What I Wish I Knew Before Feeding Our Backyard Baby Chicks

Dear Sarah of exactly six months ago,

You're currently sitting in the driver's seat of the Subaru in the Tractor Supply parking lot. Your iced coffee is sweating all over the center console, you're wearing that stained gray college sweatshirt you swore you'd throw away, and there's a cardboard box in the passenger seat that's peeping so loudly you can barely hear your own thoughts. My husband Mike is looking at the box like it might explode. You have just impulsively decided that your family needs a backyard flock to teach four-year-old Leo and seven-year-old Maya about "responsibility" and "nature."

You're an idiot.

I say this with love, but seriously, you've no idea what you're doing. Keeping a human baby alive is exhausting, yes, but at least the hospital sends you home with pamphlets and a general understanding that milk goes in the mouth. Keeping a baby chick alive? It's a minefield of highly specific agricultural hazards that nobody warns you about on Pinterest. You're sitting there Googling frantic variations of how to feed these tiny fluffy dinosaurs, and you're about to make so many mistakes.

So grab your coffee. Here's the messy, unvarnished truth about what those tiny peeping things actually need to consume, and how to stop your children from accidentally committing poultry manslaughter.

The magic egg yolk thing is deeply weird

Okay, so the most mind-blowing thing I learned during our 2 AM panic-Googling sessions is that when you first get them, they might not need to eat at all. Wait, let me explain.

When the post office called me at literally 6:15 in the morning to tell me my box of live animals had arrived—which, by the way, is a surreal phone call to receive before you've had caffeine—I assumed they were starving to death. But apparently, right before they hatch, they suck the rest of their egg yolk up into their little abdomens. It's like a built-in biological lunchbox that keeps them alive for the first 48 to 72 hours of their lives. That's how hatcheries can legally mail them across the country in cardboard boxes.

But the thing is, because they were hatched in a plastic incubator and not under a mother hen, they're born completely clueless. They don't know what food is. They don't know what water is. You literally have to play the role of the mother hen. I spent my entire first afternoon gently grabbing each struggling, terrified baby chick and physically dipping the very tip of its beak into the water dish, and then tapping my fingernail in their food tray so they would copy the pecking motion. Maya thought this was hilarious. I thought I was going to break their tiny fragile necks. It was incredibly stressful.

Water is somehow their biggest enemy

Before we even talk about actual food, we need to talk about the water situation, because oh my god, they actively try to unalive themselves in it.

You would think a shallow dish of water is fine. It's not. They will fall asleep standing up, face-plant into a half-inch of water, and drown. Or they'll just get wet and freeze to death because they can't control their own body temperature yet. Mike had to run back out to the store to buy a bag of glass marbles to fill the water dish so they could only sip the liquid from between the cracks. You can also buy these fancy poultry nipple waterers that look like hamster bottles, which we eventually did, but the marble trick saved us during that first chaotic weekend.

We spent hours sitting on the cold garage floor just staring into the brooder box to make sure nobody was drowning. Maya was shivering, so I ended up wrapping her in our Bamboo Baby Blanket. I originally got this blanket for Leo because the organic bamboo controls temperature so well and the watercolor leaf design is really pretty, but honestly, during "chick watch 2023," it mostly just served as a barrier between my daughter and the dusty, wood-shaving-covered garage floor. It washes out great, anyway.

Please put down the adult chicken food

This is the part that almost caused a massive disaster. I figured chicken feed was just chicken feed, right? Just grab the bag with the pretty rooster on it. No.

If you feed adult "layer" feed to a baby chick, the calcium will literally destroy their kidneys. Like, fatally. Adult hens need massive amounts of calcium—like 3 to 5 percent of their diet—to manufacture eggshells every day. Babies don't. Giving a baby chick layer feed is basically feeding them kidney stones. They need a specific "Chick Starter Crumble" which is ground up super fine for their tiny beaks and has around 18 to 20 percent protein to support the fact that they're growing at a terrifying, explosive rate. They double their weight in the first week. It's unnatural.

Then you get to the feed store and the teenage employee asks if you want medicated or unmedicated starter feed, and you just stare at him blankly while your four-year-old tries to lick a salt lick in the next aisle.

Here's my deeply unscientific understanding of the medicated situation: chickens poop a lot, and they stand in it, and there's this microscopic parasite called coccidiosis that lives in poop and loves warm, wet brooder boxes. It will wipe out your whole flock in a day. The medicated feed has a low-dose preventative drug in it. The feed store guy said we had to use it unless the chicks were already vaccinated at the hatchery, which I didn't know because I bought them out of a trough near the registers. We went with medicated. Better safe than sobbing children.

Washing hands until your skin peels off

Let's talk about Salmonella. Because the Instagram reels of toddlers kissing fluffy yellow chicks are cute, but our pediatrician basically looked me dead in the eye at Leo's annual checkup and told me that backyard poultry is a massive vector for Salmonella in kids.

Birds carry it naturally. It's on their feathers, it's in their poop, it's on the feeder, it's in the pine shavings. Every single time the kids touched a bird, or the box, or even looked at the brooder too closely, I was marching them to the sink and scrubbing their hands with aggressive amounts of soap.

This is honestly why Leo basically lived in his Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit for two solid months. I love this bodysuit. I'm obsessed with it. It’s sleeveless, which meant when I was wrestling a squirmy toddler over the bathroom sink to scrub his forearms with hot water and antibacterial soap, I wasn't constantly soaking his sleeves. It's 95% organic cotton so it didn't irritate his eczema, and it survived being washed on my machine's "sanitize" cycle roughly four hundred times during the chick phase. Plus the envelope shoulders meant if he did manage to get chicken-brooder-dust all over himself, I could pull the whole thing down over his legs instead of dragging it over his face. Absolute lifesaver.

Kids wanting to feed them table scraps

About three days into this experiment, Maya decided the chicks looked bored with their beige crumble and wanted to feed them a salad. She came into the garage holding a fistful of ripped-up romaine lettuce and half a strawberry.

I had to frantically Google "can chickens eat strawberries" while physically blocking her from the brooder box. It turns out, most of the chicken-obsessed people on the internet—and apparently avian experts—say you shouldn't give them ANY treats or scraps for the first two to four weeks. Their digestive systems are just too immature. When they're finally old enough, you can give them mashed hard-boiled egg (which feels like cannibalism but they go crazy for it), strawberries, and oatmeal, but it can only be like 10 percent of their diet.

Also, there's a whole list of toxic stuff. Never feed them raw beans, chocolate, onions, avocado skins, or the leaves from your potato plants. Obviously.

But here's the kicker: chickens don't have teeth. If they eat literally anything other than their commercial starter crumble, which dissolves with saliva, they can't digest it. They have this organ called a gizzard, which I guess acts like teeth? But to make it work, they need to eat rocks. Seriously. You have to buy a bag of "chick grit"—which is basically just coarse sand—and sprinkle it in their food so the little rocks can grind up the strawberry chunks in their stomachs. Nature is wild. Note: make sure it's chick grit, not oyster shell grit, which is back to the whole adult-calcium-kidney-failure thing.

(Speaking of putting things in mouths, if you need a distraction for your actual human baby while you're managing farm animals, check out Kianao's organic sensory toys and teethers instead of letting them chew on the feed scoop.)

The teether incident

Because I can never just do one thing at a time, I was usually trying to monitor Leo's teething misery while also monitoring the brooder temperature. He had this Squirrel Teether from Kianao. It's fine. It's honestly just okay. The mint green acorn design is cute and the silicone is nice and soft, but he was standing on his tiptoes looking into the brooder box one afternoon and dropped the entire squirrel directly into the chicken water dish.

The water dish that was filled with pine shavings and definitely poop.

I shrieked. He cried. The chicks scattered. I had to take the teether inside and boil the absolute hell out of it. The silicone held up fine to the boiling water, which I appreciate, but honestly Leo prefers the teethers that vibrate anyway. Mostly it just reminded me that mixing farm animals and teething toddlers is an exercise in extreme maternal anxiety.

The teenage chicken phase

Eventually, they start getting ugly. They lose their fluff, grow these patchy dinosaur feathers, and enter their awkward teenage phase. Around 8 weeks old, you've to switch them to "Grower Feed," which drops the protein down to like 15 percent so they don't grow too heavy for their bones to support them. Then around 18 weeks, when someone finally lays an egg, you switch to the Layer Feed we talked about earlier. Moving on.

Anyway, past-Sarah, take a deep breath. Buy the starter crumble. Put the marbles in the water. Wash everyone's hands until they're raw. It's going to be chaotic, the garage is going to smell terrible, and Mike is going to complain about the dust for months. But when Maya collects that first egg in her little hands, it almost makes the paralyzing fear of coccidiosis worth it.

Almost.

If you're outfitting your own little flock of human babies for outdoor adventures (or just trying to keep them clean in the garage), explore our full collection of sustainable, heavily-washable baby essentials before diving into the farm life.

Wait, I still have questions about feeding them

Do baby chicks need water immediately when you bring them home?
Yes, oh my god, yes. Even though they can survive on that weird absorbed yolk sac for a day or two for food, shipping dehydrates them completely. The very first thing you do when you open that box is gently dip each of their tiny beaks into the water dish so they learn where it's. Do it before you even offer food.

Can I just feed my baby chick normal bird seed from the garage?
Absolutely not. Wild bird seed doesn't have nearly enough protein (they need 18-20%), and it's too whole and tough for their delicate little non-existent teeth to process. They need commercial chick starter crumble, or they'll literally fail to thrive and die. It's not worth the risk.

What if my baby chick is eating the pine shavings in the brooder?
This freaked me out so much. Sometimes they're just so dumb they peck at their bedding instead of their food. If they eat too much wood, their crops (this weird pouch in their throat) get impacted. For the first few days, I actually put paper towels down over the pine shavings and sprinkled their food directly on the paper towel so they could clearly see what was food and what was floor.

How much do they actually eat every day?
It doesn't look like much at first—maybe an ounce or two a day per bird—but they waste SO MUCH OF IT. They kick it, they scratch it, they poop in it. You don't really measure it out into meals like a dog; you just leave the feeder full 24/7. They self-control. Just prepare to sweep a lot of wasted crumble off your garage floor.

When can my kids finally give them kitchen scraps?
Hold off for at least 2 to 4 weeks, no matter how much your kids beg to feed them lettuce. Their digestive tracts are super sensitive. When you do start offering treats, you absolutely must provide chick grit (coarse sand) at the same time, or they won't be able to digest the scraps. And keep it to tiny amounts, like a tablespoon per bird!