For anyone who wants to increase their flock of chickens, raising chicks is a rewarding way to do it – but if you want to have a go, you’ll need a good-quality brooder.
Buying a ready-made brooder can be expensive, but you can save a lot of cash by making one yourself – and for anyone who wants to try, here are 21 chicken brooder plans we found online that will show you how to do it.
1. Build a 200-Chick Brooder in 2 Hours for $20 – Robert Plamondon’s Rural Life
To get things started, here’s a plan for a simple brooder that you can build in under two hours – and that won’t cost you more than $20. As this blogger writes, many types of brooders have their associated problems, but his version fixes them all – so why not check it out and see if you think it might work for you?
2. The Best Baby Chick Brooder Box Design – Tanner Farmstead
In this video, this YouTuber gives us a tour of his chick brooder, explaining all the design features that make it such an effective way to raise chicks. The video is full of useful tips too – The video is full of useful tips too, so most people will be able to learn a thing or two from this video, even if they’ve raised chicks before.
3. Easy Plans for A DIY Chick Brooder – Hobby Farms
Here’s a post that talks in depth about all the things you’ll need from your brooder, helping you build one that will allow you to raise your chicks in as much comfort as possible. It then also gives you an easy plan to follow that just about anyone will be able to copy – complete with a list of the tools and materials required to build it – allowing you to construct a reliable brooder ready for your next arrival of chicks.
4. New Farmhand Builds a Joel Salatin Style Chicken Brooder!
The brooder we get to see being built in this video is a large and ambitious model. It might be a bit bigger than most people will want for raising chicks at home, but it’s a highly professional job, so the video should give you some idea of the kind of features you will want to incorporate into the brooder you make for your chicks, even if you don’t want to copy this design exactly.
5. How to Make a DIY Brooder Box for New and Growing Chicks
Not only does this post tell you how to make a brooder, but it goes into detail about what brooders are and why chicks need one too. It also gives you some useful tips about how to prepare and use your brooder, so after reading the post, you’ll be ready to receive your first chicks from the hatchery or even incubate your own. An excellent resource and recommended for anyone getting ready to raise their first batch of hatchlings.
6. Upgraded Chicken Brooder Build – Beast’s Backyard Creations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncUgVPx-j6Y
Since this chicken keeper needed to increase his capacity, he had to make a new brooder that was big enough for up to 20 chicks – and this video documents how he did it. As you can see, the chicks now have plenty of space, and the brooder will still be big enough, even as they start to grow. This is a solid plan for a high-quality brooder and one we’re sure lots of people will find useful.
7. Brooder Box Plans: Build Your Own Brooder Cabinet
The brooder cabinet this post teaches us how to make is a little different from most of the other plans we’ve seen, but we love the way it looks, and we certainly won’t be alone. It’s an impressive design considering this DIYer created it herself seemingly with little previous experience of keeping chickens. It’s ideal for allowing kids to help with looking after the chickens too, which was one of the important aspects she considered when planning it.
8. DIY Chicken Brooder for up to 72 chicks! – Watts Way Farms
For anyone who needs a large amount of capacity for raising chicks, this video should be of interest – because in it, this YouTuber shows us how he made a brooder that’s big enough for about 72 little birds. In the video, he follows a plan for a brooder that he purchased, and as he says, it took a little longer than he anticipated to build. The video is quite long too, but it’s interesting to see how the brooder takes shape – and it might also inspire other people to try something similar.
9. No-Mess Chick Brooder Hack – Bock Bock Bouquet
This video isn’t a plan for building a brooder – but it will be useful for anyone who’s building a brooder since it teaches you a hack for keeping your brooder clean with minimal effort. It’s actually a very simple idea, but doing this will mean you don’t have to spend time cleaning wood shaving out of your chicks’ feeder all the time. Sound intriguing? Then give the video a watch to see how it’s done.
10. How to Create the Best Chicken Brooder for Your Flock – Know Your Chickens
Here’s another post that has all kinds of useful information about what brooders are and why we need them. It will help you decide how big the brooder you need should be, and it also discusses things like where to place a brooder and how to stop a mother hen from brooding. It then goes on to describe how to make a DIY brooder, so in short, it has everything you need to get started rearing your own chicks at home.
11. Growing our Chicken Farm with this DIY Brooder – Sow the Land
The brooder this YouTuber makes in his video is mostly constructed from salvaged scrap wood, so it hardly cost him anything. He thinks he spent only around $70 on a few supplies like plywood that he needed to finish it, so the final price was a lot lower than if he’d bought one ready-made. It’s a solid design too, and it looks like it’s ideal for raising chicks in safety and comfort, so we’re sure lots of people will be interested in trying to replicate his ideas.
12. DIY Plans for a Chicken Brooder – Pets on Mom.com
Essentially, a chicken brooder needs to provide two things for the chicks – food and heat. Although the chickens we keep are species that have long been domesticated, in the “wild”, the mother hen would provide these things. However, when we raise chicks ourselves, we need to take over their role – and this post has the details of how to build a brooder that ensures the chicks have everything they need.
13. DIY Chick Brooder Design – Bock Bock Bouquet
As this YouTuber says in his intro, as your chicks begin to grow, you will probably want to move them out of your house – in which case you’ll need an outdoor brooder. That’s exactly what he then goes on to show us how to make, and this classic design looks like it will do the job perfectly. This is the same person who uploaded the video in #9, and his videos are always excellent – so give this one a watch if you want to know how to build your own outside brooder.
14. Build a Brooder for Your Chicks: 5 Steps – Instructables
Here’s a plan from the Instructables website, and like almost every plan found on that site, this one is of high quality. As ever, it includes clear instructions, a list of tools and materials and plenty of photos to help you see what you should be doing – all of which makes it the kind of thing that even a novice DIYer should be able to copy without too much trouble.
15. Brooding 800 Baby Chicks with Zero Heat – DIY Agric
Here’s another YouTuber whose videos we enjoy – and in this one, he teaches us his method for building brooders with the capacity to hold up to 800 chicks and that don’t need any kind of heat source. Of course, most people won’t need anything like that capacity, but it’s interesting to see how he does it. The fact that the brooder doesn’t need heating can also help save lots of money, which is another reason this video is worth a watch.
16. Building a Multi-Level Chicken Brooder (On the Cheap!) – Old Redding Farm
This is a design that should be of interest to a lot of people – it’s a multi-level brooder that’s mostly built of scrap wood, reducing the amount you’ll have to spend on materials to a minimum. This brooder was the result of this chicken keeper’s need to upscale his operation from the capacity to raise just a few chicks to being able to look after a whole lot more. It looks impressive – and if you need to scale up your capacity too, this is a plan that should help.
17. Chicken Brooder DIY Build for up to 50 chicks – South Family Farm
Like the post in #16 above, this video is also about upscaling capacity – this time from 15 to 50 chicks. We like the design, and the video shows clearly how to make it for anyone who wants to have a go at copying this idea. We did find the sinister bit with the cat at the beginning a bit weird though. Give it a watch and see what you make of it!
18. Learn About Setting Up a Home Chick Brooder – Lulu & Sweet Pea
Just like all the best posts about building a brooder, this one doesn’t just give you the plan but also gives you the important background you need to know about raising chicks and making your brooder work. It has info about heat sources, ventilation, brood guards and more. In fact, the only thing it doesn’t have is a step-by-step guide to actually building a brooder, but with the information it gives you, many people will be able to work that part out on their own.
19. Building a Home for 30 Baby Chicks – SSLFamilyDad
Many people are happy to let baby chicks stay in the house while they are still small – after all, what’s cuter than tiny squeaking yellow chicks? However, there comes a time when they need to be put outside, and when that time arrives, a plan for a 30-chick brooder like this one is likely to be of much interest. It’s quite a classic design, but this type of setup is tried and tested – there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, and we’re sure plenty of people will find this model perfect for their requirements.
20. Outdoor Brooder Box with Run – Chicken Caravan
Here’s an ingenious idea. These chickens are four weeks old and ready to go outside into a chicken run – but instead of doing that, this YouTuber decided to adapt his brooder to make it even more versatile and use it to put young chickens outside to pasture. This is an ideal solution for chickens that are bigger than chicks but still not yet fully grown – we like this guy’s ideas, and we’re sure we won’t be the only ones!
21. How To Build a Trouble-Free Chicken Brooder – drywallinfo.com
To finish, here’s an interesting way to make a chicken brooder using a child’s plastic swimming pool. With a few modifications, the pool can be adapted to give the young chicks the perfect environment they need to thrive – and if you want to see how it works, simply head over to the blog and take a look.
No shortage of great plans to follow
As we’ve seen, if you want to try building your own brooder, there’s no shortage of high-quality plans online that show you how to do it.
We’ve enjoyed collecting these plans for you, so we hope you’ve enjoyed reading and watching them all too. And above all, we hope we’ve helped you find the inspiration you needed to build a chicken brooder of your own.
