Hatching eggs and pinching pennies

We use the black plastic garden trays to transport chicks when they hatch. Here's cuckoo marans and barred rocks that hatched today, ready to go to the brooder tub. I've been setting eggs in groups of 20-30, and usually get the newly hatched chicks out morning and evening. When they first come out of the egg they're damp, and the hatcher dries them out and keeps them warm so they're comfortable when they go into the brooder.

The chickens are mostly an incubator test, to make sure that everything is set right. My primary goal with my incubators this year is Turkeys. After spending so much on poults last year, I decided that I'd carry over a breeding flock of each breed of turkey that I liked. So I kept my eye on craigslist, but didn't see any more incubators come up, so eventually had to buy a new one.

I chose to start hatching and raising turkey poults because they're so darned expensive to buy. Narragansett poults are $9.80 each, including shipping. It's pretty easy to spend $2,000 on poults in a year, particularly if you'd like to have a decent quantity to sell. The trouble with poults however is that the mortality is terrible. My first two years, I averaged 50% mortality from delivered poult to sold bird. i lost them at every stage; right out of the box, a week or two in, three months old, and so on. The darned cows stepped on turkeys feet all last year until I started kicking the turkeys out of the cow pasture for their own safety.

So right now I've got three incubators full of turkey eggs and I'm hoping for a good hatch. I've hatched turkeys before, so I have reason to be hopeful. The economics seem to be good; for the price of a ton of feed I'll get 800 turkey poults, some of which I'll sell, some I'll raise.

The goal here is to cut the costs of producing heritage turkeys down so that I can offer them at a lower price this year. I enjoy growing hard-to-get foods, but it sucks to have most people be unable to afford them. So by keeping my eye on the bottom line if I can produce it for a little less, I can sell it for a little less, and widen the market a little.

I watch the hatcheries to see how much backlog they've got. The hatcheries with better websites are sold out for at least a month in advance for most varieties of chickens.

Turkey hatch milestone

Set the first whole tray of turkeys to hatch today. I usually get a 90% hatch rate, which means I'll probably get 30 turkeys poults out of this batch.

If you click on the picture for a bigger version, you'll see a date that's on each egg. This date is the date that the egg should be moved from the rotation area of the incubator into the hatching portion. Rotating the eggs a little each hour makes sure that the chick or poult doesn't stick to the inside of the egg. Removing the egg from rotation means that the chick can orient itself and peck a hole in the top of the egg.

The settings we use are 100.5 degrees F, 68% humidity for all eggs - chicken and turkey and bantam. Chickens get 18 days of rotation and hatch on day 21. Turkeys get 20 days of rotation and hatch on day 23.

To make life easier I set hatches in batches the size of a tray. So I'll collect eggs until I've got 36, and then set a whole tray at once. Fertile eggs will actually keep pretty well at room temperatures; I've held them as long as 10 days and still gotten good hatches. But optimally you're setting them the same day you're collecting them, but I just don't have that many right now.

After the majority of the eggs have hatched we look at the ones that didn't -- sometimes the chick is stuck to the egg and a little careful work with some warm water to soak off the shell will save the chick. Other chicks just get close, but don't actually hatch.

If your humidity isn't high enough you'll dry the eggs out and the chicks cannot escape the egg. So watch for a hatch where you get a little beak hole but the chick doesn't get any farther. That's a sign of low humidity.

This is the full hatch I set today. One batch of chicken eggs, one of turkey, and one mixed tray.

Just a note: If you buy heritage breed poults from a hatchery they're $9 each, which is valuing a dozen turkey eggs at around $90, figuring some incubation loss. So one way to figure it is that the tray of turkey eggs I set there are worth $270, and an incubator full of turkeys is worth $1620!