Did you know they ship day-old chicks through the mail?  They do, and we run down to the post office to pick them up.  Bringing them back to the farm, they’re rushed to the warmed brooder, an enclosed space that is warm and cozy and has warm water and feed for them.  Amazingly, they do incredibly well, better than any of us shipped overnight through the mail!  As they grow and begin to feather out, they’re given more space and don’t need the heat lamps so much. After they fletch out their feathers, they are acclimatized to the outside and eventually moved to a hut surrounded by “feather netting” a light-weight fence, electrified to keep out predators..  By that time, they’re really putting on weight.  They move inside, under the shade of the hut, to outside, depending on weather and their whims, eating the grasses and weeds and all the bugs they can catch.