How To Begin A Successful Journey With Poultry: Part 3

0:00 Welcome to the poultry keepers podcast. This is part three of our conversation on beginning your journey to success with poultry. We're going to pick up right where we left off last week, so let's get started. What time of year do you find your chicks grow best for you? my spring birds tend to Develop the best chicken habits because they are more apt to get outside earlier, and starting them on a pop door and outside access At six weeks makes a completely different type of ranging bird than my fall hatch birds.

0:40 And my fall hatch tends to be lazier birds throughout their life because they stayed inside most of the winter. That's an interesting observation, john. What you thought? Yeah, the fall hatch. I'm actually able to track how much feed they're consuming because forage is Not factor and look at their feed conversion ratio and then when they do get out on pasture, just as we come into egg laying production, they get all that supplement. So I believe Hatching in the the lake fall early winter and getting them out on pasture in the early spring is the best for my birds. If I do a September hatch, those birds have time to figure out ranging coming into winter and they do pretty okay.

1:24 And then usually by spring they're already laying great sized hatching eggs. So I could start test hatching from them. I don't hatch a lot from them because they're still young and unproven, because to me a Pollock doesn't prove herself until she's made it to the one-year point and then another six months she will tell you more about herself. So I'm cautious on hatching from the younger birds. But I will do it to get a feel for what they're gonna produce like, so I can make plans for their future If they end up sticking through the program as soon as my electric fence is up and running inside the high tunnel, I'll throw my chicks out there and an Ohio brooder outdoors and you know, if it's negative 10 outdoors it's probably in the tens and 20s outside.

2:13 The Ohio brooder in the high tunnel and inside is nice and toasty and they can start figuring out chickening on their own. The sooner they can start learning that, the better they are as adults and getting out there and foraging and doing chicken things, which ends up making a healthier bird. I switch from spring hatches to fall hatches. But the reason I did that is Is then the bridge road island reds grow slow. Okay, my springtime birds would be up big enough go out. Just about the time it got hotter than blue blazes here and when it's hot those birds, they didn't perform well at all.

2:54 But I found that by hatching October, november I Could get good bodies grows, get a really going well, they'd be Six, seven months old by the time it really got hot. That's looted them. That makes a lot of sense in Florida. I'm trying to. You know, around here people start wanting to buy laying hands or point of lay pullets. 1618 week old hens available in the first week of April is kind of a target for me to make sales. So at that point I've already selected who I want to keep potentially for breeding and sell off all the hens for backyard Laying flocks that I don't want to keep and put my first batch of roosters in the freezer, except for anybody that I've got my eye on but if you've got Spring pellets ready to lay, you're ahead of the game and that's the first thing that sells out and that can get you your pallet of Chick-Starter to hit the ground running.

3:51 It's a financial relief first thing in the spring when you're looking at your feed bill and you've got, you know, 10 Point of lay pullets that you could sell for 30 bucks each that's. That's a pile of feed. Yeah, and everyone else is just getting started in chicks. Hardly anyone grows overwinter and it's a missed market and the hatcheries have figured it out. Have you seen the spring prices on started 12-week old pellets? Oh, Ridiculous it's absolutely insane. And they're just hybrids. They're not even breeding stock. This is just regular backyard layers being offered as shipped point of lay pellets. Can come to the farm and look at what we have available for sale and which ones they want.

4:31 They can see, but they can't touch the breeding flock that they came from. Mm-hmm you know. So there's a huge customer service and a rapport building with the customers as well, and Education as to what to expect and how to treat your birds so they succeed in their hands that brings us to something else we need to talk about is learning how to schedule your hatches. Okay, we know it's gonna take 21 days from the time we send them to the town. We get chick, but you also want to learn to schedule your hatches. Maybe you have a certain big show like the Ohio National come up that you want to go to.

5:14 Well, if you're hatching birds in late April or May, chances are they're not going to be in show condition. They're not going to be ready to show. They're not going to have their best tail. No, they're not going to be grown in. So you've got to learn how long it takes to mature your birds. Hopefully you know when you want to go to the show. You know take 21 days to hatch a chick and it's going to take two or three weeks before then to get fertility up. So you just start adding all those numbers together and you'll know when you need to set eggs to have chickens at a certain particular time.

5:56 And. Rick, we tried to schedule it so that Hen laid her first egg at the show as a showman. That's correct. Well, I didn't try, I just accidentally happened and that's how I learned about that. So I began to follow what Kenny Bowles, who's a longtime breeder of Rhode Island Red Battles and he actually originated the New Hampshire batter. But if you hatched a few chicks every other month, you'd always have birds in shape to show. I'm a fan of that method because it keeps the freezer full too. You just like to hatch chicks? Come on, I'm not going to hatch a hollock, I've got a problem. You have a regular outlet. I have two sale seasons here and two processing days here.

6:37 I just asked my meat buyer if he wants birds in the winter and he said absolutely. So I'm going to keep going. That was all the encouragement you needed, bud. All he had to say was yeah, we eat them in the winter. And then he was telling me about how hard it is to find them because they don't buy grocery chicken at all. They don't buy any of their meat at a grocery store, butchers it all direct from a farm, and I'm lucky enough to be the chicken person. So that gives you the ability to hatch out 100 eggs at a time and find that rock star. Yeah, so I can shop for what I need and I can shop for the breeding stock and I can work on building the flock up, and he only cares about are they ready to eat? Yet he wants 40 in November and I'm going to have to phone a friend to help.

7:23 Let's talk about shipping. Something else that you need to know to get your groove on here, and that's shipping. When do you want to get your birds? Not when it's hot. You want it to be a cool spring or cool fall. Well, overheating is a big problem. You want to be aware of seasonal availability. If you want birds in November, you want chicks in November. You may or may not be able to find a breeder that can accommodate that. So you kind of got to plan, head for that. And you also need to contend with shipping hazards, whether it's eggs or chicks or started birds. And if you're using the mail and thank goodness they're able to take those, because back in the day when I first got started, you got birds in, you had them shipped in by train.

8:12 Postal service didn't do it and can't play too much to even talk about with them on the airplane, but the whale has been taken into account. If it's too hot or too cold, I'm worried about it being too warm than too cold. You know spontaneous incubation, I guess you'd call it. If it's too warm, the eggs are going to start to do their thing. If it's too cold, they're just going to. As long as they don't freeze, eggs ship pretty good when it's cold. Because back in the day when I was an eBay junkie with hatching eggs, I developed a preference for fall, winter, early spring because it seemed to help the results.

8:53 And as far as the results, it varied from 0% to almost 100% and sometimes there was no rhyme or reason. Sometimes those percentages were the same from the same seller Because if I got good results I would go back to where the good results came from and then other people would end up on my do not buy from list. And the more you hatch and the more sources you try, you start to see the differences. Because I think what one thing people might not think much of is how strong the egg needs to be to handle shipping, and diet of the parent stock plays into that. Because from the thickness of the shell and how resistant it's going to be to how thick the white is, because you know how when you crack open a fresh, fresh egg and it has that ring of white and then like a looser white around that and when you drop it in a frying pan, the yolk is very perky and it stays.

9:50 It stands up. Yes, yeah, but Well, there's also a structure inside the egg called the chelise, which is what is responsible for holding that yolk in the center, and either one of those could be damaged or broken or stretched in transit. Or they could be weak from poor nutrition and not able to do their job. Right, so you never know where it is. Hopefully your breeder has been selected based on them doing all the right things, and then hopefully it hasn't been dropped, kicked in transit by an employee, the shorter the distance those eggs have to travel the better off, you're going to be. Sometimes, Well, we saw a drastic decrease in fertility just because the farm got a new gator and the person collecting was now driving the eggs in the gator rather than hand carrying them back.

10:38 Oh, and the vibration right from the gator, the vibration from the gator, just Because that can loosen up the membrane which would cause the air sac to move. I just started to say. Detached air sacs are a I won't say a big problem, but it's not an uncommon problem to have in shipped eggs and that's the reason why when you get shipped eggs you want to candle those eggs immediately and point them pointy and down. Yep. Yeah, give them a date of rest with the air sac 24 hours at least, before you put them in the incubator. Now for folks that are incubating air cell up in like a commercial rack, is that as important as people who are incubating on a side in a smaller tabletop incubator?

11:23 If they have loose air cells and you put them on their side, those air cells move. Yep. So if you plan on doing a lot of shipped eggs, I would actually strongly encourage you to get an incubator that'll hold them upright. It's going to save you so much grief than trying to fit some sort of contraption in there to get them upright. To increase your success, just go ahead and get an incubator that puts them there automatically. You know, I can almost assuredly tell you that if you have a detached air cell and you incubate that egg horizontally, you're not going to get a check out of it. It affects the pit too much, because where the bird needs to be. Naturally, it can't get there because there could be fluid there.

12:05 Well, they're counting on air behind that membrane when they first right, right I'll just take their first breath before they even come out of the shell, and if it there's no air, they just instantly drowned. Yeah and how well over we're on eggs here, but how they are packed. You can make a less movement the better. Let me ask you a question, Maddie. I know you ship egg from time to time not often, but every once in a while Okay, do you ship them in Personally in the box or vertically, vertically, why? They fit better. You look well the way I pack them. I put them in the individual foam tubes and that puts them in that vertical position with the air sack up.

12:47 So as long as that box is upright, the eggs are too. But I can't. I mean, I don't know what the post office is gonna do with them. That box might go and transit on its side with the eggs on the side. Both are gonna be labeled up when it's packaged because all the optical ideally character Recognitions on all the belt-fed equipment, and when it's loaded in the Vehicle it should all be labeled up. So the optimization process is helping us, but if we pack them up right, they stay upright Through the block of the there's another reason. If you ever tried to crack an egg in your hand, raw egg yeah, I give everyone the squeeze test. Yeah okay and scramble is it easier to crack that egg if you're holding it horizontally in your hand, where the pressure is applied from the side, or If you turn that egg before the pressure is applied to both ends.

13:40 Which is easier to crack? Sideways yeah oh, oh, yeah. Yeah, I Thought I had you. I thought you're gonna say very clean. No, I'm tracking. Yeah but yeah. Well, we've all done the trick where you can take an egg and squeeze it and and yeah, all your weight on it and it won't break, and then you tap it on the side, it's gone those eggs are designed naturally, or that they can absorb a lot of pressure from top to bottom, not so much from side to side, but that's still, you know, requires you, on the receiving end, to Rest the eggs. Candle them immediately, look oh absolutely for shipping damage. Yeah, you don't want to put a crack. That'll be your stinky one.

14:23 No permanent emotional scarring. I've felt to so many people that when they packed hatching egg they just stack them in horizontally. I've received them. That way didn't have bad results, I've had them. I've received them in the fancy, fancy foam cutout shippers. Yeah, I don't like those they're expensive? and what if the egg size doesn't fit the whole size and it can wiggle in there? The problem I had With those shippers. I got three different shipments. In those All of the boxes had suffered external damage and 50% of the eggs were not just cracked, they were crushed.

15:07 That probably goes into the type of the foam, because the density of absorbing impact would vary by foam type. Yeah, so if you cut corners on, cost and got a soft foam. It's gonna squish. I've gotten a lot of boxes from shippers that have been seriously damaged and the eggs have always arrived in very good shape. But as standard course, any shipped package, I count on 50% by the time I'm done. If I order 80 eggs I plan on 40. You're gonna make it past day four. That's a good average. Yes, it is 50% should be what you could hope for, because of how many different variables are involved. Even if the breeder's doing all the right things, transit can have a significant impact and then incubation methods after that so what do you guys think when people say I'm not?

15:58 Promising you anything. I'm not promising a single one to hatch. Well, I've had a blanket statement when I was shipping a lot of eggs. Results are not guaranteed. I mean eggs can be damaged in shipment, they can be broken in shipment. I don't know how an individual is going to incubate their eggs. There's a lot of first timers with incubation and they didn't get that grade of an incubator and it's their first time and they chose to do ship eggs. And then I've seen reputations destroyed where someone that doesn't know the ins and outs of hatching absolutely rips into a breeder on social media and blames them for not hatching.

16:48 When they're really not to blame when they're really not. Yeah, and it could be people who got all the way to lockdown and then lost all the eggs. Goes back to reasonable expectation and, like John said, my expectation is about 45%, 45%, 50%. If I can get that many hatching out of eggs, I am happy. That's why I usually order twice as many eggs as I want or I think I need. Yeah, sure, Something that I was having a problem with a while back was curly toes, and I wasn't sure if it was genetic or nutrition or incubation related. Once I got my nutrition under control I knew that wasn't the problem and I was still getting curly toes and I thought, you know, I had incrementally upgraded incubators along the way.

17:39 So I was still not sure if it was genetic or incubation. But once I got a really professional quality incubator, curly toes went away completely. Yep. Incubation, if it's not done correctly, can cause a lot of problems. I'll just leave it that way. There is a learning curve, for sure. Oh, sure there is. My first incubator, like my very first one. I was probably I don't know eight years old. It was the little plastic spaceship with a light bulb Yep, and I could put about four eggs in there. And they're done that and I had about a 25% hatch rate from my own free range happy mix block. Yep, well, most folks start with the nurture rate 360 or something of that nature, or I mean, that's actually.

18:26 I started with something even less than that off of Amazon. I think it was all of $79. And it's. It worked okay, but you know I had a lot of curly toes. And I didn't realize Did you have to ever, did you have to fool with a wafer thermostat at all? Those are fun. I went to a still air styrofoam. Well, we had a way further in the old GQF incubator and once that went out the second time I was like you know this makes more sense to just upgrade to the new control system and not worry about it anymore. Y'all were fortunate. Back when I was coming up, it was either a way for thermostat or a hand.

19:09 That was your two options. It's always easier when the hen does it. They just don't have the capacity. Well, unfortunately, with the wafer, when it fails, it fails to the hot side, not the cool side. I'd rather lose temperature than for it to spike. Oh for sure, I think it's a little bit of a recovery, fikes will take out the whole batch right there, Whereas, like we've had power outages that can go, you know, three or four days and I still might get chicks. Well, we've got tornado Well yeah. Really, when it comes to having eggs or chicks or stock, if it comes down to shipping them or going and picking them up, I would encourage you, if at all possible, to go pick them up, particularly if you're talking about starting stock or adult birds, shipping those birds many, many times here lately.

20:06 Folks are paying about twice the amount in shipping cost as they are for a chicken. Because you paid for $100 shipping doesn't mean you got a $150 bird, correct? You got a $50 bird and $100 shipping. The last time I sent birds it was probably two or three years ago. They were 15 or 16 weeks old and I could only get one into a box. So it was $90 average per box per bird, just in the shipping charge. And then you still have to buy the boxes because you can't just go get them from the post office free. These are like what $10? Or $15 specialty boxes, because they're regulated.

20:50 You can't pick any old box and put a bird in it and drop it off. They have to have vents on them. The vents have to be covered, so it needs to be full of holes, but then, with a screen over top of that, they have to be a certain size and you cannot exceed I think it's like eight pounds per box. I think so Well, when I got my start from my breeder I started out with. I asked for 100 eggs, started collection January 1st and they were very insistent that I couldn't they could not meet that schedule to get me my 100 eggs. But they were like great. But you know what I'm going to do the first two dozen, you're going to come down and pick them up as hatchlings, along with your second two dozen eggs.

21:32 And then everything else was hand at hand to hand, because it is such a huge investment to start your flock Right. This is not where you want to be cutting corners, so even purchasing hatching eggs from a really good breeder that has really exceptional quality of his bird. That can get expensive even just for a dozen eggs, you know. I think realistically you should expect to pay five dollars an egg. That's what you'd pay for a chick or an egg from a commercial hatchery, that's not unrealistic in the real world a lot. A lot of them are doing a hundred plus dollars a dozen.

22:17 Average egg prices being half as much as chick prices. So it varies from operation to operation, breeder to breeder, but roughly eggs are half as much as what chicks are to reflect that you might only get half of them. Yeah, you're gonna lose half, probably. But that doesn't mean that that egg was half as expensive to produce. It doesn't mean it's gonna make a good chicken either, because when I see people talking about show quality chicks or show quality eggs, I'm like how do you know? Like unless you're doing the diligence of pair breeding and you have a history of how that, yeah, and.

22:59 Said you know, you know what this? This is my. They said to you I'm putting this rooster with these hands, these are their production records and these are the eggs that you're going to get and they're going to be labeled as such. You can get a little bit out there with marketing terms and how people advertise. Well, a good breeder is gonna be pedigree mating and you're gonna have this relationship built with them before you hand over your money hopefully, Hopefully, but that's tricky. There's not that many people who do that. Well, it's hard for the new Person coming in to the hobby to know how to separate the good from the bad and not buy junk off of eBay or hey, I did get some good birds.

23:42 Everyone gets a lot of great birds, but you need to look at who's got truly very highly rated birds. One thing I started doing is when I saw a listing that interested me, I would go to that seller name and figure out how many different varieties they were offering. To figure out if they were an Eggmilk, cuz those are a thing. Yeah, well it goes. It goes back to having realistic expectations, you know, and at doing your research know your breeder know your breeder. Let's talk. We got one more topic to cover here before we close, but let's talk about when's the best time of the year to find good quality started stock or adult stock in the fall From their spring hatches that they've are.

24:32 They've grown them out, they have done their sorting, they peeled off their you know best 10% or so that they're gonna keep, and that's when you can Swoop on in there and scoop up some really nice birds and you already can see the qualities they're showing, because they're probably gonna be five, six, seven, eight months old and you only need one good trio. And you can, because when you look at the expense of growing 24 chicks, or 25 chicks to drop down to the five best birds, from that you still had to raise the other 20 Yep, and that costs a lot does and the breeder whose offering started stock there already paid that.

25:17 Well, this is the time of year I'm searching for somebody that I could maybe say because I've got some birds that are like really really good my second best that I don't have the capacity to carry, that I'd like to keep close as a backup and Maybe get somebody set up with some really great genetics. Well, you're gonna find that person, and then don't be surprised if, through the growth of the reputation, you might find those people Well before time. Well, they're usually lined up and then I can kind of qualify who I want to give my Second best and then maybe my third or fourth best. Yeah, cuz you're not working with quantity, you can't help everyone interested and I have to start asking Well, what are your flockals?

25:59 Yeah. I want to see a picture of your chicken yard before I even send you the questionnaire to fill out. Yeah, you don't want them to go somewhere and then end up as raccoon bait their first week. No, and it's my reputation as a breeder that's being put out there. I want to make sure that I provide them with a bird that's gonna do good in their environment. Yeah it sounds like we all firmly agree that the best time to look for these birds is in the fall, and and that that has always worked out for me. We've covered a lot of ground in this podcast and we hope we've Given you information that will help you become a better poultry breeder.

26:40 Until next time, be sure that you do your very, very best to keep your birds happy healthy and productive Folks. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll talk to you soon. Bye, Bye.