How to hatch your OWN chicks!
How to Hatch Your Own Chicks
Do you want to hatch your own chicken eggs? Whether it be to add more chickens to your own flock, or sell some chicks for a bit of extra money, hatching your own chicks is pretty simple to do, and has many benefits to the self-sustainable farmer.
There are two options to hatching your own eggs. The first is to let a broody hen sit on them. This can work, the best success we have had is to isolate the hen into her own area with just the eggs you want her to sit on accessible. If she is successful, it is really sweet to watch the mother hen raise her chicks and you don’t even have to worry about a heat lamp! There are many factors that make this method not as successful as the method I will go into a bit more detail with.
The second way, and in my opinion, much more successful way, is to hatch the eggs in an incubator. You don’t need anything to big or fancy to start, we use a simple Styrofoam hovabator tabletop incubator (it holds 42 eggs and we opted for the automatic turner). The key is maintaining an even temperature throughout incubation, and following the incubator’s instructions precisely. The fun part is you can keep this in your house for this process and as soon as one week in you can start to see the signs of life! After the average incubation of 21 days, your chicks will hatch.
Once they have hatched, you can move them to a brooder and watch them grow! Hatching your own eggs or hatching eggs from other breeders is an exciting and cost-effective way to add to your flock. Once you have tried it, be warned, it is very hard to not want to hatch ALL THE EGGS. It can get quite addicting… Especially when you start to play around with egg colour, like we have, and now that we have the full rainbow, our eggs and chickens are more in demand than ever and we are always wanting to add to it to see what hatches next!
MARCH 30, 2O21
Becca Dault @Yellow Point Farms
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