“How do I learn what I need to know?” This is one of the most common questions people ask when jumping into a farm or garden enterprise. The heritage understanding that permeated deep into the culture a century ago is largely lost. That means newbies are starting from scratch and have no rudimentary understanding about basic farming procedures.

The regular learning recipe is fairly straightforward: books, instructional videos (including YouTube), workshops, mentoring, and experience. Although I’ve written a bunch of books and now do instructional videos (Farm Like a Lunatic), I’m going to concentrate on the experience component of this educational recipe.

My mentor, Allan Nation, said experience was the best and fastest way to learn. I agree, with one caveat: the experience scale must be in sync with your knowledge. In other words, if you know little, do little. One of the most common mistakes newbies make is starting too big. Building castles in the sky is much easier than building them on the ground.

Just for fun, let me dig into a question I received today from a first-time chicken grower. Probably his big mistake was starting his first batch in November instead of late spring or early summer when the ambient temperature is better. He lost half of the chicks in a week and asked why. Of course, I’m supposed to give an answer with nothing more than that. At any rate, I responded with a list of possible issues.

Too cold. Chicks need to be around 93 degrees Fahrenheit for the first couple of days. They are highly subject to pneumonia and almost any respiratory issue. In the brooder, you’re trying to recreate the hen’s body temperature and care; that doesn’t give you a lot of latitude. The way you know they’re just right is if the group huddles under the heat with a donut in the center. In other words, right where the heat is the most intense, you don’t want any chicks lounging. They will find their perfect warmth somewhere around the heat circle, but if they clump up right under where the heat is most intense, it means they’re too cold.

Too hot. If the birds congregate around the edges of the brooder, away from the heat source, they’re too hot. Excessive heat is generally not as devastating as excessive cold, but it still creates discomfort and makes the birds lethargic. Nobody wants to run around when they’re overheated.

Too much temperature fluctuation. Chicks can handle a few minutes of cold—allowing them time to run out and get something to eat or drink—but they can’t be away from heat for long. The main problem is overall temperature fluctuation due to not having a well-regulated heat source. Typically this happens between cool nights and hot afternoons. If you set the heat for night, the birds roast in the afternoon if the sun is bright. By the same token, if you check them during the afternoon and realize the birds are too hot, you can’t wait to adjust the heat back to night strength two hours after dark. This is why good hovers have thermostats to cut the heat on and off according to ambient temperature.

Draft. Chicks need fresh air, but they can’t handle a draft. Fresh air needs to come in above them, not at their level. Chicks don’t like crosswinds. Once they get a few days old, you can open things up a bit more, but initially, the air needs to be still.

Wet. Nothing creates health issues in chicks as fast as getting wet. Moisture sucks out their body heat. With all that fluff, if they get wet, they get hypothermia in a minute. To warm them up, you can put them in an oven, literally. That’s what it takes to overcome getting wet. They can get wet from drips in the ceiling, falling into a watering pan, or being too thirsty and hogging in too much water too fast.

Filth. The most common culprit here is capped bedding, or no bedding. Chick batteries with mesh floors have certainly been used for a long time, but a mesh floor doesn’t let a chick do anything it naturally wants to do. The chick can’t scratch, fluff, or get antibodies generated from microbes in a deep, hygienic bedding. Newspapers are slick, and they cause slipped tendons. They also don’t absorb the manure; carbon bedding needs to be fluffy. Other bedding material that doesn’t work: wood chips are too big to scratch around; straw mats together and caps over quickly; sawdust is too powdery and packs quickly. The ideal bedding is wood shavings—curly and bouncy.

Incorrect nutrition. I don’t have enough time to go into all the nuances here, but this is especially an issue with either homemade feed rations or minimalistic industrial rations. The birds need grit on day one to get their gizzards off to a good start. The fast-growing meat hybrids are not nearly as forgiving as the old standard-bred dual-purpose birds.

Dirty water. The industry developed nipple drinkers for a reason—they’re clean. We use them exclusively in our brooder, and they are a game changer versus the gallon jug with red trough. If you haven’t graduated to nipples yet, at least elevate those little drinkers so the birds need to stretch just a bit to get a drink. Put a wooden block or two underneath to protect the drinking tray from birds walking or pooping in it. If you wouldn’t drink it, your chicks probably shouldn’t either.

Inadequate feed or water. This has to do with linear space. You don’t need enough space for every bird to get feed and water at the same time, but you definitely need enough space for a quarter of them to access at once. They’ll rotate around at that linear access, but only if the feeders and waterers never go empty. The moment they go empty, the quarter access rule no longer holds because the ones that didn’t get feed and water at the beginning can’t get any later. Empty feeders and especially empty waterers are a big no-no.

Weakness. Sometimes you just get a bad batch from the hatchery. It might have been a weak group of breeder birds. It might have been mishandling by the postal service. One year we lost an entire batch of 1,200 chicks because they were put on a postal truck on a hot day. The driver closed the tailgate, then took his lunch break. On a hot July day. Cooked them. Stressed birds seldom really come out of it; mortality is high and performance low. Good chicks have a certain feel: they’re plump, heavy, and robust. And sometimes, it takes a couple of years before you learn how to tell a weak batch.

Which brings me to the point of all this—nothing beats experience. It’s kind of like riding a bicycle. You can read all the books about riding a bicycle, watch YouTube videos, watch siblings and cousins ride bikes, and even stare at a bike for an hour, but you don’t really know what it’s like until you get on yourself and try to ride.

That’s why I’m such a big proponent of starting something today. It can be extremely small; don’t jeopardize your bank account, marriage, or sanity by starting big. But nothing beats getting some experience under your belt. A couple of failures indicate movement, and movement is the imperative of our day. Until you’ve killed a hundred chicks, you’ll never be a master chick grower.

All vocations are like this, but farming seems to have a bigger element because it deals with things that live and die. Nobody wants to go out and see a bunch of dead chicks. Or dead tomato plants. Fortunately, we can try again. That’s better than raising kids—you only get one crack at it. That first baby teaches us quite a bit about babyhood. And if we mess up, we can’t order a replacement.

“You can read all the books about riding a bicycle, watch YouTube videos, watch siblings and cousins ride bikes, and even stare at a bike for an hour, but you don’t really know what it’s like until you get on yourself and try to ride.”

Be grateful that on our farms, we can get replacements. We can mess up on round one but fix things on round two. The most important thing is to start. How do you learn about farming? You simply start farming. Do something where you are with what you have. Don’t have any acreage? Fine. Borrow some. Or grow worms under your sink. Sprout mung beans on your windowsill. Do what you can where you are with what you’ve got. Nobody can take experience away from you.

While I’ve concentrated on farming in this column, I’m going to go back more than 50 years to two incidents that focused me through failure. I tried out for the baseball team in seventh grade and didn’t make it. Then I tried out for the eighth-grade basketball team and didn’t make it. My mother was a high school health and physical education teacher—great athlete. My older brother was a gifted athlete. After my second athletic failure, I focused all my attention and subsequent education on my gift: communication. Drama, debate, public speaking, writing. The experience in failure created success in experience… in other pursuits in which I was more naturally gifted. Experience is the best teacher.

What is your gift? What is your passion? Hone it. Put attention on it. Just like any skill, farming requires a heart yearning to do coupled with feet actively pursuing. That combination yields the most direct, efficient education.  //

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What would you like Joel to write about? Joel is always looking for reader suggestions on which topics to cover. Please email all suggestions to: re******@*********es.com.

Joel Salatin co-owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Four generations of his family currently live and work on the farm, and his farm services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets, and a farmers’ market with salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. When he’s not on the road speaking, he’s at home on the farm, keeping the callouses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local, regenerative food and farming systems. Salatin has published 15 books, and he is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. He passionately defends small farms, local food systems, and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm.

Photos by Millpond Photography