were then forgotten—until now! Learn how to choose a good hatchery and a good breed, what kind of heat source to use, how to prepare the brooder area for your baby chicks, what to feed them, and how to avoid common mistakes. All of this is explained so clearly and completely in one slim volume that it has received praise from children, hobbyists, farmers, and poultry scientists alike. Whether you brood five chicks or five thousand, this is the book for you, because its practical methods work with flocks of any size. And it will save you money. Learn how to build an insulated brooder in two hours for $20, keeping your chicks warmer and more comfortable than with overhead heat lamps, and saving two-thirds of the electricity into the bargain! Robert Plamondon is a writer/farmer/engineer who has been awarded 17 U.S. patents and raises free-range chickens on his farm in Oregon.

155 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2003

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Success With Baby Chicks was at the top of my chicken reading list for 2011, but I was a bit disappointed by the contents. Robert Plamondon compiled a lot of information from old poultry-keeping documents and mixed in a bit of his own experience, which sounds like a recipe for success, but I found the book dry and lacking in the information I was really looking for. To be fair, most people nowadays do order chicks from hatcheries, so the absence of tips on incubation and hatching is understandable, but that was the part I wanted to know about most.

I would recommend Success With Baby Chicks to beginners planning to raise lots of chicks (perhaps to sell broilers or eggs) but probably not to the mainstream chicken-keeping public. That said, Robert Palmondon's website (and his email list) are fonts of fascinating information and you should definitely check them out.

[Kitten Kisser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very helpful book for doing exactly what it says, raising mail order chicks. It's loaded with information. We found ourselves referring to it through our mail order chick process. It has been a valuable tool in raising our mail order chicks. It's a small soft cover book. But don't be fooled by the size! It covers everything you need to know! At least it does from what I can tell. We are not chicken experts but this has been our first BIG mail order of chicks & this really helped us understand what is happening when you have so many chicks. It's a big change over having just a few chicks! The rules change big time & this teaches you those new rules!

[Zoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good information, but mostly geared towards people who are going to be doing a very high volume of brooding. Still, definitely worth the time and money to read.