How I'll NEVER Need to BUY CHICKS Again (& you can too!)

so i have this plan and if it works i may never have to buy chickens again so when it comes to our chicken operation the two things that we're constantly buying from outside sources to keep things running are the feed and chicks every spring but my focus today is the chicks how can i stop having to buy chicks from the food store every single year and create a more self-sustaining system and this contraption is my secret weapon i have to confess this has been in my basement for a while i bought it a number of years ago i used it once and then i just got a little lazy because it's too easy to go to the feed store and get the chicks but i'm committed to figuring out how to hatch chicks this year so we can close our chicken system once and for all first things first i gotta get my act together with the fluff down here guys rude so we have a bunch of different breeds we have barred rocks americanas silver laced wine dots golden lace wine dots and i have a few icelandic chickens that are left over from a purchase many years ago and they are the last lingering few long term i want to only be hatching purebred chickens but for this first batch of chicks i know we're going to have a little bit of a learning curve as i relearn how to use the incubator so i'm just going to take the eggs i can get the ones we've been collecting and roll with those chad keep your nose out of my eggs it takes two to three weeks for a chicken to become unfertilized do you get what i mean by that so once a rooster breeds a chicken she'll be fertilized by that rooster for up to two weeks that everything stays in the oviduct so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna separate out the hens that i want to hatch from wait for them to become unfertilized and then put the rooster that matches their breed in with them in their separation place and then i can get the purebred chicks or that's the plan at least we'll see how this goes [Music] okay so i have these girls separated out i'm gonna make sure they're not getting bred for a couple weeks and then once their eggs are no longer fertilized then i will put them in with their matching rooster mate and see if we can get some purebred chicks okay so we're gonna do a little test because once we separate out our purebred chickens i need to be able to tell when the eggs are no longer fertilized so there's a little test you can do i'm gonna see if it works i don't know i'm a little skeptical if i'm gonna be able to tell the difference but here we have an egg from our chickens which are pretty likely fertilized because we have a number of roosters out there in the coop and then here we have a costco egg because we bought several cartons because we were completely out of eggs and then three days later the chickens started laying like crazy so now we have way too many anyway let's crack these into a bowl and see if we can tell a difference google says you can we'll see if that's true [Music] here's costco and here's ours and there's this little white spot in the eggs and if the egg is fertilized it looks like a bullseye and if it's not fertilized it looks like a white blob so check this out you can actually see it really good in these eggs okay i know it's hard to see this but you look right there a little white circle it's hard to see on camera but it has a bullseye appearance you see the rings that means this egg is indeed fertilized this is called the blastoderm that's harder with costco egg here because our circle is over on the edge so you can see right there am i gonna go in and out of focus that is solid white there is no rings there is no bullseye so this means this costco egg is unfertilized which we would have expected and now that is not a blasto derm that is a blasto disk so we have a lot of laying chickens and the question remains what about the meat birds it's pretty tough if not impossible to breed cornish cross chickens at home which is what we always butcher so the plan is and i was inspired to do this after doing an interview with kate from venison for dinner but we're going to be hatching out these dual purpose breeds the bird rocks the wine dots we'll keep the hens for the eggs and then we will take whatever roosters come in each batch we'll raise those up and then we can use those as our meat bird will they be as meaty as a cornish cross probably not but i think they'll still do pretty darn well so last week we were in the middle of an egg famine this week this is what my counters look like it escalated quickly i do not claim to be an incubator expert but i will just give you kind of the train of thought around why i got this machine and what i know about using it so i mean i've read the instruction manual several times so this is a brency octagon eco is designed to hold 20 eggs from what i can tell it's a little more reliable than the tiny models that are like little circles that hold eight eggs or so but it's not a giant so kind of in the middle this is the vent that controls humidity that humidity is really important has a thermometer right here to adjust the temperature you take this little casing off and you use a screwdriver to adjust temperature with my first batch of chicks i did years ago i turned the eggs myself which you can do but it was a little bit cumbersome to remember to do that three to five times a day and with our life i figured the investment in the auto turner would be wise so since i knew i was going to set the eggs this morning this has been plugged in for several hours it was cleaned really well on the inside and now it's up to temperature and i know that because it's blinking so different species of birds need different temperatures uh chickens need to be within 99.3 to 99.6 degrees fahrenheit it's a little hard to see the thermometer but that's right where we are right shy of a hundred the other piece of this it's key take this off very carefully is water and humidity so this how they have this these two channels in the incubator and i filled one with water per the directions and once we get ready to actually hash i'll fill up both reservoirs with water but for now we just want the one filled so now i'm picking through my selection to get good eggs all of these eggs have been laid within the last couple of days from what i've read you can collect eggs for about up to seven to ten days if you store them in a cool damp place and just collect your eggs up for incubation we're getting so many eggs a day i didn't have to wait that long though okay now it's really important to be picky with your egg selection i went through the bowls i picked the eggs that were the freshest the ones that were just really a nice normal average shape i skipped the teeny ones i skipped the big ones i skipped any that had an irregular shape and then i also skipped any that were porous so like this guy is a nice looking egg but if you feel it it's rough it's extra porous and i'm gonna skip that one and not hatch it i also didn't wash these and that's why i picked clean eggs so i wouldn't be tempted to try to wash them a few had little bits of chicken poop on them i just kind of scrape it off with my fingernail but i don't want to hurt the bloom that protective coating that is on the egg so we want to put these guys in pointy side down the big end is up and now we just watch and wait i'll continue to monitor the temperature throughout the day make sure we have enough water in there we cannot run out of water that's really bad if that happens and then on about day seven we will candle the eggs to see how our growth is and i'll definitely do a video of that so you can see how we're faring so i know some of you are thinking right now why don't you just let the chickens hatch the eggs and honestly when that works out i greatly prefer to let the mama hin do her job because they do it a lot better than i do and it's hands off for me the problem is that a lot of our modern breeds of chickens they've had that broody instinct bread out of them so a lot of them will they might sit on eggs for a day or two but then they lose interest and you have a bunch of half incubated eggs that you have to throw away you guys are really loud i can't record this [Laughter] why are you in here woman you are disrupting our laying hour so one thing i didn't mention in this video is that hatching your own eggs not only closes your own chicken system but it also creates the potential to sell the extra chicks and create some side income if creating a homestead that can fund itself and maybe even pay some of your other bills is something that you're interested in head on over to self-funded homestead.com to see something i've been working on

Channel: Jill Winger - The Homestead Mentor

Views: 131,172

Rating: 4.9343724 out of 5

Keywords: How I'll NEVER Need to BUY CHICKS Again, baby chicks, how to raise chickens, backyard chickens, how to, homesteading, the prairie homestead, how to tell if your chicken eggs are fertile, raising chickens, keeping chickens, raising chicks, creating a more sustainable chicken operation, NEVER BUY CHICKS Again, baby chickens, how to raise chicks

Id: S90z1KTa-KY

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021