Raising Ducklings - The clean and easy setup to raise ducklings in the brooder

If you're planning on bringing ducks onto your homestead, that means that you're going to have to deal with brooding ducklings. Unless you buy adult ducks, which makes this a pretty bad intro. It's springtime and lots of people this time of year are bringing ducklings onto their homestead. Before you do, make sure you have a really good brooder set up. That's what we're going to talk about today in this video. We're going to talk about how to brood ducklings clean, neat, easy. We're going to make it so much more simple, so much less smelly, in-depth on how to do ducklings in the brooder without it being a total gross mess. If you've ever raised ducklings in a brooder, then you know ducklings make a huge mess. You got your wood chips down, the water, they start swimming in it, they make a big mess, everything gets wet. You're changing out those wood shavings constantly. We have a brooder set up that can make this so much easier. The first thing that makes our brooder set up work really well is the fact that we have multiple brooders for our animals. Our brooder set up is made up of these Rubbermaid tubs. We like to keep four of these tubs, two full at all times. If you have two of them full with maybe turkey poults in one, ducklings in another, chickens in one, ducklings in another, you have two free. And that way on cleaning day, which that's today for me, you have two that are ready to go. You can move all your animals into the two clean ones. And meanwhile, you can clean the dirty one. You can see the brooding tubs here. These are Rubbermaid tubs. You can get them at Walmart. They're $20 for these tubs. A lot of times you see people brood chicks in the tractor supply metal basins or the big Rubbermaid stock tanks. Those look really nice as brooders, but they're really expensive. So instead of spending a lot of money buying four or five stock tanks, get yourself a couple of these plastic Rubbermaids. They work just as well. They're easy to clean and they're 20 bucks a piece. So you can see we planned on using two of them. So we got four, so we would have a few extras. So $60 in Rubbermaids and these things last forever. So at the end of the season, they stack into each other, which is really nice. You can put them up on the loft, up on a shelf, and you won't need to, you know, worry about them taking up a bunch of space. The next thing that you'll notice is we have our lights already hanging above our brooders. We have some hooks that are screwed into the ceiling here. We hang our lights and we hang them from ratchet straps. These little light hooks are screwed in, they got to be really strong because you want to be hanging, you know, your heat lamps, the heat lamps or the feeders are working on ratchet straps. Our preferred light for our brooder setup is this Premier One Prima heat lamp. The reason these are really nice, they have this plastic grate on the front and all this covering the bulb. It keeps the bulb from rusting and breaking out in here. It also is a much more safe light. If this were to fall down for some reason and wind up at the bottom of your brooder, the light bulb, the heat lamp isn't going to come in contact with the wood chips. I have this other one here just to show as a comparison. This is often what you see at like Tractor Supply or Home Depot. That gets rusted, it gets broken, the bulbs get stuck in the metal there and if this were to fall then you have direct contact with your wood chips and that could cause a fire in your barn. So these are not as nice to use as these Premier One Prima lamps and we'll have a link in the description. So you see we've screwed in the white hook, it's nice and strong, I can hang off that thing. I take a ratchet strap and I put a ratchet strap in the bottom and you can do rope, you can hang this with regular rope, but I just like to use the ratchet straps because I like to be able to make micro adjustments. So here I have a hook in the lamp and then I have my hook above in the white hooks here. Every day when you come out if you think the lamp needs to be up a little higher, ratchet it up just like that. As they get older the ducklings will get warmer, they'll have more feathers on them and more down on them and that means each day you can ratchet that up a little bit, get it higher and higher out of the way. These ratchet straps I got mine at Walmart with the same time I was buying the tubs. These are like three dollars a piece, they're the 10 foot ratchet straps. Rope, every time you got to make an adjustment you got to re-tie your rope, your knot and I don't like messing with rope. So when you're all done with this brooding for the spring, you throw all your equipment in the Rubbermaids themselves, put it up on the shelf and it's ready to go for next year. And then I just kind of take the excess, I just loop it just like that. And then I also take the electrical cord and to keep things nice and neat I hang the electrical cord over the hooks so it's all the way out of our way there. Just looks nice, neat, keeps things clean and it works really really good. I want to show you what we put into a duckling brooder to keep it nice and clean. This is what the inside of the brooder looks like. You'll notice we have wood shavings, it's very absorbent. So we get the fine shavings at Tractor Supply. You're probably wondering what in the world am I doing with this? This is a paint painters trough. This is an idea that I got from the survival podcast Jack Spierko, he's got a great channel on YouTube. He's got a great series called the Duck Chronicles and we've been watching a lot of the Duck Chronicles getting ideas for our ducks this year because we brooded ducks in the past and it was messy and disgusting and we didn't want to have messy disgusting brooders. The reason why duck brooders get so gross is because ducklings love to swim, they love to splash in the water, they poop in the water, they swim in the water, they splash in it and then they go running around and drag it all over everywhere. It's nice that they like to swim but we don't want them doing it in the brooder and making a mess out of the brooder. And so to prevent that we use first this trough, this painter's trough and then I get these. You can get these right, I got this fancy little trough that's nice and level from Home Depot. These are sold right next to them. This is I guess for rolling your brush on or something. They fit right in, perfect. I like to make them level so I kind of press them in here you'll see and the nice thing is this is easily bent this stuff so you can get it just right. Okay so that's more or less level. I can get it perfect later but that tray the ducklings are able to walk on and then we take this which is usually used as a feeder. Most people use these as feeders for chicks. We actually use this for the water. Again idea that we got from Jack over at the Survival Podcast. The reason why these work great for ducks and water is because they can stick their whole bill in there and rinse it out. Ducks need to rinse out their nares so a nipple drinker water doesn't work well for ducklings. They need to be able to submerge their whole bill and swish it around and this water allows them to do that but it doesn't allow them to get in it and go swimming and then drag all that into all the wood shavings. So this thing works perfect. Now it doesn't have an incredible volume so as they get bigger you're going to need to either put more of these in with them or change it up as they get bigger and I'll show you an idea that we're going to experiment with today. This system has worked great. This has been our first week and I literally have not had to clean out this brooder. It's been one week. We've only had six ducklings so there's not that many but we haven't had to clean out the brooder yet. We've fluffed it and added some shavings but not a deep cleaning like we're going to do today. So this is the setup. It fits right into our Rubbermaid tub. I put it the long way and then I pull these shavings down the side of it and down the front and that way the ducklings are able to walk right up to it, right on top of it, drink and then walk away and it just keeps so much of the water and the mess and the gunk in there and it's easy to clean which I'll show you in this new one. I'm going to try, I've never done this, but I'm going to try to use Farmer Brad's Mighty Micro Waterer. This one has the drinker cups. When you push down on this you can see the water comes through. So I'm going to try these for the ducklings because I think this will keep it clean and neat and the nice thing about this it has an automatic float valve in there and a hose hook up so I can hook a hose when it gets a little bit warmer. I can hook the hose right up. The float valve shuts the hose off when this is full and the ducklings will have constant fresh water constantly being refilled. So I'm going to experiment with Farmer Brad's Mighty Micro Waterer. You can check out Farmer Brad's channel or go to Farmer Brad's website farmerbrad.com to learn more about those. I haven't actually used it with the ducklings yet but I'm going to try it. So this is our feeder. In the beginning when they're real small we use these mason jars into this little bottom. You can get this at any big box store. We use these when they're real small. As they get bigger they start to make more of a mess on these feeders. We'll switch over to a larger hanging style feeder which you'll see in the upcoming weeks but for now with the little ducklings we just put one of those in the bottom. So we have our feeder. We have our water set up. We're going to put this in place so that heat lamp is warming everything and getting it up to that ambient temperature and then we'll move our ducklings out of that the one that they're in right now. We'll move them into this nice clean new one and then we'll clean the old one. We have the old brooder. The ducks we've moved into the nice new clean one. Now we can take this and work on this one without having to work around the animals which is the way to do it. This is what the waterer setup looks like when it's ready to be emptied. So you can see the bottom of this is actually full of water and it's nasty gunky water. So I can remove this and it's very easy to clean. I just take this out. I mean if you got a garden pour this on the garden. I hose this out and I hose this stuff out. That's why I like having this tub with this removable top. This stuff is just it's easy to clean. It's easy to keep neat. I mentioned I don't like using that heat lamp. The nice thing about this setup I just use that one as a spare when I'm doing a cleaning day and I want to keep them warm and pre-warm my new brooder. Now all I have to do with this setup is slide the new brooder over to the existing good light and I can unplug this bad light. And now everybody's in the nice clean new brooder. The light is on them. They're getting comfy. Nice clean brooder. Easy to clean. I take all those messy wood chips with all the poop and all the duck water and all that stuff and I'll bring that to my compost pile. That'll make really good compost that we can age and turn. So I'll just take it in the Rubbermaid outside. Dump it in the compost spot. Wash the inside of the Rubbermaid out with the hose real quick and bring it back in place. This system is the way to do this. It makes it nice and easy and neat and you could set this up if you had to set it up in your house. You can set it up in your house. You can set it up in the basement. I prefer with the smell of the animals. I prefer to keep it out of the house if possible if the weather allows us. We have this nice insulated barn which we're able to do it in. But you could do this in a basement. You could do it in a mud room. Whatever works best for you. We're pretty much finished taking care of the cleaning. The ducklings are in the nice new clean brooder. I want to show you a few more pieces of equipment that have made this even easier and even better. I have here a little electric thermometer. This is a very old one but I'll put a link below to a newer version. It's just nice to have a little electric readout so when you come you can quickly see what the temperature is so you can keep an idea. Week one they want to be about 90 degrees and then you start lifting that light and making it cooler and cooler. So it's good to have a thermometer. Keep an eye on your temperature. We had a really cold night this week. I had to turn two heat lamps on because it was getting brutal. The last thing that I have added to this setup this year. We've added a nest cam to our brooder. Cool thing right now there are people watching this live streaming on YouTube. Hi guys. Nest has nothing to do with animals. It's not made for animals. It's actually a home security camera. Nest cam into power. It works over wi-fi so it sends your video through wi-fi to the internet where you have a login and an app that you get when you get your nest cam. Our barn is a good ways from the house. Late at night, early in the morning, in the middle of the night we're able to check on the nest cam. You can see right now. There we go. That's the delay. It's a one second delay. I've got to shut that off. That goes annoying. Real time you can see into your barn what's happening on your camera on your nest cam. You can watch your ducklings or your chicks or your turkeys and see are they running around? Do they look healthy? Are they all crowded up in a pile? Do they look too cold? Do they look too hot? I put the thermometer right in front of the nest cam so I can keep an idea on the temperature on those cold nights. I can see through the nest cam if the feeder is getting low or the water is getting low. It's just a really helpful tool if your barn and your animals are far away from your house. You can check on them every 10 minutes with your nest cam when you send your kids out to do the chores. Hey buddy. I forgot to tell you. Make sure to unplug the heat lamp. And then you can talk so it's an intercom system too to your barn. And we are live streaming the nest cam. Is that an M&M? Look at that. Keep you around. We've added the live stream to our YouTube channel. Maybe you've seen our duckling video. Maybe you're watching right now on YouTube. Let's see. Is anybody watching right now that wants a shout out? Mfinit, Chadshow, Ellen Mitchell. So they've been watching the live stream. You can watch the live duckling stream too thanks to the nest cam. So that nest cam has been a huge addition to our brooder setup and we're going to get a couple more of them as we get our new animals this year. We're going to have some feeder pigs at the end of the week. Some more meat chickens are coming. Each nest cam, I believe that nest cam was $200. So they're not cheap but they will pay for themselves. Perfect example. A couple nights ago we had a really cold snap out of nowhere and some of the YouTube viewers watching the live duckling cam messaged me and said, hey the ducklings look cold. I checked the camera and sure enough they were all piled up on each other. I was able to come out. It was 11 o'clock at night. I was able to come out, add another light and make sure everybody was warm enough. If I hadn't seen that, if the YouTube viewers hadn't noticed, you can actually lose animals that way. So being able to keep an eye on your animals saves you money, saves the animals well-being, maybe even their life. So something like that nest cam can really help out. And we have a link below. You'll notice I have two links for that. If you don't want to do the affiliate thing, I just think the nest cam is awesome. I think it's a nice addition. So I have two links below. One of them is an affiliate link. If you want to support what we're doing here at Homesteady, we appreciate it. The other one is not an affiliate link. You can click on it and just buy it. We won't get anything from that. I just think it's a really nice addition for especially a homesteader who's not a full-time farmer. If you're not out 24-7 with your animals, if you're inside working or even if you have a job that you have to go to, but maybe you have a family member close by who could stop in, that nest cam is a little extra peace of mind on your barn and on your animals. So it's been a huge addition to our setup. If you have any questions, be sure to ask in the comments below because we check comments every day. We answer back to as many as we can. If you like this video, please share it with somebody else. We're trying to grow our channel. We're racing to 10,000 subscribers right now and we'd love it if you could help us get there. So share the video. Don't forget to subscribe. Chirp, chirp, chirp. I meant to say chirp, chirp, chirp. Chirp, chirp, chirp. 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