Feeding Bantam Type Day Old Chicks

Feeding day old chicks adequately in their early stage of life is critical to their development. There are many fine nutritious starters available for chicks, I would encourage you be alert to the ability of your baby chicks to consume it when they are a few days old. I find sometimes chick starter granuals are a bit too coarse and large for the smaller chicks to consume, particularly serama and smaller bantam type chicks. Tiny chicks in some cases, are not able to consume starters that are ground coarser, to allow them to get enough nutrition, in this early stage of life. One solution would be to put the chick starter in a food processor and grind it smaller, I have done this however I find my derived mix is easier to feed and my chicks do well and I don’t have to mess with grinding smaller.

I do strongly suggest you monitor the coarseness of your chick starter to make sure your chicks are consuming it and showing vigor and growth.

Here is what I have come up with, I feed this mix only to get them over the hump in their early life stage, to ensure they are consuming enough food until they are old enough to eat the coarser ground chick starters, about 4 to 6 weeks old.

This mix is not meant to be a permanent feed, it it will nourish them until they are old enough to consume chick starter even if the granuals happen to be a bit large. I have not done any nutritional studies to validate if this complete nutrition or not. This is simply what I am feeding my chicks and as a result I see my tiny chicks growing with vigor. I do not want to discourage anyone from feeding chicks commercial chick starters. They are formulated to be an excellent food choice for baby chicks, its just some times the granuals can be a bit large for smaller chicks to adequately consume to get enough to eat in their early life stage. I also find one batch of starter may have fairly small granuals and the next batch quite a bit larger of the same feed, so be on alert for this as well.

My Mix, I mix equal parts of finch feed, (which is a blend of tiny seeds), baby oatmeal, chick starter and 1/2 part of ground flax. In addition I start feeding chick grit when the chicks are three days old following the package directions.