Results of our First Hatch of 2022!

Our first ever hatch has finally concluded! It was a fun experience, we learned a lot, and are already planning for the next hatch (including Guineas)!

We started off with 54 eggs — some Araucanas, Ameraucanas, Olive Eggers, and Black Copper Marans. I had personally picked these eggs up and drove them from Missouri to Wisconsin, an 8-hour drive. Some of the eggs were a week old by the time they got into the incubator. We candled the eggs on day 4 and again on day 10 to monitor progress. After the day 10 candling, we were left with 39 eggs of which 23 appeared to be developing as expected and the remaining 16 were darker, chocolate eggs that couldn’t be candled so we were unable to confirm if they were fertilized.

With that many eggs, we incubated 41 of them in our Farm Innovators 4250 Pro Series Circulated Air Incubator with Automatic Egg Turner and the remaining eggs in our Harris Farms Nurture Right 360° Egg Incubator — each has its pros and cons which I’ll be looking to share in future posts. I chose to do a dry hatch, meaning, I added no additional humidity to the incubator for the first 18 days. The ambient humidity hovered around 25-30% during this time. On day 18, when lock down started, I raised the humidity and did my best to keep the humidity hovering around 75%. It seemed premature, and definitely caught us off guard, but on day 19 the eggs started hatching!

Over the course of 4 days, 16 of the remaining eggs hatched into perfectly healthy little chicks! They are now happily getting acquainted to their brand new brooder box and we’re looking forward to sharing how they continue to developer the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned!