🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm
29 chicks, and 28 of them still going strong.
On Friday 16 October our incubator eggs began hatching, and it was exciting to watch. Of 44 eggs, 29 hatched. When we checked the rest, quite a few showed no development at all, which probably means they weren't fertile. Of the 29 chicks, 28 survived the first week and all of them are doing well.
They're in a brooder in the shed under a heat plate. We're on solar power, and plates are more economical to run than lamps. They're on unmedicated starter feed and they haven't been vaccinated. That's on purpose: we want to be breeding a strong flock, so we're raising them without medication or vaccines and watching them closely. It's a choice with a trade-off, and this week's guide goes through both sides.
🐔 This week's topic
Chick, grower or layer feed: which bag is for who?
The short version. Starter from hatch, grower from around six weeks, and layer feed from about 18 to 20 weeks or the first egg, whichever comes first (Oregon State University Extension). The big difference is calcium. Layer feed carries around 3 to 4 percent for making eggshells, which a growing chick isn't doing, so it's the wrong bag for young birds.
Medicated or not. Some starter is medicated to hold coccidiosis back, a gut parasite that lives in the ground wherever chickens have been. Unmedicated starter is sold too. The sources disagree on the trade-off. Penn State Extension says medicating too early can interfere with a chick building its own immunity. OSU says mortality in chicks on unmedicated feed may rise to unacceptable levels, and leaves the call to you. We're not telling you which to choose. We're telling you what each asks of you.
Where it lives. The parasite lives in the gut, and infected birds, including healthy-looking adults, shed its eggs in their droppings. Chickens catch it by pecking them up from the ground or litter. The eggs aren't infectious straight away. They need about two days of warmth and damp litter (at least 20 percent moisture), then they can last for months in the soil (NCAT). They also travel on boots, equipment, dust and wild birds. A freshly cleaned brooder keeps the numbers down but won't be free of it, since the chicks' own droppings start the cycle, and NCAT says disinfectants aren't effective against coccidia. The aim is a small dose, not none, because moderate exposure is how chicks build immunity.
If you go unmedicated, the job moves to the litter. A New Zealand poultry-supply page puts the coccidiosis danger zone at roughly 3 to 7 weeks, so for chicks hatched on 16 October it is a couple of weeks away. Now is the time to get ready.
🔎 What helps, and what to watch for
Keep the litter dry. Wet litter cakes and the chicks peck at it.
Don't crowd them, and keep feed and water off the floor.
Know the signs: fluffed up and hunched, off their feed, diarrhoea with blood or orange mucus, pale and slow-growing.
Have a plan before you need one. Talk to your vet or rural supplier now about what you'd do, because it comes on fast.
When can chicks go outside? When they're fully feathered, usually around five to six weeks. The heat comes down about 3°C a week from 32 to 35°C in the first week, and nights should be reliably above about 15°C. Move them in stages: a few days in the coop first, then short supervised time in the run. And with bird flu confirmed in a New Zealand wild bird, keep the run covered and feed and water out of reach of wild birds. If you see 3 or more sick or dead wild birds in a group, call MPI on 0800 80 99 66.
📖 The full guide
There was more than fits in an email.
The stages, both sides of the medication question and where it all comes from are in this week's Farm Guide: Chick, grower or layer feed: what your chicks need, and when they can go outside. Free to read, no sign-up.
📲 And where the app fits
Give the chicks their own record from day one.
On a hatch, put the batch in as an incubation batch, and when the chicks come out, press Hatched and enter how many. The app then offers to start a new flock for them ("Chicks / growers", with the count and date filled in), so the chicks have their own record from day one. If you lose one, the flock's loss log keeps the date and the cause. That's how you end up knowing which birds to keep breeding from, instead of guessing.
We found a bug in the hatch button doing exactly this on our own batch. It's fixed. See below.
🛠️ What's new
Recording a hatch works properly.
All of this is live on the website now. The phone apps have most of it already; the newest (garden and orchard jobs) is on Android and reaches iPhone as soon as Apple clears the update.
- Garden and orchard jobs. Sowing, watering, feeding, pruning and the rest, as jobs tied to a crop and a place. They show on the garden card and on each crop's page.
- Spray it, then don't pick it. On an orchard or garden spray job, note the product and the days to wait before picking. Once you mark the job done, the app shows "Don't pick before" on the crop, puts the date on the calendar, and checks with you before you log a harvest inside the wait.
- Stock on hand for products. Record what you bought (packs, size, cost, batch, expiry) and the app works out what's left from the doses you log. It flags low stock and anything expiring within 60 days.
- A shorter products list and breeding for a whole group. Search products and filter by category. For a herd, record bull in, bull out, AI served or preg scan once for the whole group.
- Faster saves on a slow connection. Saves now go up compressed. On a 1 Mbit line we measured a big farm going from about 15 seconds to under 2.
- Recording a hatch works properly. Pressing Hatched now asks how many and only saves when you give it a number. A finished batch with no count shows Record hatch so it can be fixed, and it offers to start a flock for the chicks. We found this one on our own incubator batch on 16 October.
- Notes on animals. A dated note with a category (vet, health, breeding and so on), a title and details. Put one on a single animal, or one note across a whole herd or a few ticked animals. They sit in Records beside treatments.
- Edit a treatment or test result. Fix a mistake without deleting and re-entering it. For a herd treatment, it asks whether to change this animal or all of them.
- Sort the All animals table. Tap any heading to sort, including sex and age. It shows current animals by default, with an option to include sold and died.
- Dose per animal. Add a product's label dose rate and the app checks each dose against the animal's last weight. For a group it uses the heaviest.
🔜 What's next: we're still working through a list from a breeder who's switching over from another app, and the garden is next to get more attention. If there's something you keep working around, tell me. If you get the Bulletin by email, just hit reply.
🗓️ On the block — late October to November
Written from Northland; most of it travels, the dates shift with you.
- Chooks: if you have chicks, check the brooder litter every day, especially around the drinker.
- Sheep: keep checking for flystrike as the grass flush and warmer weather arrive.
- Cattle: ticks are active in spring. Check when they're in the yards for something else.
- Pasture: growth is near its peak. Shut up hay or silage paddocks now if you haven't.
- Water: check troughs and floats before the first hot week.
💡 A practical tip
Get the drinker off the floor.
The wettest spot in any brooder is around the water. Wet litter cakes, and chicks peck at it. Standing the drinker on a brick or a small block (or hanging it) keeps the spillage down, and moving it around the pen every day or two stops one patch turning to mud. Check the litter under and around it every day. It costs nothing and it's the single easiest thing to do for gut health, medicated feed or not.