Hatching THE BEST Homestead Chickens!

hey everybody Welcome Back To Living Traditions Homestead well today's video is going to be an exciting one because it is going to be our very first hatch of the American breast chickens we are going to take you along from the day that we put these eggs in the incubator today to uh when all the way through through and the chicks hatch and make sure that they're doing okay as you know we've been raising the American breast chickens now for gosh it's got to be close to a year uh last fall we got some additional ones and so everybody is laying now and we've started collecting eggs now for hatching So today we're going to load up our incubator uh our incubator will fit 56 eggs we're gonna get those in and then we're gonna bring you through like Sarah said all the way through hatching day to see how it actually goes before we get the eggs in the incubator we do want to review just kind of the basics up to hatch eggs over the years I mean we've been homesteading for over 10 years now so over the years we have hatched lots of eggs not just chicken eggs but ducklings and quail speaking of quail I just recently within the last few days put my new batch of quail eggs into our other incubator those will be hatching right around the same time that these will be hatching so we're gonna kind of bring in you know we'll kind of cut into this video to show you guys the hatching of those new Quail as well on this video uh but you guys that's going to be exciting so we're going to have quail chicks hatching and we're gonna have these American breast chicks hatching right around the same time so anyway we have hatched a lot of eggs over the years and so we thought we'd just take a minute to kind of review some of the basics now we know that sometimes especially for people who are brand new it can be kind of overwhelming you start to look at articles online or you start to watch videos and it seems like like everything is super complicated and hatching eggs is one of those topics where you'll probably get as many opinions as you do videos that you can look at but I'm going to tell you that here on our Homestead we have a good success rate of hatching eggs and we keep things very very simple we've tried a lot of different things over the years and to be honest most of them are not necessary some people will do things like spray their eggs with Lysol or add peroxide to the water in their incubator if you have a good clean incubator I don't think there's any reason to do those things at all in fact we don't do any of that and like I said we always have a very good hatch rate there there are really two important factors to remember when hatching any kind of eggs the first important factor is temperature the second is humidity and we keep the same temperature and humidity for hatching chicken eggs and quail eggs right right so what we do is we set our incubator at 99.5 degrees I've used that the entire time and then we try to keep our humidity during the first part of incubation we keep it at 45 and then on the day that they go into lockdown which for uh chicken eggs is day 18 and for quail eggs day 15. on that day we raise the temperature or we raise the humidity to 70 percent and that will give the chicks a easier time getting out of their eggs now we've used various types of incubators over the past 10 or 12 years right in the last couple years we have settled on this incubator here which is very good and it takes a lot of the guesswork out of incubating eggs right if you have one of the like Styrofoam incubators which is what we used for years and years they work very very well but they are a little more work because you do have to manually control the humidity the temperature you can set but the humidity you kind of have to manually control and keep a hydrometer in there it's not a big deal you can definitely do it it's just a little more work so the incubator that we use now and we actually have two of these this is made by a company called brincy now we're in no way affiliated with these we just bought these on Amazon but we are very happy with them so I'm always want to tell you guys when we're really happy with the product so this is the brincy it's the Ovation ex 56 which means it can hold 56 eggs and it's completely all contained system it not only controls the temperature within the incubator but it also controls the humidity by pumping water into the incubator as the humidity fluctuates it also comes with trays and that rotate back and forth yeah turn your eggs uh so it's kind of an all-inclusive setup right let's take the cover off of this so you can see that so these are the egg Turners and there's a little motor inside of the incubator that turns this right here so as you uh have the incubator running you can set how often you want the eggs to turn I always have mine turned once every two hours so this will just move and it'll turn the eggs and then two hours later it'll turn them back the other way and I have it go every two hours which you don't have to do it that often if you don't have an egg turner just turning them two or three times a day would be fine but I figure since we have it all automated we might as well have them turn a little more often so this is our incubator this is the setup that we use we're gonna go grab our eggs we're going to talk to you a little bit about how we store the eggs prior to incubating another thing that we do that's very very simple and then we're going to get these actually loaded up so we can get these chicks ready to hatch so guys here are the eggs that we're going to be putting in the incubator today when we collect our eggs every day from our chicken coops we bring them in the house we don't wash them we don't do anything fancy with them the only thing that we do is we keep them in an egg turner now this is actually an old egg turner out of one of our old styrofoam incubators actually and we keep this on on the desk in our house plugged in so that this is turning the eggs while we're saving enough eggs to incubate now we just keep these at room temperature we don't worry about you know refrigerating them or keeping them at the perfect temp of like 55 degrees I think it's you know perfect world says 55 degrees we just keep these at room temperature and we don't save them for longer than seven days I actually prefer to save them only for five days but if we're looking for a large number and we're not getting that many that day uh we'll just keep saving them up to seven days and incubate that amount now if you don't have an egg turner the other thing that we do like if we like today we have we're going to be incubating more than what fits in our egg turner here the other thing that you can do is just put them in an egg carton like this and then prop one end of the egg carton up and then just once or twice a day come and turn the carton around so that the other end is propped up and that is essentially the same thing as having them in the egg turner so the only other thing I think that is a good piece of advice is don't use eggs that are too dirty like if you get a big rainstorm I know a lot of times after a big rainstorm our nesting boxes will get dirty or and some of our chickens lay on the ground and so if things are really dirty just don't save the eggs from that day if they're just a little bit dirty like you can see some of these just have a little bit of dirt on them we still put those in and most of the time they still hatch a lot of times if there's any just like dry stuff on there and I can just kind of pick it off there with my fingernail or something it's fine but anything that's like stuck on poop or dirt or dried mud then we won't use those right yeah and under no circumstances should you wash your eggs prior to incubating them because that will take the protective layer off the outside of the egg and it's almost certain then that they won't hatch so there you go you got guys that's pretty much it pretty simple now we're going to load these into the incubator and get them going so really you guys it's just a matter of placing these eggs into the egg Turners now one thing that we didn't mention that we just remembered is that it's important that when you're storing your eggs for incubation that you store them pointy and face down and then when you're loading them into your egg Turners you want to do the same thing they should be pointy end down and a number of years ago we did a video called pointy eggs or roosters and even though we did do a follow-up to that video for some reason a lot of people have a hard time finding it so I'm going to dispel that rumor right now we actually heard that as kind of an old wives tale and wanted to put that to the test and in that video we we loaded a bunch of eggs in and the follow-up video the information didn't get out there in YouTube land so we just wanted to let you know that the hatch rate of that was still about 50 50. right even though we didn't have any pointy eggs in our incubator about half of the chicks that hatched were roosters so that is a myth I don't want to say a lie it's a myth pointy eggs or round eggs can still be roosters all right that's all there is to that you guys we're gonna go get this plugged in and we will see you back here in about 21 or 22 days to see how these eggs hatch well I shared with you guys about a month or so ago that I had processed all of the adult quail that I had because I was having just terrible aggression problems with the quail I decided to start completely over with new genetics in my quail and I received a bunch of eggs almost 100 eggs in the mail from AJ Farms I've had these in the incubator and you guys last night they started to hatch I actually planned on doing a video trying to show you guys them hatching but it kind of happened so fast that we got busy today and by the time I got back in the house it looks like almost all of them have hatched so I'm super excited we're going to take them out of the incubator they've been in the incubator now they started to hatch last night so about 24 hours since the big hatch kind of started and well we're gonna see how many we have we started with uh 88 eggs that I put in the incubator when I candled them on day 15 78 of them were fertile so that was like an 89 fertility rate which for eggs that came in the mail is absolutely amazing so we're going to take the incubator over by the brooder I brought a brooder in the house normally we don't like to brew things in the house but it is going to get pretty cold again tonight so I thought you know what we're gonna just bring it in the house because I want these guys to have the best chance of success so we're gonna take this over we're gonna take these out we're gonna try to count them as we put them in the brooder all right I'm actually going to set the incubator down inside of the brooder because there are so many baby quail inside of here that I'm afraid they're all going to come jumping out I'm going to try to lift the cover just a little bit at a time and take some out but we may have to count them another day so I'm gonna do the best that I can today and see how many I think we have there's just no way they're already jumping out everywhere but you guys look how many quail there are holy cow I don't know if I've ever had a hatch like this I'm gonna try to get them all out of the incubator we'll have to count them another day when we move them outside for today we're just gonna try to get them all out of here make sure that they all know where to go to drink make sure they all get some food I don't know we might be able to just count how many eggs have enhatched and know how many are here that might be the easiest thing to do now this is a completely new breed of quail for me I mean there's still caternik's Quail but these are called jumbo meat maker Quail which is different than what I've had in the past so I'm excited to raise some of these just in the off chance that a few more might hatch overnight but let me see if I can real quickly see how many did not hatch here in the incubator I see one two three oh four [Applause] five six all right foreign that's it oh seven all right you guys I'm gonna get a heat lamp on these guys I'm gonna plug the incubator back in and see if any of these last seven will hatch we also have our other incubator running right now in just a couple days those eggs go into lockdown those are going to be our first hatch of the American breath chicks so we're gonna have a ton of quail chicks and the American breast chicks hatching here between today and just the next couple days so an exciting time here on the homestead we'll be back with you guys in just a day or so well it's day 22 and all of the eggs have hatched well we don't know yet if all of them have hatched but it sounds like a lot of them have hatched um we are going to leave some of them in yet if they haven't hashed to see if they'll continue to hatch the chicks started to hatch yesterday morning and hatched throughout the day yesterday there's so much humidity in the incubator that it's kind of hard to see exactly how many are in there last time that I was able to count I saw about 12 but there's a ton more now so we're excited to see how many actually ended up hatching but like I said we're gonna leave if there are any eggs that haven't hatched we're going to leave those in for another day or two because sometimes they hatch on day 22 or even day 23 so we'll have to see what happens all right we want to get the chicks out we're good we've got our little brooder right here this is just a small little portable brooder that we brought in we'll leave them in here for like a day and then we'll probably move them outside we do have a heat lamp for this too we're not going to leave it right here in the kitchen it's going to go over in the other room so all right we're going to get them out and see how many we have now when we loaded the incubator originally we were able to fit 56 eggs into the incubator on day 18 we candled them before we moved the eggs into lockdown there were six eggs that were not fertile that we took out and so 50 fertile eggs went into the incubators that means we have the potential to have 50 chicks in there we're ready to take the cover off transfer them into the brooder here and see how many have hatched so far and try not to let them Escape all over the kitchen all right let's so do you want me to just like open it up a little bit okay there are a lot of chicks in there lots of chicks I'm gonna try to count as we go okay so here's two ten twenty-six 37. all right so 37 into the brooder I think that's pretty good it'll be interesting to see if more still hatched but 37 is still a good hat all right so we're gonna move this brooder over and we're going to put the heat lamp on and show them where their water is they've got food and water in there and then we'll just keep an eye on them throughout the day and we'll show you guys how they're doing a little bit later today after we're done with some of our chores one thing in our house whenever there are baby birds whether it's the quail or the chicks our beagle Bubba he is so in love with baby chicks and he always wants to be right by them he's very good with him he never tries to hurt him he doesn't bark at him or anything like that he just wants to sit and watch him so he's our guard dog for the chicks but for now we need to let them get settled in we need to let them you know warm up a little bit and see if we can get them to eat some food and we'll check back in in a little bit so it's been a few days since we showed you guys where we were taking them out of the incubator and getting them set up in their brooder they are now four days old let me show you how they're doing they're doing great now on that last video on that last part of this video we told you that we had had 37 hatch we ended up having three more hatch after that so that's great so end up with 40 out of the 50 that went into lockdown hatch and that means we had an 80 hatch rate which I'm very happy with Bring It On closer here so you guys can see them but they are doing really really well so you guys we've already sold 12 of these to a friend but already all been sold right we're gonna put it back in until they quiet down now we did want to let you guys know that even though this batch is already sold we do have more eggs going into the incubator so in another three weeks or so we'll probably have more we are launching a new version of our website livingtraditionshomestead.com that will allow us to sell chicks and hatching eggs and other things right on the website going forward that is how you can find out when we have things available uh we're not doing a like back order list we're not doing a waiting list but you can go to our new website and that will allow you to put in your email address and be alerted when we have things in inventory so like when we have more chicks available and we put them on our website it will send you an email saying Living Traditions Homestead has chicks available go there now if you want to buy them so that's what we're going to that's how we're going to be doing the sale of chicks and other things going forward while you're there on the website make sure you check out everything else that's new on there we're really excited about how it looks and all the new features and information that's on our new website again it's livingtraditionshomestead.com this was exciting uh our very first hatch of the American breast chickens we have fallen in love with these chickens over the last year we really do think they are the perfect Homestead chicken not only for eggs but for meat as well you guys if you're enjoying our videos make sure that you hit the Subscribe button also remember that the best way that you can help us here on the homestead is just to share our videos on your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our Homestead take care and God bless God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 85,296

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: ZsfO-3B7kEU

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023