Shipping Hatching Eggs, Buying Better Birds & Incubation Mistakes to Avoid | Poultry Nerds Podcast

In this episode of the Poultry Nerds Podcast, we get into the real-world side of shipping hatching eggs, buying from breeders, hatch rate expectations, incubation mistakes, poultry medications, NPIP misconceptions, and how to find quality hatching eggs.

We talk through what actually matters when you’re buying hatching eggs or live birds, what questions to ask a breeder, how nutrition affects fertility and hatchability, why some eggs should never be shipped, and the red flags people ignore when they’re shopping for birds online.

We also break down:
 how to choose which hatching eggs are worth shipping,
 why damaged, torpedo-shaped, oversized, undersized, dirty, or questionable eggs should be culled from hatching orders,
 why shipping partially incubated eggs is a bad idea,
 how chilling, handling, and stressing embryos can reduce hatch rates,
 what buyers should ask breeders about feed, flock management, medications, and shipping methods,
 why NPIP is not the same thing as breeder quality,
 how poor nutrition and bad breeder practices can affect developing chicks,
 why shipping materials matter,
 what to know about egg age, embryo age, and improper storage,
 and how to find better hatching egg sellers without gambling on social media.

This episode is for anyone raising quail, chickens, or other poultry who wants better hatch rates, stronger chicks, and fewer expensive mistakes. If you’ve ever bought hatching eggs online, struggled with incubation, or wondered how to tell a quality breeder from a bad one, this is a conversation you need to hear. 

Join Carey of Show Pro Farm Supply and Jennifer of Bryant's Roost as we delve into chickens and quail (mostly)  to help you enjoy your birds more and worry less. Backyard chicken keeping shouldnt be stressfull, let's get back to the simple days

Valley Hatchery is a proud sponsor of Poultry Nerds, find more at ValleyHatchery.com

Transcript

0:38

I'm so exhausted. I've been packing eggs all day long. Have you really? Yes. So I thought busy season hit ya. It is. Here it is upon us. And I was I'm glad that you said that you've been packing eggs all day.'cause I got some questions about that. Let's do it. You ready y'all? Okay, go for it. How do you select what eggs you ship and what eggs your pigs eat? If they have a hole in'em, they go in the pig bucket. If they're cracked, they go in the pig bucket. That's fair. If they're torpedoes, they go in the bucket now. Okay, so I say that they go in the bucket and I mean that somewhat literally, and somewhat figuratively. So I also sell eating eggs and eating eggs. It doesn't matter if they're torpedo shaped, or double yolkers or whatever. I was gonna say, it might be a double yore, which would be a bonus for the person getting it. So I have a method to my madness a little bit. I have my quail in hatching time cages. Which the egg rollouts are like in three sections. Yep. And, okay, so I use the eggs out of the middle section first, which for whatever reason, the quail don't lay in the middle. They lay to the corners anyway, so I clean the middle sections off, and then if I find double yokers or large torpedoes or whatnot, I put them to the middle. And then I use them to fill my eating egg orders later, is what I do with those. Okay. Then with what's left, I keep a bucket at my feet while I'm packing orders, and if an egg doesn't go in the foam, it goes in the bucket, it doesn't go back on the tray. So if it's a golf ball. No pointy end. Bucket if it's too small. If it's too big, if it's got cracks or dents or peck holes or got wedged in the egg rollout and got pooped on, all the things. Made a funny little noise when you pulled it out. Sometimes they like there, it don't, I can't see a crack. But it made a noise so it's gotta have a crack. So let's don't ship that one. Right now, I have seen some people on social media say that they're handling every egg before they pack it. They must not be shipping very many because I, there's no way. No, I packed over. I wanna say if I just had to guess 1200 eggs today, there's no way I could candle those. Okay. So maybe they're not lying. Maybe they turn the lights off in their barn. And they have a light box that they wave it over before they stick it in. How, however they ship it. But you don't see that no. So I'm just being honest. If they want a candle, go for it. But I do not have that kind of time. I literally packed eggs for, I'm gonna go with four hours straight today. And that just means putting'em in egg foam. Now I haven't even put'em in shipping boxes yet. I'll do that after we're done recording. So I'll be out in the garage for a while. But anyway, so after, I mean I go through all the eggs. Pull out the ones I wanna use. One I don't wanna use. Yeah. So the racks should be somewhat cleaned off at that point. Yeah. The other thing that I do is I have of course, large quantities of each variety, and let's say you order Pharaoh Quill eggs. I will pull just a few eggs from each breeder set and they won't look the same. So you get at least. Eggs from 40 different hens. Yeah. That's good for diversity because not everybody has. A few thousand quail. If you take from different pens, they may be kissing cousins, but they're not brother, sister. So they don't have to worry about anything weird when it comes to mating the offspring together. So you diversify the genetics far enough. So that helps out pretty good. Yeah, so everybody should get a nice variety of genetics when I pack eggs. All right, what's your next question? Oh, man. So I see, I saw the, I'm trying to think of a PG 13 way. At least to say it because when I saw it I was like, what in the crap? But, so there's somebody out there. That will incubate eggs for the first couple of weeks, and then they wanna sell'em to you and ship'em to you. I sent that to you, for you when I saw it. Let's see. So she lives in Alabama. At least the person. Oh, now you're gonna blame it on Alabama. Okay. It's Alabama's problem. So probably my neighbor. Okay, so if our listeners don't know, we, me and you own the Incubating Masterclass Facebook group and. Even though we don't allow sales posts in the group, and I'm pretty hard about that people do try to sneak them in. So this person tried to sneak a sales post in, and at first I thought it was just a Candling video and I run my thumb across it to fast forward it because I thought she was just candling. And at the very end. I noticed that she had stopped caning and was just talking to the camera. So I went back to listening to it and it was a sales spiel. She had tried to slide that in there, so I backed it up just a little bit and was listening to see what she was selling. She incubate eggs to right before lockdown and then sales them. And I was like, say what? Yeah. How does, like, how does that work? And so I backed it up again and I listened to it again. Make sure I didn't, I had enough coffee.'cause this is in the morning. Make sure I heard that and I was like, huh. So I backed it up again and I said, David, I need you to listen to this. And he's listening and he's just looking at me. I said, did I hear her right? He goes, yes. And he just shook his head and went back to what he was doing. But see, he could just let stuff go so you can, but I had too much, too many questions about that. I was just like how does that. So how is that a, how is that a thing? I don't think it's a thing. So I asked some other people that I know is this a thing that I'm just not aware of? And most of them were like no, that's not a thing. Never heard of it. Don't even know what you're talking about. But one person did say she has heard about it, like in the sense of. Somebody across town maybe would sell somebody eggs to put underneath their broody hen to break the broody, which I could get behind that. I think I could get behind that. If you're not spending a lot of money on it, but this particular individual, it was quail eggs and she was selling'em like on day 14, which is like Balu day and. I don't know if she was shipping them or just selling'em to people stopping by, because that wasn't part of the video. I did go to her page and couldn't really find any information there. I'm gonna assume she's not shipping. Let's hope she's not shipping, but because that's what I'm curious about because, you gotta maintain a temperature and we've done podcasts before where you talk about the science behind incubating and why things have to be perfect, even though when it's in Mother Nature, it's not like we've talked about all that stuff before. And I'm just wondering if you take these out of the incubator and then put'em in a box and ship'em. Don't they get too cool too soon? Yes. You want me to get on my soapbox for just a minute? Pop on the box. Let's figure it out. Okay. So if you cool a chick, mid incubation, you are essentially stressing it because it's trying to mature and grow and develop and into a chick, right? And. You're stressing it and then you're asking it to warm back up to hatch. Now, if you took a chick that was three days old and took it out of, from under the heat lamp and stressed it to the point. It was wet. Okay. Remember, they're wet inside the egg. So you wet a chicken, you get it all nice and chilly, and then you put it back underneath the heat lamp. It's gonna be stressed, it's gonna have some issues, and you're going to have some mortality to go along with that. I. That's what I would think personally. Don't think it's okay. I think it's cruel because it, because you're basically taking something that's alive and just a slow death while it's chilling off because it can't maintain its own body heat, and that's pre egg or post egg. It can't, A chick cannot maintain its own body heat for. I mean at least after the first week or so, right? Yeah. I wanna say a chicken chick is like 10 days. And so I would guess around a quail chick would be around seven or eight days, but that's when they start being able to maintain their body temperature. Okay. So yeah, to me that's like a slow, cruel death if you ask me. And that's a lot of the reason why we. Harp on, not Candling and it, and people take that to an extreme when we say that the candling itself is not an issue. It's the moving it. It's the chilling of it. It's the handling of it. And we see videos all the time of people candling in their twirling'em and twisting them and trying to slosh'em and see if they can see anything. Good grief. That's like putting a pregnant lady on a rollercoaster, which is not allowed, right? So leave the darn eggs in the incubator from beginning to end. You're taking responsibility for a life. Be responsible for it. It's not a toy, it's not a. Snow globe. It's a living being. Leave it alone. If you just leave it alone and I'll get off my soapbox. Yeah. I'm curious,'cause this is the Poultry Nerds podcast. Yeah. The nerd inside of me wants to say, Hey Jennifer, will you put some? Two dozen eggs in your incubator for 14 days and ship them to me and let's see what happens. But then I don't really, you're not gonna wanna waste them eggs and I'm not gonna ask you to be cruel to animals'cause No I wouldn't do it anyway. Counterintuitive. And to say that the hatch rate would be decreased because of the chilling. Yes, that is a given, but is it really ethical to say, oh, it's just a reduced tax rate but we're gonna go against nature and do it this way. I just, I can't get behind it at all. I just, I can't myself, so I was curious. Yep. That happens. It does. I get curious. So let's say that, I decided after listening to one of our previous podcasts that I'm gonna order some hatch and eggs. Because I want to see that experience like one of a mutual friend of ours. Recently had an experience where, he watched the top pop off like popcorn and I wanna do that hatch my own, but I don't know who to get'em from. What kind of questions would you ask a breeder before you bought Hatch and eggs, or if you were decided to go the live bird route? What kind of questions would you ask the breeder? When you are buying eggs, you are buying that seller's environment, meaning you're buying any disease, any, any bad nutrition, bad genetics, medication you're buying all of that, okay? Whatever that bird's been exposed to is in that egg to a point, and you know that, that brings up some really crazy stuff because you see that all over the place. But even I never considered, you're buying their. I've thought about genetics, but I haven't really thought about buying their diseases or medicated feed or antibiotics or crappy water. I never really thought about all of that. Okay. Let's just start with nutrition. So if I were buying eggs, or if I would, let's just play the devil's advocate here. If I was selling eggs and I was just feeding them, cracked corn or. Off flock or something. How would that chick be developing from a nutrition standpoint versus a bird that's on a quality layer feed? I would say very slowly. So if you're shipping eggs, you're stressing the embryo.'cause that's an embryo in the egg already. Yeah. So you're stressing it in the shipper. With the vibration, with the handling, with the weather, the climate change. So you wanna make sure that it would have the best possible nutrition out there to get it started. So as a poultry nutritionist, are you saying you wanna make sure they're being fed good layer feed? The facts are, and the studies show that birds that are fed a more nutritious diet. Do have a higher viability percentage and higher hatch rates. For me to ship hatching eggs. And we've had conversations about your numbers as well for people to call you and have a cow because they had. Anywhere from a 65 to a 80% hatch rate off birds or off of eggs that they've ordered from you. And even higher, that's a pretty common thing. But for a lot of folks, everybody that swears by that anywhere from 45 to 55 is the standard. It, it's got a lot to do with the nutrition behind the parent stock. It does. I've seen, I know somebody that has birds that may or may not have been put in a box in Germany and landed somewhere here in the southeast years ago and had a decent hatch rate, but that's also because the person in Germany feeds really well. Yep. I've also seen people on the old interwebs where, you know, everything is factual, that complain about shipping eggs that they got from somebody in the same state they were in, giving'em a 30% hat rate. So I think that there's a lot to do with what the parent stock or breeding flock eats, but. As a breeder, there's only so much you can control, and I'm not gonna blame that on poor hat traits a hundred percent, because a lot of it does have to do with the person doing the incubation. Oh, there is definitely different legs for a thriving chick to hatch. Yeah. And nutrition is one of them. So I made a blog post a few weeks ago. I posted it to Brian Roost and it was on using off-label meds. And the one in question that I was really picking on, and I picked on it hard and I struck nerves with some people, which was the point. Really? People don't like choroid for coccidia, right? And so they are using something. Called Inox that they're getting off of Amazon, and it literally says on the label, not for use in poultry, meant for meat and eggs. But the other thing that it says on the label is it doesn't say what it is. There's no ingredients. There's no active ingredient, there's no inactive ingredient, there's no serving size. There's nothing. Yeah. It just says inox. What people seem to be doing is there is a brand name. That is approved in the European Union for meat birds, not for layers, and there is a withdrawal time. This is not the same thing, but we really don't know for sure. We know it's not the same thing. I was gonna say, I'm, if it was the same thing, it would have ingredients on the label. Yeah. I'm of the opinion that a company like that, that has made this product and sells it. Now I know that the requirements for labeling are different in every country. Of course. They do have requirements in eu, so there's gotta be something, right? So it's only the brand name in Cox is only approved in a handful of countries in the European Union. There's a lot of countries in the US is one of them that has not approved it and it is not approved in layer houses. Bay Cox is another one. Brand name approved for birds, but it has a 70 day withdrawal because it sticks in fats, the fat of the bird, the fat of the egg, any kinda lipid. It sticks in there. It takes 70 days to go to zero trace, so that's a long time. It's a long time. The world of lay natural egg laying. So let's couple that together with you should, if you had a co osis problem, we're talking about chicks. Okay. Now take that information, taking it off label into the hands of backyard people getting their information off social media. And now we're using it for everything under the sun. Star gazing or falling over or just doesn't seem like herself. Let's give it a shot of whatever everybody's using nowadays. That's what they do with Corey. Exactly. And it's oh, let's doing this. Let's give it that. So now we've got, now back on my soapbox. You're just on it tonight, aren't you? So we've got, yeah. We've got this bird that's been fed into Cox off of Amazon. So not even the brand name stuff'cause we don't have it in the US and the bird doesn't seem to be doing well. So we're gonna give it some antibiotics, we're gonna give it some stuff and then we're gonna get it perky and we're gonna sell it. Okay? Now the buyer, we don't tell the buyer. The buyer doesn't know. Buyer just sees they've got a perky hen and for three more days before it starts getting all lethargic again. So we're gonna give it some more stuff.'cause we just spent 50 bucks on this bird. Or worst case scenario, we're just gonna eat the dang thing because we don't medicate our birds. However, what they don't know is what the first person put in this bird, right? And the buyer could be allergic to this stuff. It is unethical to medicate birds and then sell them. It is period, the end. I'm gonna stand on that hill. There's. There's been a particular situation where that did happen and a person wound up passing away because of their allergy. Yep. And we know this person, so you know, you need to make sure when you are buying birds, if you get that creeper feeling or anything like that, if you don't feel like you could trust the person with your life, then. Maybe don't buy from because that could happen to you. And I gotta say this too, folks, just because somebody has NPIP does not mean that they treat their animals humanely. It does not mean that they have a clean place. It does not mean that they're great and wonderful breeders. That means that at the point in time when the person signed off on their testing, they did not have rum. Rum, which is something that hasn't been found for 20 years. I was gonna say one 20 years, like over 20 years. And the ones that are NPIP plus ai, they didn't have AI at that point in time, which, I gotta be honest, if your birds are sick with AI and they really have it, they're not gonna be around a whole lot longer. They'll be dead before the test results come back. Yeah. They'll be dead before the test results come back. And if not, when the test results come back, you'll have some folks showing up to your house. Exactly. So don't trust that. And also if a person asks you if they're NPIP certified, but they won't. Directly answer, or if they don't want to tell you their number or some crap like that, it's not like you're giving out your social security number. NPIP numbers, there is literally a database where you can go to select a state and see an alphabetical or numerical order. Everybody in that state and it's got their number, their farm name, or the name that they registered. The first time they filled out the paperwork for their test and everything else. So it's not top secret information where somebody can steal your identity. Now I will say, if you ask me what my NPIP number is, I'm gonna tell you, hang on a minute. Why? I'm gonna have to look it up. I write mine so much. It's six three dash 1 1 2 0. Like I write it all the time. Mine's on a label. So I don't even have to think about it.'cause they say you're supposed to put it on the bags. It, it prints on labels. And I don't even ma I think that it don't even matter what the label's for, it just prints the numbers. But I don't know it, I'd have to look it up too. Okay. So back to our original question about the meds. Yeah. So you could ask the breeder what meds they have used and assume that they're gonna be honest. Hope that they're gonna be honest, or I have come up with a way to ask people, underhandedly. And that just simply is ask them what meds do they keep on hand and which ones they recommend that you keep on hand for just in case, oh, my allergies. Yeah. What kind of medicine should I have in my chicken first aid box, right? Because, everybody talks about having a first aid kit for your chickens. So I ask them, what kind of medicine should I get? I don't really have a whole lot of chickens. I want to get some, what kind of medicine should I get from my first aid box? Yep. And so that from that information you make your decision yourself. NPIP, that is just means that yes, they exist. That's about all that is going to be for. It's not a scammer. I will say in some states, like Oklahoma and a few others. They have added like facilities requirements to the tester that the testers are also supposed to be checking. But in states like that, they also don't have, essentially Feds doing the testing. Their Billy Joe Jimbob sat through a class. And he can send in the samples because in Alabama where I'm at last time, me and my NPIP person had the conversation. There was three of them. And they all drive white Dodge Rams. And they work for the federal. They're not on the state level. You wanna hear something funny I heard the other day? Yeah. And I won't say which state. But lady wanted to get MPIP tested and she couldn't because she had pigs. And I said, pigs don't fall under MPIP. I do not understand what you're saying. And she said, no, you can't get MPIP if you have pigs. And I said I'm not computing exactly what one has to do with the other. And she said, because the lady doesn't like pigs and is scared of'em, so therefore she won't come. Therefore, you can't be approved. All righty then. I just had to laugh. I was like, okay, serious. Okay, there, there's another state that they don't like to, NPIP people for ducks, geese, or swans that have a pond. Dang. I'd be out. Like where they're, where those are supposed to flourish? Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Because those Canadian ones that will drop the crap. They'll land anywhere when they're going either direction and if they, if you have a pond and they see other geese or ducks or whatever, I guess their thought is that they'll hang out with them and get'em sick or something. I dunno. Okay, so how to box'em. You wanna know how they're gonna box the eggs. Of course our preference is gonna be egg foam. There are some creative ways of boxing out there. Brent, who was on the show a couple weeks ago, he received some eggs in a Ziploc bag. One time. Pretty sure those are gonna hatch like in a Ziploc bag. Eggs in a Ziploc bag, and yeah. Bubble wrap or no, no foam. Like those little foam nugget thingies? Nope. Just in a Ziploc bag. We've seen them online where people put'em in. Just put'em in a box. I've seen that. Then of course the most common is putting them in egg cartons, and I'll know, I'll get some hate mail for this, but if you really trust Jennifer at poul podcast com. But here's my reply to that. If you, when you go to the store, now, I haven't bought eggs in many years, but if you go to the store and you buy eggs, what's the first thing you do Standing in the aisle at the store? Oh man. You see so many people open'em up and check'em out. So if the egg cartons are so great at protecting the eggs, why do you check'em out before you even buy'em? And this is for a$2 batch of eggs. So why would you wanna spend$150 on eggs to be shipped in these egg cartons? Let's just think about that for just a minute. Okay. You know the age of the eggs. Now we don't want eggs over 10 days old going in the incubator, so you have to work backwards. So assume for the sake of, assumptions, assume five days in the mail just to be safe. So you don't want the eggs more than a couple days old when they go in the mail because not everybody can get all the eggs together for an order, in one morning. Or the hens don't lay that day because they're cranky or something. So what I do be like the breast eggs I'll collect and I date them. Okay. And I hold them. And then when I definitely have enough for an order that day, I box'em. I'll package today's eggs and then I'll package yesterday's eggs. And then if I need to go into the day before, I'll go that way I don't start with the three day old eggs and move forward. Does that make sense? Yeah. Because you, you want to give quality, right? And the youngest earliest, whatever you wanna call it, hat pop out, egg is the best. And I always send extras so you know what you have, and then extras. And I know what my fertility is. So if my fertility, like when we came off that ice storm, my fertility dropped. So I sent a lot of extra eggs. I waited a couple weeks before I started shipping again anyway, but then I sent several extra eggs. Now I know my fertility is really high, so I may only send two extra eggs. That's because you hatch every week. Like people should, and you know what your rates are. Right? And that's also a good way to wind up with a plethora of chicks. And who don't love chicks? When you're feeding them every day. Okay. Your feed guy loves it. All right, so the next thing that we hear, I know you love it. The next thing that we hear is I receive my eggs and they look like they're all in different stages. So that goes back to how often does the seller collect eggs and does she really know where she's getting her eggs from? So my chickens all have nest boxes. They can't like hide behind the tractor and lay eggs. So if the seller has free range chickens, that's fantastic. But is she collecting every day from every location or is she just going out there when somebody has an order and finding a random dozen eggs? Because if that happens and she finds a nest that's been out behind the tractor in the sun for four days, those eggs are going to be the embryo age of those eggs is gonna be older than a fresh egg. And that, and if that's in the south, yeah. And then they put it through the post office and you wonder why they hatched a week early. That's'cause they've been incubating for a little over a week. So at that point we're going by embryo age and you just will have to be aware of that. And plan your lockdown accordingly. Should you receive eggs like that in a. Perfect world. The person collects eggs every day, keeps them in a cool, dark spot, out of the sun and ships quickly. And that's another thing I, it's not on our list, but let me just digress for just a minute. For some reason, people have gotta in their head that they can only ship on Mondays and Tuesdays. And for the life of me, I do not understand that concept either. If it if you're in somewhere where your post office sucks and you know it, then I could see the precaution. Over here in the real world where I try to spend most of my time, even on Saturday after 12 o'clock, when your post office closes. Your mail still moves. Yeah. As long as you dropped it off. Because I have been, I passed a post office at two o'clock in the morning that had a 18 wheeler backed up to it, and I saw stuff going in and out of it. Yeah. So I noticed taking the mail and moving it just the retail counter. Is has hours. The rest of the post office works 24 7 basically. So if I mail eggs on a Monday and you get'em on a Thursday, or if I mail'em on a Thursday and you get'em on a Monday, that's still four days, right? If you add that and carry the one and subtract. Yeah. Four days. So really what difference does it make? And if they're sitting in the post office, in the air conditioning, then you know, I don't know. I can't, I don't understand. So I just ship five days a week, it. It works well unless it's raining really bad. And then you only go to the post office four days a week. Yeah. I don't like to drive in the rain all right, so this, we got that. Store the eggs in a cool, dry place. We did all this stuff. Okay. Lastly is how do you find these sellers? So that has been a huge, I would like to have a dollar for each time. I have seen that question on social media. Yes. Because if that is the case, we may be having this conversation, but I would be retired because I've seen it 10 million times. Yep. And finally, somebody. Came up with a hatching egg directory.com webpage where verified people have, like Billy Joe Jimbob, can't just get on there. Somebody has to know that they're doing all the things right and checking all the boxes. That is a trusted individual to get added to that directory. Yes, so I created the hatching egg directory for those breeders who ship and foam and are NPIP. I don't hatch off their eggs and calculate their hatch rates or anything, but I promise they're real people and they use quality materials to ship their eggs. And so you can go to hatching egg directory.com. I've put in search. Engine of sorts in there. So you can search silky eggs or quill eggs or button eggs or whatever you want. And I don't view it really as competition really. I view what. You silkies go first. I need more silky breeders people. Come on. Oh, Jennifer. We can't even get a silky breeder to come on the show and tell us about their silkies. No, I don't understand. I don't understand, but they, it is the best hatcher in the world though. So anyway, I don't view having the hatching egg directory as a competition to myself. I view it as helping people find what they need. Because you would probably be really surprised at how many people contact me and say, Hey, do you know who raises? I don't know. The last one was for chocolate Orpingtons. Do you know who raises these? And I'm like, I really don't, but let me, and I had this just idea a few weeks ago and I was like, you know what, that's a great idea. So now I've just dedicated part of my website to this directory and all you have to do. Is ship an egg foam and have MPIP and send me your information and I will put all your information on this directory so people can find you. How much easier can it be than that? And the more people we get, the more buyers will come and it'll just build and we can just all work off of each other that way. And two, in all fairness. If somebody is located in Baja, California and when they search for hatching eggs for cix and the only person they can find is located in New York they might not get a good hatch rate because. In transport, one hiccup, and those things are gonna be in transport for two weeks. So if you are in Baja, California, go to the directory and look for somebody that's close to you that has what you have. Yeah. Because it may, that it means enough to you that instead of ordering'em and shipping'em. You actually have a conversation with a person and go pick'em up, like that could be a thing, and then you wouldn't have to worry about it at all. All kinds of options, but yeah. Yeah. So I'm adding to it every day and I hope that it continues to grow and becomes a thing because I think it's needed. You can't sell on social media technically, and I know people are tired of eBay. And quite honestly, eBay eBay's great for people getting started. I have stuff on eBay. But eBay's fees are so high. So if you can go around eBay and straight to the seller, then that is fantastic for everybody.'cause you get more one-on-one intervention and the seller doesn't have to pay all those fees. And can cut out the middleman. I'm okay. So hatching egg directory doesn't cost anything. You just go on there and search and you contact them has no fees whatsoever either way. I never thought to Steven say that. It's free and, but hey, I'll say this too. Do not email, call, Facebook message or text message one of us and ask us if somebody's on the directory. No, you gotta go look for yourself. Yep. Yep. Okay. So it's incubator season. If your incubators are empty, fill'em up, shame on you. And if you need help, we always have incubator masterclass.com. If you buy eggs from either one of us, you get that for half price. We also run a support group. We have a support group or Hata, holics Anonymous. It's Incubator Masterclass on Facebook. Did you know that is almost 16,000? People already, and it's only three months old. People want to know good information about hatching an incubator. Yeah, it's cool. People have started tagging me into the post Brian's roost. What do you think about this Brian's roost? What is the answer? It's fun, so I don't know. There's, we have to put, we do our best to put out information. Based on no, I'm not gonna say we do our best because we just flat out will not put out information that is not based on some kind of fact. Whether it be something we learned in school or something that we learned from our own in-depth research or something that we learned the hard way on our farm. We just, we don't do that. And we're not going to do that because there's a lot of that out there, and we're against that. We want people to have the best information they can and let it be what it is. Now I love the fact that we can do all of, almost all of this stuff for free. I just wanna add that the reason why we do have a small price tag on Incubation Masterclass is because we do have to pay for the website. So it has to support itself. The website, it's$17. Yeah. And the web, the website cost a lot. Yeah. By the time you start adding videos and lots of videos to the website. Yeah that 9 99 plan, don't cut it. No. So we are trying to put out as much information as we can to help everybody and just support everybody. That's what our plan is. Yep. All right. Next week I'll be here. Yep. See y'all later.