Want healthier birds, better hatches, and fewer costly mistakes? Poultry Nerds gives backyard flock keepers and breeders practical, science-informed answers about chickens, Coturnix quail, hatching eggs, incubation, breeding, nutrition, brooding, biosecurity, housing, and flock health.
Jennifer Bryant of Bryant’s Roost and Carey Blackmon of Show Pro Farm Supply bring real-world poultry experience to honest conversations with breeders, researchers, poultry professionals, and other people who truly know birds. We explain not only what to do, but why it works, so you can make better decisions for your own flock.
Whether you are setting your first incubator, raising breeding stock, shipping hatching eggs, or managing an established farm, every episode gives you useful information you can put to work.
Join hosts Jennifer Bryant of Bryant's Roost and Carey Blackmon of Double R Farms as they delve into the essentials of incubating hatching eggs. Whether you're a backyard chicken keeper or a seasoned breeder, this episode offers valuable insights to enhance your hatching success.
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Carey
Welcome listeners to another exciting episode of the Poultry Nerds podcast, the show where we dive into the world of innovation, creativity, and all things cutting edge poultry. I'm your co host, Kerry Blackman, and joining me today is Jennifer Bryant, and we're going to discuss some of the things that have worked for us in incubating hatching eggs. So buckle up, get ready to incubate your curiosity. and join us on the journey of discovery. This is Poultry Nerds, and we're going to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest, and highest quality birds possible.
Intro Music
Mhm.
Jennifer
All righty, so when the breeder ships you the eggs, hopefully they have chosen good quality perfectly shaped eggs that are clean but not been washed, and they ship to you in foam, pointy side down, and we're going to give the post office a lot of credit there, that they're going to keep the boxes the correct orientation but just be aware that they're going to get jostled. They're going to get dropped, they're going to get thrown, just assume the worst with your shipped eggs. And so when you receive them, You need to set them out in your room, pointy side down, and let them rest. You are going to hear people suggest anywhere from 8 to 24 hours. My personal opinion is just as long as you can stand it. I have rested them for 2 hours, and I've rested them for a day. So just whatever works. for your situation. Then the idea behind that is just to get the air cell to orientate itself back up into the fat end of the, of the egg and kind of stabilize there. Now if you're talking about quail eggs, I would say just after a few hours just go for it. If you're talking about your three or four hundred dollar a dozen chicken eggs, your specialty chicken eggs, or your turkey eggs, something big like that. Go ahead and candle them and see if the air cell is detached. And you're going to be able to easily see that if the air cell moves when you gently rock the egg back and forth. If you've never seen a detached air cell, what I would suggest that you do is just take one of your eggs out of the nest. And just shake it. Shake it like you're playing the tambourine on your vacation in the Bahamas after a few margaritas. Just shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it. And then candle it. And you're going to see that air cell is all busted up in there and you're going to have bubbles. And you're going to see it floating around in there. And if your shipped eggs look like that, probably not going to hatch. But, but there's a caveat there. What you're going to want to do is let them rest for the full 24 hours. And then you're going to get either a paper towel, cardboard. This is going to depend on your incubator too. You're going to want to hatch them. standing up, pointy side down, without the turner on. And that's very important because we want the air cell to stay artificially stabilized in the fat end of the egg. So if your incubator puts them on their side. Like say you have a Nature Rite 360, I want you to take the turner out. I want you to either cut pieces of an egg carton or circles from a paper towel cardboard holder and I want you to set those eggs up in there. And for the first eight days or so, I want you to tilt them very gently. side to side, maybe four times a day. And that's all you're going to do. You're just gonna take it from leaning against one side to leaning against the other side. We're not messing with them any more than that. You don't want to candle them. You don't want to handle them. You don't want your toddlers around when you're doing this. Those eggs are only gonna hatch If you do what I'm saying and leave them alone. Now, if you receive the eggs and the air cell is attached and it is, it is how it's supposed to be, then go ahead and just incubate normally. You're probably going to be okay. Now, when you get to the end at lockdown, which is what people refer to when you take the turner out and you, and you increase the humidity a little bit. If you're dealing with detached air cells, continue leaving them upright. Don't lay them down. Just leave them in the position that they've been in until they hatch. You shouldn't need to help them. Leave them be, let them hatch. If you did incubate them normally because the air cells were okay, then just lay them on their side. Hatch them like you would hatch your own eggs. Now, if we're talking about quail eggs, those suckers are pretty well hatch no matter what you do to them. So just throw them in there, they'll hatch. It's not a big deal. You know, if I got some shipped eggs, what kind of incubator should I use? If I'm wanting to get an incubator, you know, let's, let's say I don't want to spend more than a couple of hundred bucks because I don't know if I'm going to incubate a whole lot or not. What should I look at? What would be a good incubator? Okay. So if you're in the market for an incubator, I am going to tell you to buy the best that you can buy. And the reason why I say that is. You will use it probably more than you think you will because chicken math is real and you don't want to pay 300 for specialty chicken eggs or For 18 dozen quail eggs and put them in a 39 incubator. I mean it don't just don't do it Not very smart Well, we're going to, we're going to be nice and we're going to say, let's just be smart about this. Well, I mean, as a, as a good, good rule of thumb, I think somebody should be prepared to spend as much money on their incubators. They spend on their eggs, right? At least because the incubator is going to be around a lot longer than the eggs are going to be. I mean, some of the incubators I'm using are. 15 years old probably. I mean, you just keep them. Try to have some foresight. Look on Facebook. Now I work off of exit strategies. So look on Facebook, see what's selling. You know, the Nature Rite is always selling, even though I don't like them, but they do sell and they, they hold their resale value. If you're scared of buying a $600 incubator, because you don't think you'll use it, but you can't afford it, Go ahead and buy it, because I promise you, you can sell it for $500. So basically, you only spent $100 on that incubator. If you really hate it, you don't want to use it anymore, sell it for $500 the next year, and you only lost $100. So, I would just buy the best one that you can afford. Makes sense. Yeah, so chicken math is real. I can't say this. So in the beginning, I'm somebody that was a breeder here, locally, and this lady for Nature Right? 360. And that's, that's what she was doing. She, she had some hatching every week. And she did that and she, she, one day they had an epiphany that, Hey, you know, that she likes the GQFs. So she purchased the 1502 after selling all of her NR 360s. And I'm, I'm thinking to myself, well, if I go into it with that in mind. Wouldn't it have been better to just spend the money to get the other one the first time? I don't know. I mean, for me, I started out with the 360 because, you know, that's, that's what everybody online said to get, you know, it wasn't until after I got one that I, that I discovered that regulating on the humidity is atrocious. and I did that, I spent $250 bucks for a dozen eggs and I put them in a $150 incubator and luckily. All but one of them hatched, but now hindsight, I feel like an idiot because probably shouldn't have done that. So instead of doing what other people do, where they have multiple of those so they could incubate, I was like, Oh, well, let's see, chicken math is a thing. So I went and I still have the 360 because I do use it to test fertility and stuff like that. Cause it's. If it'll hatch in a 360, it'll hatch anywhere. And I got a hatching time CT series. I love it. The to me, the biggest thing about it versus the other is the humidity. When you, when it goes time for lockdown, like you hit the up button and it goes up, boom, your humidity set. You know, I'm kind of, if I think about it now, I probably wish I would have bought one of those instead of the NR360 in the beginning. Right. Well, my first incubators were free and they are the plastic ones that sit down in the styrofoam tubs. Like you think, I don't even know if you can buy them anymore. I, I still have them. I don't use them for incubating, but if I run out of hatcher space, I use them for hatching. It's hard to argue with free. It really is. I have three of them out there. GQF still makes one that it's about a foot and a half square. And it's styrofoam. I know. I used it in the incubator experiment. I didn't have a very good hydrate. I have a funny story about my first 1502. Yeah, you're gonna appreciate this being from Alabama and I'm from Tennessee. So, you know, we're all being infiltrated right now from all the Westerners, you know, coming out to the South because, you know, life's better in the South. And so this incubator, the 1502 went up on Craigslist. I Don't know in the morning and I just happened to see it and I messaged the guy or texted him and he said, yeah He said I'll meet you at noon and he was about two and a half three hours away and I said, okay I said hold it for me. We're jumping in the truck right now. He wanted $500 for it. And So we jump in the truck and we drive all the way to Jackson, Tennessee it was about three hours and we met him in the parking lot of a Walmart and he had moved out here from California and he thought that Southerners were stupid and we didn't know how to do anything. And I'm holding on to David for dear life, trying to get him to not say anything. And, and he was so good. And he's loading this 1502 into the back of our truck and I just kind of stand back and I'm watching him and he's just having a fit. And he loads The water system, and the racks, and the emu trays, and, I mean, probably $1400 worth of stuff in the back of our truck, and I'm just standing there looking at him, and I'm listening to him just blather on about stupid, and I hand him $500 dollars. And I let go of David. That man turned tail and ran out of that Walmart parking lot. David just cut loose on him after I closed the tailgate and locked the door. Now you knew what kind of deal that was. You wanted to make sure that he didn't mess it up for you. I know. I let him load it. He had so much paraphernalia with that, that incubator. It filled up the entire bed of the truck. But his plan had been to move from California to Jackson, Tennessee And raise emus, and he was going to be a billionaire raising emus. I mean, so, I felt bad when I got my 1502 because, you know, I think I spent $700 for mine, but this lady, She had bought it because she was into Bob White Quail and she wanted to hatch out tons of them. She had a huge outdoor Aviary and by huge, I mean, it looks like a batting cage for baseball and you know, she, her husband is in the military and he was overseas a lot and she had a triple bypass. Really, really bad heart attack. And she just, she said that she couldn't do it anymore. And I was like, okay. And she, she was, you know, telling me about everything that she got with it. And I mean, I have the five gallon bucket on top reservoir system that they have probably got about 15 or 20 of those wick pads that drive you nuts. I got six quail egg trays, six chicken egg trays. Six trays that look like you put a football in there. So that's probably like the emu or the ostrich ones. And I'm like, are you sure this is all you want for it? She said, yeah, if I that, yeah, I'll be happy with that. And I'm like, okay. I mean, I show up, she's got the thing plugged up at temperature with the humidity going to show me that it works fine. And I'm just like. Okay, I get it home. This thing is so new. I pulled the plastic off the window in the middle. Yeah. So, and, and to be honest for incubating, I like it. Because here where I am, where I've had it set up, it gets about 50 to 55 percent humidity with none of those stupid pads in there. And it's, it's perfect. So what we didn't talk about when I was talking about incubating the shipped eggs is the, the humidity. So everybody's humidity is going to be a little bit different. I incubate at 40%. If I'm setting the hatching time incubators are set at 40 percent and I hatch at 55, the 1502s, I don't add any water and they stay in the 30s. And then when I move them to hatch, of course they, I run it up to in the 50s at that point. But it's perfectly fine to dry hatch if you can keep it. I would say minimum of what, 45 50 percent to do dry hatch? And you know, there's a lot of people out there that swear by dry hatching. And you know, if you're in the south and it's humid, and you know, it's, it's gonna be 35 45%. Do a dry hatch. Fine. If you live, I don't know, Northern California, Nevada, somewhere like that, where it's dry as a bone, you know, your regular humidity is maybe 5 percent probably, probably won't have a successful hatch or dry hatching. Mm. But there's, there's people, oh, I, I dry hatch. I never add water. I never do this. And I'm like, well, where are you located? 'cause that's the side of your story that you're not telling. Right. You know, for me, I have to use humidity because, especially in the summertime, because I am in Alabama and I don't like humidity, I have dehumidifiers in my house to, to try to pull some of the humidity out because I like to keep my house 65 degrees year round. And in the summer with the humidity without a dehumidifier. That's a challenge. Mm hmm with two commercial grade dehumidifiers It's not really a challenge. So I don't recommend dry hatching unless your humidity level is what it should be Yeah, you need you need at least I Mean, I would say at least in the 40s for for the end The actual hatching period. But I would definitely not go any less than say 25, 30 percent for, for any of it. Well, I mean, have you ever thrown a quail egg? Have I ever thrown one? I throw them at the pigs all the time. So like you have one that that's not in a real humid area and you do that. They're hard. They're like little bricks. They're little rocks. And you know, quail are tiny. They're, they're not going to be able to pop out of that. You have to have the humidity to soften the shell up. That's the way I look at it. Yeah, so the only way I found out how to dry hatch was actually just messing up my days. And I went out there one day and there's a whole bunch of little babies looking at me at the floor of the 1502 and I was like, well, I mean, if they can hatch like that, then why am I even bother trying to fight with the humidity? So, honestly, I think a more consistent temperature and humidity is most important, more important than trying to necessarily pinpoint a number and keep it there. I agree consistency is definitely key because my, you know, I incubate in my 1502 and it's somewhere between 50 and 55 with no pad, just, just straight water going into the one tray. And that works good for me. I know it's, you know, in the, the range of what works, so I don't mess with it. And because of the wide variety of what I do hatch, when I use my hatching time as a hatcher, it's set on 65. A lot of people would say that's kind of high for quail. And it is a lot of people say that that may be a little high for some chickens and for other chickens, it's about right. But. You know, I get really good hatch rates at 65%. It's not broke, I'm not going to fix it. Alright, I run 55%, but yeah. But I think any, when it comes to hatching, depending on what you're hatching, anything over 50 works. Yeah. And I mean I would argue that some 40 to 45 would work too. Well here's another thing, I drop mine a degree too at hatch. You go down to 98? Yeah, 98. 5. Hmm, if it works, don't, don't fix it. I think I read that in the Hatching Time Incubator book and I started trying it and my hatch rates went up. So I just kind of left it at that. But it kind of makes sense. I mean, so if a chick is incubating at 99. 5 and you're supposed to keep them at 95 for the first week of their life, right? Literally makes sense. Okay, well, they're formed. Let's start working them down towards the 95. I mean, how would you like to be born in 70 percent humidity and a hundred degrees? I'd say put me back in the egg. Yeah, let me go back take me back that makes sense. Yeah, I'm gonna do that I'm gonna lower, lower my hatcher down a degree. Yeah, see what happens.
Carey
Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released. And they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it eggciting. This is Kerry signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.
