{"content":[{"text":"Chapter 1. Introduction","bbox":{"left":0.20732,"top":0.075109,"width":0.291881,"height":0.025567999999999994}},{"text":"Raising baby chicks can be a delightful experience if things go \n well, but it can be discouraging and even heartbreaking if things \n go wrong. The purpose of this book is to help you avoid the pit- \n falls and achieve the delightful experience that makes poultrykeep- \n ing attractive in the first place. \n When baby chicks are brooded artificially—that is, when they \n are raised without their mothers—they depend on you for food, \n water, warmth, and protection. How well these are provided in the \n first few weeks of life will determine both their short-term sur- \n vival and their long-term development. \n When my wife Karen brought home our first group of \n twenty-five baby chicks, we had read in a book that chicks could \n be started out in a box heated with a sixty-watt light bulb. \n Nowhere did this book mention that this was adequate only if you \n brooded the chicks in a room heated to 70 °F! Our chicks were in \n a basement that maintained a steady 50-55 °F. The chicks weren’t \n warm enough until we had escalated all the way to a 250-watt heat \n lamp. Fortunately, the chicks did very well in spite of our inexperi- \n ence, giving us some much-needed but largely misplaced confi- \n dence. \n A lot of our chick-rearing experiences were like this. We’d try \n to follow the best instructions available, only to find that these \n instructions were only a general outline, with important details \n missing. The result was that sometimes all our chicks would do \n well and sometimes they wouldn’t. \n At about the time we were becoming resigned to this, we met \n a woman who had retired from the egg business after raising \n 30,000 chicks per year for many years. \n She told us proudly that she would lose about 1% of the new \n chicks during the first week, but that every chick that survived the \n first week would still be alive and healthy when they were moved \n into the laying house when they were five months old.","bbox":{"left":0.103006,"top":0.159971,"width":0.500155,"height":0.564924}},{"text":"1","bbox":{"left":0.348888,"top":0.765242,"width":0.008137000000000005,"height":0.016776000000000013}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}