The brooder: six weeks, four purchases, one temperature schedule

A brooder is a box that stays warm. That is the whole idea. Everything sold for this stage is either the heat, the food, the water, or a way of measuring one of them, and almost every problem a first-time keeper has in these six weeks is a temperature problem wearing a different hat.

The good news is that the schedule is published, specific and not in dispute. Penn State Extension puts it plainly: supply 95 F at chick level under the heat source for the first week, then decrease by 5 F per week until you reach normal daily temperature, which they give as 62 to 65 F. Their space table runs alongside it, and it is worth reading because it is the reason a brooder that was fine in week one is crowded by week four.

The schedule you are actually following

Two things fall out of that table that nobody tells you. The first is that floor space per bird quadruples between week one and week five, so a brooder sized for day-olds is badly overcrowded a month later — that is what the wall-climbing is. The second is that the temperature is measured at chick level under the heat source, not on the brooder wall and not in the room. A thermometer on a shelf is measuring the wrong thing.

You can also read it off the birds, and this is more reliable than any instrument. Penn State puts it in one sentence: cold chicks huddle under the heat source, and chicks that are too warm will be as far from the heat as they can get. Evenly spread, moving around, some under and some out: that is right.

Plate or lamp, and why it is not close

A heat lamp warms the air in a room. A brooder plate warms the chicks under it, the way a hen does, and lets the rest of the brooder be whatever temperature it wants. That is the design difference, and every practical difference follows from it — including a twenty-fold gap in running cost.

The cost is the smaller argument. The larger one is that a 250 W bulb suspended over dry bedding is a fire waiting for a loose clamp, and brooder fires are not rare. A plate has no bulb and runs at a surface temperature a chick can lean against. The full comparison, including the cases where a lamp is genuinely the right answer, is on heat plate versus heat lamp.

Feed and water: two decisions, then nothing

Chick starter is 18 percent protein and low calcium, and every credible brand is within a point of the others on both. The one real decision is medicated or not, and it is not a judgment call — it is a question about your chicks. If the hatchery vaccinated them against coccidiosis, buy unmedicated, because the amprolium in medicated feed can work against the vaccine. If they did not, medicated feed is cheap insurance against the single most common killer of brooding chicks. The medicated-versus-not page has the guaranteed analyses side by side.

Water is simpler and more annoying. Chicks fill a drinker with bedding within minutes of you filling it, twice a day, for six weeks. Raising the drinker off the shavings is the single change that fixes it.