DIY Outdoor Chicken Brooder

Follow these plans from 1977 to build a DIY outdoor chicken brooder. Start your chicks outside and foraging safely to keep your own pasture-raised chicks.

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by AdobeStock/wideonet

Follow these plans from 1977 to build a DIY outdoor chicken brooder. Start your chicks outside and foraging safely to keep your own pasture-raised chicks.

Right now — while the ground is covered with ice and snow — is the time to hike down to the workshop and whip out one of these simple outdoor chicken brooders. Then, when you’re ready to raise that mini-flock of homestead chicks next spring or summer, you’ll be all set to handle the job in style.

Most homesteaders would never think of crowding their laying hens together in a cramped, windowless enclosure (the way today’s commercial poultry-men do). And yet, a good many small-scale farmers willingly foster just such conditions when it comes to raising chicks.

Not us. After years of experimentation, we’ve developed a system that allows us to rear small groups of late spring or summer peepers (no more than 25 at a time) in natural surroundings, with or without a setty hen. Our secret: We start our chicks outside in portable chicken brooders.

Make Your Own Outdoor Brooder

  • Updated on Oct 29, 2022
  • Originally Published on Jan 1, 1977
Tagged with: Backyard Chickens, raising chicks
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