Oxygen

Though oxygen is crucial to a bird’s survival, a young chick actually requires very little to thrive. For instance, the oxygen requirements for a day-old bird is approximately 0.00016 ft3/min. Since air is only 20% oxygen a chick needs to breath in 0.00083 ft3/min of fresh air to get its 0.00016 ft3/min of oxygen. This of course is a very small number and may be difficult to relate to. But, when we look at a typical house it becomes easier to understand how very little fresh air this really is.... For instance, let’s say we had a 40' X 500' house with 25,000 birds. We simply multiply 0.00083 ft3/min per bird X 25,000 birds and we discover that we only need to supply 21 cubic feet of fresh air each minute. Twenty-one ft3/min of fresh air per minute is not a lot of air. A couple of 36" fans would only have to operate 0.3 seconds out of five minutes to supply 21 ft3/min of fresh air!