The best approach to brooding of Chicken
When it comes to brooding, many things comes to mind. Do we know what brooding is?
Brooding is the raising of chicken from day old till the time they grow feathers and are able to produce heat by the feathers, till the time they don’t need external heat to keep them warm.
When it comes to brooding, we have brooding materials. Which are
Wood shavings : This is somehow curve, not dusty, sometimes it comprises of small small light woods. They are good for flooring of the brooding house. The shavings are not too small and there fore would not enter the nose of the small chicken, chicks .
If anything should block the nose of the chicks, it would lead to another problem.
Newspaper / carton : These are also used for flooring the brooding house, it is based on preference whether you would use wood shavings or newspaper.
Some people don’t like the stress of removing the shavings every week or 3 days interval, the stress of sweeping the wood shaving, looking for wood shavings, spreading wood shavings etc. So they prefer newspaper.
When using newspaper, you just remove the paper and place a new one.
We have heating materials used for brooding after the flooring materials mentioned above.
We have gas heater : Gas heater are most preferred by most people, you can use a cylinder for the whole brooding, depending on the capacity of the building and the number of chicken you are brooding. It comes with little stress. I can’t say if it is economical or not but I can tell you that you would not stress yourself at all.
Charcoal : Some people used charcoal as a brooding materials. They used it to generate heat for the chickens. But it’s more stressful when trying to light the charcoal, before all the charcoal will cash fire and turning red, a lot of effort must be put in place.
Even though it is considered the cheapest of all heating materials .
Lantern: This is the oldest ways of brooding chicks and it’s quiet expensive in terms of kerosene. Kerosene is expensive to buy and it dried up. You may need more than one lanterns to brood and it all depends on the capacity of the brooding house.
Electrical: This is when you use electricity as the major source of heat in the brooding house by using bulb that emits heats, high watts bulb like 200watts and above and placing them on strategic places.
We don’t have light in Nigeria, so we don’t consider it useful
The above mentioned are heat material in brooding of chicken, but which one to use will depends on the scale of production and preference.
Larger scale people would prefer using gas to eliminate stress of production while using newspaper of carton or any materials on the brooding floor except wood shavings.
It all depend on you.
Please don’t forget environmental factors on brooding of chicken
In Raining season, you need to provide extra heat because the environment is not that hot, the humidity would be high, there would be more moisture in the air and it would be extra cost to brood.
But in dry season, the environment is hot, you might need to switch off the heat during the day because of the heat, this would help to reduce cost.
If you notice that chicken are less expensive during raining season because most people tend to brood during dry season.
During raining season chicken tends to die more compare to dry season.
Please choose wisely.
