This post contains affiliate links, which means I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. While I generally think mother nature knows best, we personally prefer to keep our hens producing eggs for consumption while we handle incubating the new chicks for our flock of chickens.Īlright, so we covered WHY you would want to hatch your own chicken eggs, now let’s dive into the how. You would have a hard time determining which eggs were freshly laid and which ones were her developing chicks. Other hens and roosters have been known to eat chicks while their mother was away for just a few minutes.įinally, unless the mother hen is kept in separate living quarters, other hens may continue to add eggs to her clutch. It is not as simple as putting some eggs under a mother hen and hoping she does her job well.Īlso, in our experience newly hatched chicks are very vulnerable in a coop setting. Others give up on the job halfway through. First of all, a broody hen, which is a hen that is willing to sit on her eggs, is not something you can necessarily predict or control. I used to wonder why homesteaders didn’t just let a mother hen hatch out her young instead of going to the trouble of using an incubator. Why incubate eggs using an incubator instead of a mother hen? While chicks don’t cost much, the savings of hatching your own chicks over time is sure to add up. It is pretty satisfying and even comforting to know that you can replace your flock over time and maintain your egg and meat supply without having to depend on others to supply you chicks. So an example of this is that we keep our meat birds far away from our laying hens so we don’t have to worry about them sharing germs.Ī third benefit to hatching your own chicks is, of course, self-sufficiency. A one-month separation from your established flock is the usual recommendation.Īlso, it is a good idea, if you have the ability to do so, to keep separate flocks. There are two ways to handle this.įirst, you should always quarantine your new birds, no matter how old they are or where they came from. So maybe you’re wondering how this biosecurity thing might play out if you do choose to introduce outside chicks or poultry at some point. I should point out that at this point, we are still purchasing our meat bird chicks because we like cornish crosses, which cannot be hatched at home. Hatcheries inevitably face issues with diseases that you don’t want to bring home to your farm if you can help it. This is one aspect of farm biosecurity, and honestly, it’s not something I gave much thought to as a new homesteader.Īfter some years of experience, I have realized how much money, trouble, and heartache keeping a closed flock, or a closed herd in the case of your goats or your cows, can save. This means that you are not bringing in birds from off of your farm, and therefore, you are not bringing in diseases or health problems that you are not already dealing with. The other major benefit is to create what is called a closed flock. Then, watching them hatch is an amazing learning experience that, even as an adult, I really look forward to.Īs a homeschooling family, I find that these projects are one of the best ways to learn! I will go over this in a bit, but you can actually watch the developing embryo by doing what’s called candling.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |