Hatching 50,000 chickens in One Day at McMurray Hatchery

[Music] all right guys today i'm in webster city iowa and we're at mcmurray hatchery so many chickens [Music] this is the hatchery that we get all of our meat chickens from plus our egg layers and i thought it'd be fun just to take you guys along and kind of behind the scenes of their hatchery here [Music] all right i'm tom from mcmurray hatchery i'm the president of uh this here organization and we've been in this location since 1991 and we've been in webster city since 1917 so 105 years this year so you're just counting them right now and then you plug in you plug them in the computer is that what you do how long have you been working here this is my 42nd year wow i should know what i'm doing when i first started here we only hatched six months like january to july first of july and now we go january to the end of october well yeah and the number of breeds and the volume you know so we hatch 105 varieties of chickens from from the rarest of rare exotics to you know everyone's favorite black australorps we're all of our farms within an hour of webster city here so all of our eggs are sourced by our own breeder flocks so we we're our own breeder and we're our own hatchery and we ship directly to all 50 states so each week every week we're hatching so these just came from the farm yep so these eggs are less than a week old so they would have got here either between wednesday and friday of of last week and so they'll either get set today tomorrow actually these in here will probably go in tomorrow we have the eggs for today's set in the incubator room these uh that gray one with that one is 50 000 eggs 50 000 eggs just right here so these are getting ready to go in the incubator these will go on the incubator this week so these are getting loaded incubator we have to clean and disinfect this room so we can be ready for the next shipment of eggs so from here these eggs will arrive from the farm and then go to the incubator as we're getting ready to set about eight hours before the eggs will go in the incubator we'll pull the whole trolley with us and we'll bring it into our incubator room so this is where where the magic happens it's a little bit louder in here um just machine noise but these these eggs are going to go in the incubator today they're in here tempering we want them to be up to temperature so this room is a little bit warmer than that room it's about 65 in there it's 70 probably in here 75 and then we're going to go in the incubator the incubators are between 100.7 degrees and 99 and a half degrees so we have different temperatures depending on the incubator we do have two different styles of incubator just and that's just strictly age so we have some newer styles and then we have the older styles so these were built in 1991 with the building these were built in 2013 and 2015. they're time stamped so we all have the same time these are machines they turn we can see them turning the whole drum itself turns and we actually have three weeks worth of eggs in here today is green hatch day so we're going to put eggs in that'll be on the green day this whole drum turns it turns 45 degrees one way 45 degrees the second way for a total of 90 degrees same thing these eggs will all go in the incubator today and then in three weeks they'll be the ones we're hatching so they'll go to some somebody's house so we do have 346 solar panels on the roof it takes a lot of energy to run a hatcher you're putting heat and cooling in usually at the wrong times of the year it won't power everything but it does offset those costs we've had those for i think starting 2014 2015 this is the hatchery room so we were in the incubator room where they spend 18 days uh incubating and on the 18th day we transfer them into our hatch baskets so they get out of the little egg cradlers in the flats we put them in a basket so they can hatch into a basket so uh we already pulled today's but we have stuff coming up for tomorrow that we can look at um turn the lights on so these will be tomorrow's hats so they're still kind of hatching see the models who dance you see they're still wet and they're still hatching that little guy right there just so by tomorrow morning when we come in it's actually like really late tonight these will be completely dry and completely hatched now being born is a pretty big deal it takes a lot out of them so they really need you know a good window to to get fully dry and get fluffy you know you think that fluffy chick and then just kind of recoup their energy we hatched this morning we pulled all of our chicks they're counting them and they're also keeping them organized by name by breed [Music] we break everything down we clean it all so we're getting ready to power wash this room and we cleaned and disinfected each incubator before we pull tomorrow's chicks we have monday tuesday wednesday it is cleaned each day in between in between hatches so everything hatches in a sanitized environment and that's the same with every room in the hatchery like it doesn't smell in here like it there's no it smells pretty clean like that's one of the reasons we don't allow tours is uh you know we don't allow people in so we don't contaminate anything so these are chicks to go to people's homes they're they're gonna be as as healthy and as safe as possible so this is the the sex scene room so our uh our chicken sectors are set up here they have special lights that they can see they're determining the males and females so the yellow baskets are going to be all the females the blue baskets are going to be the males one of the things we end up doing is as part of our disease protocol is we actually take samples of all the fecal manure and we send it into iowa state and they test it for a lot of different uh pathogens and stuff so when we say like we're a clean environment like we we prove it like so a lot of diseases with chickens are passed through the fecal material and we can test that right at the source like our cartons our trolleys everything that came out of the hatchery room will go through this machine which is a 170 degree water with disinfectant and a residual disinfectant at the end so everything gets cleaned every day even though they're doing thousands of birds it's still pretty small and it's still a family business we came from the sexting room and now now we're in our chick shipping room so we've taken all these baskets and we've got them each spot is labeled so we just find all the yellows or the females we've got black giants light brahmas white wine dots this this sets up for our order fillers in order to to fill their orders so our rolls are over there our straight run are separated every customer's order is different our average is 25 chickens it's about 10 different breeds probably individually we work with the united states post office and we have a 90 on time delivery in under two days and a 99 in less than three days and that's well within that chicken's window to to be healthy and and comfortable the chickens develop out of the white in an egg and so the yolk is nothing but a food sack and so actually they envelop that yolk right before they hatch right in their navel they have a belly button just like we do and so they they draw all that yolk in and that's that's um like three days worth of food and water for a chick that's all they need we do provide them with uh grow gel which is a hydrogen supplement it's like chicken jello it's got probiotics you see our fuzzy mugging i did see them right here all these chickens they have to box up and stand out before 5 p.m so i got a grow gel in here make sure they put it in they did got four blue lace red wine dots there's my four two three four five delaware one two three four five gingers we got one two three four five white giants one two three four five quantities one two three four five red legends and one two three four five well summer's in there and my free rare is one two three four five okay they've put an extra blue lights in for free so after here flip the lid over and they go to be stapled [Music] so after quality control they're packaged up guys and that's it and right here they put them all in this truck and ship them out to your doorstep so if you didn't know mcmurray also sells all the stuff for processing chickens like everything to raise chickens not just chickens yeah one thing that did surprise me about being here at mcmurray hatchery is how hands-on they are like it's actually people like looking and counting all the chickens they're seeing which one's female which one's male making sure all the chickens look healthy they're vaccinating chickens there's people boxing the chickens there's nothing really automated so these are actually our chickens that we're taking home or not take it home but these will be at our post office when we get home so we got some red broilers in there and some more egg layers [Music] you

Channel: Sow the Land

Views: 386,479

Keywords:

Id: bACC52KZyy8

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2022