two branches homestead

There is nothing like witnessing the birth of new life. It never ceases to amaze us. Every year we try to hatch some of our own fertilized chicken eggs. This keeps our flock young and is often necessary because of predation. For many years we used two old styrofoam incubators, one with an egg turner, the other without. We have had varying degrees of success with them. We struggle maintaining temp and really have no idea what the humidity level is inside of them. For the most part, we have ended up with a less than ideal hatch rate. However, this year, things were different.

This year we used a new kind of incubator. We used one from http://www.chickcozy.com. It even came with a great chart and some calendars to keep track of our hatching journey. Right away we knew we had something different. The digital display allowed us to keep track of not just the temp and humidity, but it also kept track of the days. The automatic egg turner worked well and the drawer to add water was so much easier than what we were used to with the styrofoam incubators.

It also had a great built in candler that even worked with our brown eggs. No more finding a dark closet and a flashlight! We watched and waited and with three days left, we removed the egg holders and the turner automatically stopped for hatching. And then, before you knew it our first chick hatched!

He wasn’t alone

In all, we had more than a 75% hatch rate which far exceeded our expectations. The chicks fluffed up great and we had no post hatch losses. We were so happy with it that we shared it with the local preschool.

They had similar success and it was a big hit with the little ones. I mean, who doesn’t love brand new chicks.

Clean up was super simple and the plastic parts cleaned up much better than the old styrofoam, which should make our future hatches that much better. We are always trying new things on the homestead and it’s always nice when one works the way we planned. We hope that those little preschool boys and girls learned something, and who knows maybe there is a future farmer in the bunch. I think we will do another batch of chicks this fall so that they will be laying by next summer. It will also be nice to have the extra shelf space those two old incubators took up. If you are a homesteader, you know storage space is like gold. We have so much equipment to store. Who knows? Maybe we will even order some rare breed hatching eggs as it seems like less of a gamble now.