How to Get Better Hatches From Your Incubator – Audio Edition

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Tonight we're going to be talking about how to get the most out of your incubator. We want to help you increase your hatch rates. And and let's face it, if you're new to poultry and and you've never used an incubator, we know that that can get to be intimidating to say the least. I I know it was from me and I started back in the day with an old round galvanized Sears and Robuck incubator trying to hatch quail. And we won't talk about the success rate on that, but I'll just say that it was interesting. But that thing was about, yay, big around. And it was a pain to keep the humidity regulated. And I didn't even know enough that you need to worry about the humidity of the temperature regulated. I didn't even know you needed to worry about the humidity at that point. But it was a fun learning experience. So hopefully we're going to demystify some of the uh the functions of an incubator and why they're important or maybe why they're not important. But basically, an incubator function is to do two things. It's to maintain the proper temperature to hatch the eggs, and it's to maintain the proper amount of humidity or lower humidity to incubate your eggs and have a good hatch. And if you're just starting out with an incubator, one thing I would encourage you to do is to set that thing up well in advance of the time you want to put eggs in it. I would even say as much as 30 days, because one of the things that you're going to run into with incubators is learning the intricate parts of what works and what doesn't work, and in your location. Now, incubators all come with the same set of directions, no matter whether you're using them here in Florida or you're up in North Carolina or Pennsylvania or out on the west coast or up in Canada. But those instructions they make it sound like it's a one-size fits-all, but it's certainly not because what you deal with on a regular basis with your daily uh humidity levels can really make or break a hatch for you. So set it up, get to know how to operate it, get to know how to adjust the humidity levels, how to change the temperatures well in advance of ever putting eggs in there for the first time. Now, let's talk about some of the external factors that can affect your hatches. Where you keep your incubator can make a big difference. Back when I was first getting started, I I live in Florida and I grew up in an old wooden frame house, and there was no such thing as air conditioning, and you were definitely at the mercy of the outside temperatures and the outside humidity. But if you can, if you can put your incubator in a location that has a constant temperature, a room in your home, if you if you've got one you can dedicate to to running an incubator, is good. I know several folks, and and this was even goes back into the last century, they would recommend putting incubators in your basement. That's not something we have here in Florida with our sandy soils and high water tables. That that would uh might be a good place to keep ducks, but I don't think it would be a good place to keep incubators. But a constant temperature goes a long way because some incubators are insulated well, some are well, some are not insulated well at all. And we'll talk about those in a minute. But as to the location, you want it in draft-free because that can mess around with the temperature of your incubator, and you also want it in a location where it's not getting hit by direct sunlight, because you would be amazed at how fast that can pop up your incubator temperature. Some other things that can impact your incubator. I know when I was young and first getting started, I was a let's just say a frequent peaker just to make things sure things were all right. And with those little galvanized metal incubators, every time you opened it, you just lost humidity and temperatures, and it took a long, long time to recover that. So don't don't be peeping inside. If you're one of those folks, get an incubator that has one of those big clear plexiglass doors on the front, and you can see inside very, very well. Another thing that will impact your hatches is excuse me, the fertility of your eggs. So you want to make sure your birds are fertile. Uh, let's face it, with older birds, we have fertility issues. With birds that are overweight, there's fertility issues. And also, once you're feeding those birds, you know, you want you want a really good level of nutrition in your feed because that's going to give you a good level of nutrition in the eggs to ensure that you can grow a good-sized chick and hatch a good-sized chick, and that chick will get off to a good start to begin with. Some folks sanitize their eggs. I was not one to do that a lot unless I had some eggs that were very, very dirty. I didn't use sanitizing sprays, but there are some sprays out there on the market. I know some folks that use a product called Tec Troll. I have used it. I got the one in the aerosol can. So I could just spray it over the top of the eggs and slide the eggs into the incubator and go from there. I know some folks even add bleach to the water tray or pan in their incubator. I tried that one time. I didn't see a big difference that made me want to continue doing that. And maybe if there was something else I was doing that was causing there not to be a big difference at all. And recently I had a lady contacted me about a product. I'm not going to get into names because I don't want to get into trouble, but it is a nutritional spray that's marketed as something that you can spray on the egg. It is absorbed and helps feed the developing embryo. I I get a little cautious about products like that when they don't tell you what's in it. They just say it has vitamins and herbs and is all natural. But I I would personally be skeptical about that. I looked to see if I could find some research papers on the subject of nutritional sprays for that purpose, but I couldn't find any at all. I did find several that talked about sanitizing sprays, but nothing that mentioned any uh value in spraying a nutritional type spray on the eggs. So to just kind of take that for what it's worth. Another thing, external thing that we do that will affect the eggs, is turning of the eggs. Now, most of the machines available today either come with or you can purchase separately automatic turners. I know that when I went from a manual machine to an automatic machine to turn the eggs every hour, I thought I had died and gone to heaven because that was just a real load off my mind. But there are still some machines, some that don't have automatic turners in them. And so those eggs have to be turned manually. I would suggest if you're you're doing a manual turn on your eggs, I would do it an odd number of times per day. The reason I say an odd number of times, and I tried for three times a day, but that's so the egg doesn't rest in the same position for an extended period of time. So an odd number of times seems to work better for that. And folks, we're we're gonna leave plenty of time for questions, so don't be afraid to jump in and and ask a question if you have one. How an incubator is constructed also plays a role in how well it works for you. Some incubators have good insulation. I know I know the machine that that Karen uses is is well insulated. Some incubators are not. I know the old GQF machines were simply made out of plywood and weren't insulated at all. And I had three of those that I used, and I found that what I added uh some three-quarter inch rigid foam insulation just kind of wrapped it around the outside and the back and the front, and that that helped tremendously with the fluctuation of the temperature inside the machine. And speaking of temperatures inside the machine, what should we set the temperatures at, Karen?

SPEAKER_00 10:45

I was wondering if you were ever gonna give somebody an exact number or if you were gonna just keep dancing around it.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

So I'd like to set mine at 99 and a half and both my incubator and my hatcher.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Both of them, huh?

SPEAKER_02 11:01

So some folks will agree that by a degree or half a degree. I I was kind of always keep that simple, stupid kind of person. But I got good hatches and and good good embryo development, all those temperatures. As far as humidity goes, we haven't addressed that, but I'll get into the numbers that I used. And and humidity for me in in Florida is a bit of a struggle. I my incubator, I kept it in the back room here in the house, and the temperature is constant, and the humidity seems to run around roughly 45% relative humidity in the house, and I sometimes like to get my humidity levels down below that, around 40 degrees, depending on the kind of eggs I was hatching. 45 would work for most chicken eggs. I would, if I was hatching Baron's eggs and they have that heavy coating of pigment, dark brown pigment on the eggs, I I like to get it down around 40 percent. Now, for when I moved them from the incubator to the hatcher, I wanted that humidity up around 60 to 65 percent just so the chicks have sufficient moisture to where they can hatch relatively easily. I wanted to do what I could to get a hatch off in time. I I didn't didn't want draggy hatches. I was always a firm believer of when they start pipping in just a matter of a few hours, you ought to have chicks out and and hatching. And and Jeff, I know we were talking about this before the the show, but what are your thoughts about the time from removing them? When when when's a good point to get them out of the incubator and get them into the brooder? What should we be concerned about?

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Well, and that's what I asked you and Karen earlier, because I hear I hear all kinds of numbers. Some you know, I've heard 12 hours, 24 hours. I've heard some people talk about leaving them in there for up to 48 hours, waiting on other eggs to hatch or or whatever, making sure they're dried off. From the chick's health concern, you know, I'm kind of worried about how soon they eat. So we know through studies and trials that establishing a bird's appetite occurs in that first 48 hours. So the sooner we get a full crop and emptied and filled again, the better, right? That bird's actually going to be your more vigorous bird, it's gonna have the best growth and development. So, you know, I'd be, you know, like said earlier before we started the show, I'm okay with 12 hours, but I don't see I think you're jeopardizing the birds to go, you know, much longer than that. We need to get them started, we need to get them on feed, they need to find that feed, you know, as quickly as we can, you know. So, yeah, you know, I I get it, they got a yolk sack that's good for four to six days, depending on the bird and and all that, but still their eating habits are developed in that first 48 to 72 hours. So the sooner they find feed and they get going, the healthier they're gonna be and you know, longevity in life and all that.

SPEAKER_02 14:46

So and to me, uh a good strong start right up front goes a long way to developing birds that are very vigorous throughout their life. So you you heard it from the man himself.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

You uh right. I have to there's so many, you've brought up so much stuff. Let me I need some help here. All right, so we just contradicted ourselves. If the if don't peek into your incubator more than you have to because you'll ruin the settings, but get your birds out of the hatcher as soon as you can. So those two things seem in contradiction to me because they both require you opening up your things.

SPEAKER_02 15:31

Well, what I'm what I'm saying that there's no peak is is you know, if I went in, I I the machine I had to begin with, you had to physically open the machine to turn the eggs.

SPEAKER_03 15:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 15:44

But then I would go in there just to open the machine to make sure all eggs were present in the county for I don't know what I was expecting or why I was doing.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

You're expecting rats to get in and carry them on.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

But just open it as little as possible because some of those machines, it does take them a time to build the temperature back up, and it can take even longer to get the the humidity back up where you want it to. So that that's what I was referring to there.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

And in reality, I really only asked that because I wanted to tell you a stat, then I figured out once.

SPEAKER_02 16:23

So that was how many how many times you average a day peaking.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

No, so much of it is about what your incubator is, right? It you know, I mean, like so if you have a little styrofoam incubator that's you know that that you open that up and your room air is drastically different, then you're you're taking a long time to get back up to to where it was. Um I did a thing on my GQF incubator. So whenever I open them up, I turn them off first so the fan isn't blowing the stuff out. Do you know what I mean? So turn it off, open it up, close. I opened it up for six minutes and then I closed it, and it took less than three minutes to get back to where it was after I opened it and just left the door open for that amount of time for candling. So if you don't have, if you have a fairly steady, a large area that's got a fairly steady in your room, your room isn't drastically different, then it's not as big a deal. But I think, you know, so just find out for yourself. Do that as part of your prep when you're putting your incubator on. Find out how long it takes to get back to its settings, you know. I mean, because you might find it's barely anything. That's what I find for hatching and for you know, in the cabinet, in the large in the cabinet ones that as long as you turn them off first, it took a lot longer when you had it blowing the whole time because it blew everything out of it.

SPEAKER_02 17:52

Um and and don't do what I did one time.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

I turned it off, did what I needed to do, shut the door and walked away and didn't I did I've done that 50 times, usually to not roach determined, but but and uh and another thing, and and I tell you don't peek in all this stuff, but you know, um if if you're using a hen to hatch eggs, she doesn't stay glued to those eggs for 21 days.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

She's off getting food, getting water, pooping the whole nine yards several times. Uh so there's that side of the coin too, but I don't know, there's just something about a hen that they seem to have much more success hatching a clutch of eggs than I ever did. And I tried to figure out, you know, what am I doing different than the hen is? I don't I can't answer that.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

I'd be really curious what the humidity under that hen actually is, because every time I reach in under a hen, it always feels very high humidity. I mean, very high humidity.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

But that's and it even feels the feathers feel moist embedded almost.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Yep. So that that would be interesting if we could figure out the humidity under a hen.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Well, and it's not the same at all times because I think they have done studies that hens will wet their breast if needed and not if they don't. Like literally, they have some, but I'm not sure that was chickens. I think that might have been songbird of some sort. But but the logic is perhaps they would do something similar.

SPEAKER_02 19:37

Chicken would have a hard time wetting their breast with a nipple drinker, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

True.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

I'm just saying. Um incubator construction factors, and and we talked about this a little bit, but how well is the incubator insulated? Plastic machines, and and there's a lot of them out there on the market, and I know a lot of folks have success with them, but to me, they seem to be more influenced by external temperatures, causing them to go up and down. I I my youngest grands, two youngest grandsons wanted me to get them some hatching eggs. They were going to do a hatching project at school, and I said, Well, I tell you what, you bring me the incubator so I can get it set. And it was this little thing about so long and so wide, so high. I I can assure you that they had temperature fluctuation problems. They out of 18 eggs, they hatched one egg.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

So uh And it was a boy. I'm just teasing.

SPEAKER_02 20:48

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

That's just what people always say. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

But they um I was reading the directions that came with the incubator, and it specifically talked about hot spots. Where they where they were on that particular machine. It would hold 18 eggs, but if you didn't put eggs in the hot spots, you were down to about nine or ten. But because that's how bad it was. Let's talk about hot spots in the incubator. I was Karen, I think we've got a graphic there. I know you were. Let me actually go full screen with this so I can see what I'm talking about. But the two images on the left shows egg placement in the incubator. A typical, here it says typical consumer cabinet incubator. This would be like your GQF or your Dickies and some of the other models out there. But most of them have a heating shelf up on the top, and the airflow goes from the heating shelf and then kind of circulates down and around and back up, and it kind of cools off in the process. So it's important to learn A, if your machine does have hot spots, and B where they're located. Now, how do you do this? Just put several thermometers in there. And a word on thermometers is you want to use thermometers that are calibrated. Because I know I've experienced, and and some of you may have too, if you go down to Walmart, for example, and get four digital thermometers and put them in the exact same place in the incubator, you're probably going to get four different temperature readings. Calibrated thermometers won't do that. But I would I would put one in the top back of the top shelf or the top shelf in the back on the incubator, maybe one in the front on the middle shelf, and then one sort of in the midpoint on that lower shelf, and then I would even put one in the bottom of the machine. Pretty soon by moving those around, you can identify any hot spots or cold spots in your machine. Most I may get in trouble for this, but most of the incubators we buy for hobby use don't have the best air circulation. They have one fan motor, and that's it. That's what they use to blow the air around the whole cabinet in that incubator. And I know a friend of mine, uh Clink Oakley, has installed an additional blower in his GQF machines, and he said it maintains a much more even temperature throughout the height and and the width of those machines. So that might be something to consider. Just remember if you're hatching where chicks can get into that, you want to screen off those fans because you're gonna have a mess if you don't. But uh even uh if we look on the uh two images on the right, we got a still air, what he calls a desktop machine and a circulated desktop machine. And you can see that the different how the striations of those temperatures are, and it compares in that still air machine, you got basically a hot air, a hot area and a cold area down below, but with the circulated airflow machine, you still got the areas above and below, but then you've got sort of that mid-range in the middle. Folks have asked me where I should put my thermometer. And my the recommendation I always give them is to put it sort of in the a hatching tray, or excuse me, an incubation tray on a level with the eggs, because you want to know what's the temperature at the level of those eggs, not what's the temperature up at the top of the machine or the bottom of the machine. And uh thermostat hydrometers are another thing you want to use, and you can get basically two types. You can get a wet bulb and a dry bulb. Karen, do we have a graphic on that?

SPEAKER_00 25:47

On the well, you've got a data logger is on there, but okay, we'll record and talk about the the digital data logger.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

This is an electronic thermostat. It's calibrated, but it measures not only the temperature, but it measures the humidity in the machines. And this particular one measures it and records it every five minutes. And if you look towards this little plastic covered tip, you can see it has a USB plug, and you can plug it into your computer and download that data as a spreadsheet, and you can identify because it takes so many samples, you can identify things that happened during the day that caused temperature, humidity spikes, or or drops, or whatever. I I really like these. I use them. They have gotten pretty expensive. I think they're about 120 bucks, but it has really helped me fine-tune my incubation process not only with the machine, but help me identify any environmental factors that may be impacting those. But the the deadlogger units are I I like this one because it's small and I can actually just drop it into an egg tray if I want to. They have some that are kind of square-shaped and a little bit boxed in there. It's a little bit hard to place those, but I I really like that little torpedo-shaped unit there. It comes in.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

Well, and I have to just to get you in, just to get you into 2022, there's a lot of wireless app-based tags now that will send you an alarm, you know, if your if your incubator gets below a certain, you know, I mean, but I would say most of those are designed for refrigerators and stuff like that. So you need ones that can withstand the humidity in an incubator, but they also are not designed to give you tenths of a degree. I mean, they do, but like you cannot set an alarm, at least for the two brands I tried, do not set an alarm at 99.4 and at 100.3, and they will go off constantly because they're just not quite that. You got to get yourself down to 97.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

And you know, yeah, I think the way she led me into that was she was insinuating that I'm old. No, I'm just saying no observation on my part.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

I'm just talking about it's the same information from your digital with your USB. It's just that it'll wirelessly send it to your phone in between, so you don't have to wait to plug it in.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

I can I can tell you how the old timers used to deal with that. They had a thermostat, but they also had a backup thermostat. Now it didn't do anything if the temperature got too low. But if we had the disaster that I had last year, where the temperature spiked over 120 degrees and cooked everything in the machine, the backup thermostat would shut the would cut the temperature off if that one thermostat failed, which which is exactly what happens with mine. So backup thermostats are your friend if you have, particularly if you have the old units that have the wafer style thermostats, though those can be handy in. And they even had back in the good old days, Karen, they had uh incubator temperature alarms back then. And it sounded like the world was coming to an end when that thing went off.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Yeah, I programmed mine to speak to me. So literally I'm standing at work and it says, hatcher two, temperature alert, hatcher two, temperature alert. So I was like, hmm, I think I need to change that because it just turned out.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

It didn't have a shut-up button on the outer.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Hold on. All right, so if you so we talked about you gave a humidity, right? You said you liked it a little bit less than 45%.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

For for my conditions here in Florida, because we have a naturally high humidity most of the year and here inside the house, it runs around 45 degrees unless we're getting a thunderstorm, then it may spike up a little bit around 50. But that our rain is not like most everybody's rain, it doesn't last too long. Um air cell development is another thing that you can go by to see if you your humidity is on track. Now, remember that there's a lot of moisture in an egg, and that chick as it grows and develops, you want the moisture in that egg to slowly the excess moisture to evaporate on on the day one of the egg, day one of incubation, that air cell is very, very small up at the top, but by about a week, it should be down to about, and and here again, this is roughly this is estimation, this is not chiseled in the stone, so don't get out of here.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

You have to hold your egg right up to this diagram when you're candling.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

But and then by day 14 it should be a little bit larger, and day 18 it should be a little bit larger. Uh, if if you put eggs in your incubator, and on the 18th day you see that line further down to where the egg actually starts to taper in, you've got low humidity issues. So you need to up that humidity as much as possible. If on day 18 it looks looks much more like day seven or day 14, you've got too much humidity in your incubator and you need to drop it down. People will ask me, okay, I I've got a water pan, and how do I decrease the amount of humidity? Because it's that water pan is the size that it is. What you can do is you can take a piece of styrofoam and you know, cut it to where it's maybe start out with maybe half the size of the water pan surface. Float the styrofoam on on the water surface so you just cut the amount of water surface exposed by 50%. Watch watch your humidity and see what it does. And and you may have to just, you know, keep a sharp knife here handy there. And as you are watching the humidity in your incubator, you may have to trim off a little bit more of that styrofoam. I know some folks have tried wrapping the top of the uh water pan or tray with aluminum foil or plastic wrap. I I don't know, I've never tried that. I have done the styrofoam routine and gotten good results with that. But if you can reduce, if you need to drop the humidity, if you can reduce the surface area in your water pan or tray, it will drop the humidity because it's not allowing as much water vapor to evaporate.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

I like the diagram and for somebody who's really serious or really having trouble hatching, especially with non-chicken eggs. I feel like us chicken people are super lucky. Like everything's designed for us, but turkeys and geese and duck and all those like are a whole other world, and and it towards the end, they it they require more humidity to hatch.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

I I know the commercial waterfowl operations, but those big machines they'll actually open the doors and go after them with a water hose just spraying them down to raise the humidity there towards the end of the habit.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

But but if you if you literally don't know or you can't figure out, because measuring humidity, no matter how expensive your hygrometer is, is very, very difficult. Do you know what I mean? Like they're notoriously inaccurate. So, but just knowing whether your eggs are progressing along the way you like.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

So either by looking at their cell or by weight charts, when you when I every time I candle eggs and I do it at about depending on the breeding variety, anywhere from seven to ten days for my first candling, and and then again at two weeks, and then again just before I move them to the hatcher. And part of the reason is not only to check for the amount of raptor or increase in the size of that air cell to make sure that's on track, but I also want to remove any eggs that are infertile or any embryos that have started to develop and then died, because you need to get those out of the machine, particularly if they've died in the shell, because they can give off some gases that are not really all that healthy or or anything like that. I know some folks load up the machine and transfer everything to the hatcher on day 18 and and don't take those dead in the shell uh eggs out. But yeah, be sure you get those out of there.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

I just want to John said this while you were talking about a foam sponge, it works great, but I just want to clarify a foam sponge raises the humidity, it doesn't lower it. So you were talking about trying to lower the humidity.

SPEAKER_02 35:26

I was talking about trying to lower it on a now.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

If you have a sportsman or a cabinet incubator, you can just make a smaller water pan, right? But in a in a desktop that where it's like fills in all the little things, that's where you're having trouble lowering the amount.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

See, I had a Brindsey that had a specially designed water tray that slid in and out on a couple of rails. And I I looked to see if I could find like a little water pan or something like they use in the hospital to give you sponge band, but I couldn't find anything that fit it was the right width to work well. So yeah, they're fit.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

All right. Oh, okay. Well, you just went through. Sorry, he was talking about this, and I did not put the slide up, so humidity too high. Sorry about it.

SPEAKER_02 36:16

And if you look at this picture, we're not talking anywhere.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

We already went through that. So yeah, let's see.

SPEAKER_02 36:24

Okay. And and Karen, this is where I want you. Karen, Karen has what I think is sort of one of the best incubators on the market today that's not through the roof price-wise. I I know a lot of folks that use them besides Karen, and they said they have had phenomenal results with these machines. So, Karen, I just call them the hatching time incubator because I can't pronounce you can't pronounce that word meaning.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

I don't know. But I don't know that you can mine. I'm sure you can buy them other places other than hatching time, but so I don't know why I bought these, probably because people on Facebook were raving about how exciting they were. So this is the model I got. The most exciting thing for me was the fact that it was easier to clean. Not only does the front door open up like a GQF, the back door opens the exact same way. So you can get into it from both sides. And the biggest thing is all you have to do is it's the whole thing, I've power washed it. That's what makes me so happy. Like there's no electronics inside of the cabinet once you've removed the trays because the turners are actually attached to the actual tray in these models. So you can saturate that stuff here, just not the little black box on top, but everything else. So that makes anything I can power wash makes me happy. So the this particular model comes as the S and the H both stand for both stand for setter and hatcher. So I bought two so that I could use them independently. So cleaning was easy, but you don't have to. All right. Uh, we have to go back because people don't care about this advertisement for something they would like to go back to this slide. Um, so rep, you want to discuss this again? No, you're eating now. He's gonna so all right, y'all. Let's see. Can you throw the two high? Yes, so that's what we're doing now. So if that's the air cell, I'm gonna be quiet. Jeff, you want to talk about this slide?

SPEAKER_01 38:49

The air cell? Why did we lose rip? Are you having a snack?

SPEAKER_02 38:55

No, I'm still here.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

So I'm just putting it back up for Drew and Pat. So all right.

SPEAKER_02 39:04

Did they have a particular question?

SPEAKER_00 39:06

I just didn't put it up for long enough.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

Oh, okay. And folks, all these graphics are in a document called fine-tuning your incubator that's in the file sections on Poultry Keepers 360. It's already there, so you know, don't worry about trying to sketch it out or anything. Just go into the file section and look for the document. Fine-tuning incubation for your incubator, and they're all right there, along with other good information too.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

All right, so we'll go back to this advertisement that we're not being paid for. All right. So the big difference in between it, I circled them. So the one in red is that the humidity is sort of like the brint, the more advanced Prince's where you like literally you set a number on the controller, and then this one humidifies with steam. So it, you know, it just it blows a cool color and blows steam in when it needs to and doesn't when it doesn't. And then it just was pretty darn stable. And like I said, we already talked about the hatching trays. Somebody on here is saying that they thought the egg trays were obnoxious. I agree a little bit. I don't like that my eggs are all falling sideways, but I do like I do like the fact that the individual egg trays can either turn or not turn, especially if you're doing shipped eggs. You can have half of your eggs turning and the other half not turning. Or if you, you know, so I sort of like the redundancy of each tray having its own turner, but they store awkwardly. So I don't know, not great. But I just this is the part Rip really wanted me to talk about. So here's my results between the two. So I was using the GQF Sportsman's before. So in 2021, I did I only did three hatches of Rhode Island Reds, one each month, April, May, and June, with an average hatch rate. This is the hatching rate of 72%. But the average hen age was a year and a half. But last year, and with the new machines, actually, it's different because I did weekly hatches every single week between there, but I did average 10% higher with an 82% hatch rate, and my hens were much older that year. So the average hen age of three, but a much higher hatch rate. So I meant to do a trial between the two of them, but it was working and I didn't feel like it. So I would have had to pull out the other one and clean it out and do all that, and I didn't.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

So but that's all overall. You're you're pleased with the the bells and whistles on that machine.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

I and I I did, I have to admit, I love the humidity where just setting the little, you know, just giving it a number to aim at and and not really thinking about it other than making sure the thing was full.

SPEAKER_02 41:55

A question on your humidifier does that need distilled water, or can you use tap water in that?

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Oh, you can do whatever you want, but I did use distilled water. So, but I use distilled water in my GQF too to stop the tray from getting because I use well, I have well water, so that's got a lot of so my GQF auto feeder thing would get full gritty, you know, so that the float didn't work real well. So I use distilled water either way. Um good point. All right, are you ready for the nine million questions?

SPEAKER_01 42:30

There's a lot. I I was amazed. There's a there's a ton of questions.

SPEAKER_00 42:35

All right.

SPEAKER_01 42:35

I'm gonna lecture and answer all the questions.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

All right. Well, we'll start with the one for Jeff. What do we feed to make eggs that you can actually hatch?

SPEAKER_01 42:46

Well, actually, you start feeding a higher nutrition diet about three weeks before you start collecting eggs. Don't wait till you're actually in the middle of collecting the eggs. But Karen, do you have that graphic for that we used previously for the easiest one I had at my fingertips mid-show? So what's that?

SPEAKER_00 43:05

This is the easiest one I had at my fingertips mid-show.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

It's fine. Yeah, we're looking for that 17 or 18% protein. I I don't even want to focus on the protein. What I find is there's not enough fat in diets, and a lot of that fat goes into the yolk for feeding the chick and for chick development. So looking for a fat level of at least five. Then I start getting really worried about the vitamin levels because the vitamin A, the vitamin E, and part of the vitamin D will transfer into the egg for the chick health, you know, chick vigor. And same way with the amino acids, you know, those are going to transfer as part of the proteins. And, you know, as far as making a better, you know, just a healthier chick. But to get better fertility, these are the things I'm looking at vitamin E levels above. 50 I use per pound. You know, and this graphic will be out there. You can come back to it. You know, if you want to play the video again, just zoom ahead to 47 minutes and you'll be right where you want to be. But yeah, I mean, feeding your birds for breeding season started, you know, starts three weeks minimum before you actually start collecting eggs. I mean, you see some improvements in a week, you can see more improvements in two weeks, but to actually kind of get the body up to where it needs to be nutritionally, I feel you need, you know, a full 21 days to really get it where you want to be.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

Jeff, I do have a question on one of the vitamins only because somebody asked me today, and I was going to ask you about it, but selenium levels. I I know what you've got on your your chart there, but if someone's feed is low in selenium, what can they do to supplement it to get it back up? Or is that one of those things we really don't need to worry about all that much?

SPEAKER_01 45:03

Yeah, I mean, as long as you're at that 0.3 parts per million, it's plenty. 0.3, 0.4. As a feed, feed manufacturers can't legally go above 0.3. Okay, it's not an option. Here's what people, here's what you don't hear anywhere else is vitamin E and selenium are connected to each other. In other words, they they make each other work to their fullest extent. And without enough vitamin E or without enough selenium, either one of those can actually be toxic to a bird, right? Too much E's bad, too much selenium's bad. But they have a synergy, is the fancy word, where they work hand in hand with each other to promote the immune system. It and anytime you promote the immune the immune system, you're gonna have healthier birds. Healthier birds are gonna give you more fertile eggs. You know, it just it's all about overall health. I get nervous when people people focus on one thing like selenium. It's never about one thing, it is absolutely never about one nutrient. Okay, it's about the total mix of nutrients being appropriate or having the right relationship with all other nutrients in that feed mix. So just don't get hung up on selenium. You know, there's a bunch of crazies out there running around talking about the importance of selenium, and it is important. All things in moderation, okay? Just if you have the right amount, you have the right amount. Look at the overall picture of the nutrition that you're feeding, not just one or two items.

SPEAKER_03 46:48

Thank you, sir.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

All right, all right. When we were talking about what you put in your water tray, Marie asked, what does the bleach do in the water tray? And we've got some more questions around that, which I think are similar. I'd like to know what the best thing is to do with dirty eggs.

SPEAKER_02 47:06

So best thing to do with dirty eggs, if they are valuable eggs, I would wash them. I would use room temperature water so you don't worry about it being sucked into the eggs or into any of those things. But it's it becomes sort of a two-way street. I I don't know that just washing them by hand truly gets all the gunk out of the pores of the eggshell. If if back when I was raising a bunch of Rhode Island reds and I was hatching way more than I needed to, if I got really dirty eggs, I just didn't use them in the incubator. Uh because not only are they hard to truly get clean, but you run the risk of contaminating the other eggs in the incubator. And I know that some folks use disinfectants and all that for that purpose. And if you do and you have good results, God bless you, keep doing it. But you know, any anything we say on the show is well, I'll always try to use the caveat. If you're doing something different than what I say and it works for you, keep doing it.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

You know, but I use I use Tektral sanitizing solution on any eggs I hatch for anybody else, which I don't do very much anymore. But nobody puts their eggs in my incubator without without me without me sanitizing. That's my biosecurity there.

SPEAKER_04 48:40

So and honestly, folks, and you heard it right here on the shelf.

SPEAKER_00 48:45

Yeah, no, but I but I mean I had I've had a hundred percent hatch rates out of those sanitized eggs. So I believe that if you use a product design for that or something that works for you, it can did did you spray it on or did you dip the eggs? Uh I would I I maybe would say dip because I prepared the solution, but I mean so briefly that it might as well have been a spray. But I feel like a spray you can't make really warm like you can a yeah, a dip, you know.

SPEAKER_02 49:19

So I know there was a study done, and I forget the professor's name. He now works for James Wade Incubators, but he was at University of Arkansas Poultry Science Department, and he developed a method that used hydrogen peroxide spray in conjunction with medical grade black lights.

SPEAKER_03 49:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 49:42

And it kind of rolled the eggs through this machine, and and they got good results with that kind of sanitation as well.

unknown 49:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:49

I was wondering about ultraviolet lights because you know, we're we have really good success treating our well water, you know, with an ultraviolet light to kill coliform and E. coli and different bacterias. So it can be quite effective, and that way you're not removing the bloom. I saw the one comment, and I was gonna ask you, you know, do you think the bloom I mean it's there for a reason? I know it's a protective barrier for the egg. I I kind of hate to see it washed off. I I understand the sanitation. I'm not arguing with anything that Karen said a minute ago. So, but you know, to me, that bloom is really important. And I did want to go back to Ashley's question, you know, about the muddy eggs and laying on the ground. And I'm wondering, you know, if nest box location could help her out as far as and I just covered this when I was at the APA conference last week, and a lot of time nest box height off the ground is critical. And I don't know that people, you know, 16 inches is ideal. If you go too low, they lay under it, and if you go too high, they're just too lazy to jump up there. So about 16 inches to a perch rail. And if you don't want to do that, or if she's if this is a chronic floor-laying bird, you may want to put a nest on the ground just to you know get her to you know something else besides laying it in the mud. But yeah, I just you know that's that's all I had. The one person used parasitic acid, which I am a fan of because it's kind of a non-toxic cleanser, if you will, and it's widely used in the food industry as a sanitizer. And it's basically a fancy vinegar, if if you will. And but yeah, I I'd be nervous about removing the bloom off of the egg. I I think it helps to control that humidity and give you some egg preservation, you know, well into the incubation period. Just my thoughts, but I have no proof on that. That's just an opinion.

SPEAKER_00 52:03

And I cannot remember, I know it's Shelly Oswald, but I cannot remember what, but she's convinced, I don't remember why, that like just getting your eggs wet or whatever, that it actually takes to remove the bloom, it actually takes a little bit of friction. Yeah, but it's not, it's not just you know what I mean. Like, but if you had a muddy egg, if you had a muddy egg and you were scraping the mud off, then you'd definitely be scraping off the bloom. But right, um, but it's also not magic. You can't do everything.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

No. So you know, in some states they have you're required to dry clean. You can't even use a liquid for sanitizing your eggs, like the state of Minnesota. If you're gonna sell eggs for table eggs, there's no washing. Washing is not allowed. You have to dry scrub, you know, dry scrub or sand.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

What's that? It's the opposite of North Carolina, where you have to lose the eggs.

SPEAKER_02 52:56

Same way here in Florida, you better wash them.

SPEAKER_00 52:59

All right. Okay, let's see. I'm gonna move on to the magic word dry hatching. So there's a couple of questions on this. So, what are your thoughts on dry hatching in the beginning and then bumping the humidity up the last few days? So that's one. And then John also, what about dry incubation? You read about on social media.

SPEAKER_02 53:21

Dry hatching is kind of a misnomer. It's really dry incubation, where you don't add any additional water in in the incubator. I think a lot of a lot of it has to do with your drick geographical location and the amount of rainfall you get. I have used dry incubation with great results. Um for for me and my location, I'm a proponent of it. Now, it may be an entirely different situation up in Minnesota or Canada or wherever. You may not be able to get by with it. But I didn't add any water in my machines until the eggs transferred from the incubator to the hatcher. Then I bumped up the humidity to help with the hatch.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

But time of year makes a big difference too. Somebody in here is talking about, you know, Indiana, mid-winter with the heaters running full blast. Yeah, you're you need tons of water to get, you know what I mean? So it's more about more about the number than it is whether you added water or whether nature adds water.

SPEAKER_02 54:24

Exactly. That's the reason I said don't don't necessarily go by the instructions that came with your incubator. I use that as a starting point. Adjust as you see and witness and see what's going on. You can make adjustments then. But you know, and and I keep harping on it, but your location makes a big difference in how your machine performs and how your eggs hatch.

SPEAKER_00 54:52

I knew there was a comment in there somewhere, so I just wanted to put it up. All right, let's talk a little bit about storing your eggs before before you before you. So one, are you a proponent in turning the eggs before incubation during storage?

SPEAKER_02 55:11

What I would do, or what I have done, I guess I should say, is I put my eggs in egg flats and I'll have a uh a tuberfore, just a piece of a tuberfore laying in there, and I'll put one side of the flat on, and then I'll rotate it to the other side. Usually I try to do it twice a day, but more frankly, it was probably closer to once a day. I have a friend in Pacific Northwest who just disconnected the heating element and an extra incubator, extra GQF incubator, and he puts it in there and it just turns automatically. I have personally I've had good results with turning the eggs, and I've had good results with not turning the eggs. For me, I think it boils down to as much as the freshness of the egg when it goes into the incubator as to whether whether it's turned or not. And I I'll say the same thing about humidity. I I never found the need to keep my hatching eggs in a humid environment. I mean, here we got enough humidity here uh to patch a road a mile. So I never I never had to worry about that.

SPEAKER_00 56:38

And I did a very small-scale experience experiment with turning and not turning last year. So half of them went into the you know, the automatic turners you can buy for the styrofoams and half of them did not, and there was absolutely no difference when they were set within seven days between the two groups.

SPEAKER_02 56:59

You get out past that seven-day mark, then then you can have a problem.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

Yeah, all right. So, and I think you sort of answered that right there. North Star Farms is hatching a huge amount of eggs. Look at this, they want to hatch up to 50 to 1,000 eggs weekly.

SPEAKER_02 57:13

500 to a thousand.

SPEAKER_00 57:15

Yeah. So wine fridges aren't quite big enough for that. But my vote would be if you're hatching them weekly, don't even bother unless you're somewhere super hot.

SPEAKER_02 57:25

If if do you know what I mean? They've got them on a inside in a control temperature environment. I probably wouldn't worry about them.

SPEAKER_00 57:34

But if you're in Florida and it's June, then storing your eggs just you know, you need to have it. I mean, it you can't just leave them in the garage for that amount of time.

SPEAKER_02 57:44

No, you know, so you'll have chicks in three weeks if you do that.

SPEAKER_00 57:48

But I use a wine fridge, but obviously not hatching in those kind of numbers. I don't know. You know, just to think, my brother has a beer fridge that he's taken a freezer and then changed to a thermostat that they do for so that that freezer is now a you know, a beverage refrigerator, just with some plug-in adapter. So you could do that with a stay upright freezer and then change it so that it keeps a solid temperature at 60 degrees or something. So if I was going to do that kind of quantity and you really needed it cool, you might look into they do that a lot for beer. So look at that.

SPEAKER_02 58:30

Yeah, yeah, that's probably a a good way to do that.

SPEAKER_00 58:36

All right, let's see. All right, Craig was willing to give us some hard and fast numbers, so he sets his GQF at 100.5 for best results, his hubiter styrofoams, factory preset, and old sterile air, y'all can read. And then he loves to set the broody hens to you know, all natural.

SPEAKER_02 59:01

So and you know, honestly, if you're raising show chickens, I I don't know what the difference is, but chicks raised by a broody hen have much better feathers uh and feather quality than uh brooder-raised chicks.

SPEAKER_00 59:18

All right. Kelly wants to remind us all that despite what Karen says, older doesn't mean worse. And an old telephone incubator with an allen wrench on the top to adjust the temperature hatch on eggs that were even shipped, bought a new one a few years ago and hadn't been able to hatch a thing. So I am sorry to hear that. I hope you kept your old one.

SPEAKER_02 59:39

And I'm sorry, Kelly, I shouldn't have laughed at that because I thought you were referencing my age.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

Well, I didn't I said that. So do you have any? So you do not recommend the one that that classroom used, a small incubator.

SPEAKER_02 59:53

Well, generally the smaller incubators, the cheaper, the cheap, small incubators, just like chicken feet, you're gonna get what you pay for. If if you're going for the cheap, don't expect spectacular results. Just my rule of thumb.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:12

I don't have my chart now, but I actually have a graph with this answer. And the how long can you hold the eggs before putting it into the incubator? So with my personal experiments, I had no problem with a wine fridge hatching them all the way up to 25 days after that, it dropped down pretty rapidly. But I believe the general consensus is 10 to 14 days, yeah, better before seven. Seven is best, but ten to fourteen is I had a couple, I had a couple hatched over 40 days old, so it's not impossible, but why bother? But you know, let's see, back up to the top. All right, I think Rip, you did something about like this. Most of us live in homes with air conditioning that gives lower room humidity. Should we consider having humidifiers in the room with the incubator?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:09

You know, and we have AC here, and and it runs a good bit of the time unless it's cold. But our our humidity runs about 45% inside the house. And that's fine for my my machine and my setup. If you're having issues, a room humidifier might help you some. You know, if you've got a room humidifier, try it and see what kind of results you get.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:41

All right, so all right. If there isn't enough volume in the incubator, is using full water bottles a good idea to help keep consistent heat? So, what about putting foreign objects in your incubator with your eggs?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:54

So you know, I know some folks do it, and I know some folks use rocks in their incubator. I I never had any issues using and getting good hatches on using a less than a full incubator loot. And I I had at one point 600 and uh 1200 egg machines and and they were never full, but I I've still got good hatches in in the high 80s and into the 90s. As long as you've got that good air circulation, that goes a long way to good hatches.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:29

Back when I was first starting, I did actually call GQF on the phone and ask them that question, and they recommended putting the eggs all together, not evenly, well, I thought like evenly spread throughout the machine, and they said no, clump them together when you didn't have a full. So that's right making sense. All right, let's see. All right, so Barbara, I don't use a regular egg turner. My duck eggs sit on the bottom of my desktop incubator. Are there any tips or cautions for this?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:04

Again, that goes back to, and I'm assuming she's talking about hand turning. That goes back to turning them an odd number of times per day. I know some folks will make a mark or draw an X on one side of the egg so they know they're getting it rotated enough and it it's but just I I think I would probably use like a terry cloth towel, something that would keep the eggs from rolling around naturally by themselves, because no matter how careful we are turning them by hand, those those eggs, when we take our hands off them, they're gonna rotate a little bit. But just something to keep that egg stationary after it's turned, I think would be beneficial.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:50

All right. I do not know how to pronounce the name of this company, but everybody knows. So Brincy, Brincia, however, Steven Steven said they're they're supposed to be the best incubators in the whole wide world. So I don't know how they can call it.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

Steven, I've I've got a Brincy, I've got a Brincy over easy, uh, but I'm probably going to shift to that Samuka machine just because of the fact that it's a lot easier to clean. It has a door on the front, the door on the back, and I'm tired of doing this number to get into the back side of the the uh Brincy to to clean it up.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:31

North Star Farms also wanted to say that they do not like the egg trays on the hatching time, so there is a negative if if you but they do just if anybody needs to know, they've added a lot more models to the hatching time lineup now. You can get all the way up to 4,800 eggs now.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:49

Um so it's I haven't seen them loaded up.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:54

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:55

You definitely need that, I need a smaller machine, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:59

Yeah, they go down as low as 60.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:01

So well, I've I've kind of got my eye on that one, the 120. That'll that'll take me down from a 360 egg machine. So that that will curb my desire to hatch a lot a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:14

All right, so unfortunately, I was there long enough to okay. How long can you hold the eggs? Here's a good one. Steven wants to know can a flock of birds be bred year-round?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:31

Theoretically, yes, but you you need you need to give them a little time off to to go through the molt and and and do that naturally if as much as all possible. Jeff, I I I don't know. You worked with some of the commercial folks. How do they approach that? I they take time off, don't they, with the flocks?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:52

They're replacing, you know, they're replacing their flocks, you know, every so often. They'll they'll harvest eggs for about 40. 35 to 40 weeks out of the year. They don't harvest eggs for hatching early in the first couple weeks. And they they don't, once the eggs get too large or the shell starts to deteriorate in lately, they won't try and hatch those as well either. Because it's just you're just filling up the incubator with low risk or high risk, you know, probability that they're not going to hatch or they're not going to be good chicks. So that's more what the you know the large commercial guys are doing. Smaller flocks, I've got people that are doing year-round hatching. A lot of it's hen hatching. So once they get out of the breeding season in the spring, where they've collected, filled the incubator, you know, two, three, four, or five times, then a lot of them will let the hen, if she's still laying, like better hens, if she's still laying, they'll let her do a hen hatch. And I mean, we're getting hatches into June, July, August. You know, you can't so conceivably, I'm with you, right? Theoretically, you can do it. There's just a lot of things that have to fall into place to call it successful, you know, where you're getting at least a 50% hatch rate or higher. So, yes, yeah, I believe it can be done. I think part of that too is breed. I mean, a lot of hens just quit laying at a certain point, you know, somewhere in June, July, or August. And so you're not going to get eggs from them anyway. But some breeds that are more prolific layers, you know, they're going to lay eggs, you know, right through the summer. So a lot of the game fowl hens, because they're lighter bodied than the large fowl, you know, they'll if they're being fed right and managed right, they're laying eggs, you know, right into July, August. Had some laying eggs through the molt that hatched, believe it or not. So yeah, on a good diet, good management, and depending on the breed, yes, the answer to that question is yes, but a lot of things have to come together really good, you know, almost perfectly to make that happen.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:09

I I don't know if this is what he's talking about, but I was helping a guy earlier in the week. Actually, it was the weekend. Uh that his his hands were what I would call a sporadic layer. He has Brahmas. They they lay probably 15 or 20 eggs and take a break. They could take a fairly long pause in between clutches, so to speak. So I don't know if that's what he was referencing, that to get a goodly number of chicks, he would literally have to sit and hatch almost year-round when he's got birds doing that.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:49

I I would challenge him that his birds are overweight. You know, the Brahmas that we had in our small little flock were really good layers, you know, I'd have to think we were getting 200, 225 eggs a year, you know, but the birds got lots of exercise, they were outdoor, they you know, they were a certain amount of feed. So what did you say?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

I said hatchery birds.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:21

Just teasing. So a lot of it also is environment, right? Weather. So I know when I had to tell everybody that my hatchery, my good hatch rate was 82%. Poor, poor rips going, oh, the Rhode Island Reds, Karen's telling a terrible number. No, and but early that was weekly from April to July and mid-July. So I had 100, 95, 100, 100, 90, 90.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:49

And then once June hit, I got the hot weather that went to pick.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:54

Yeah, 80, 79, 79, 65. You know what I mean? Like, so just you know, I mean, it's asking a lot of your birds, depending on the weather and that sort of thing, too. So that was an annualized percentage, but so it can get harder.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:09

You may have been able to change that if you had other roosters that had not been with the hens the whole time, particularly if you had cockerels that were just coming of age and you rotated them in for mating. A, they're not carrying the excessive body weight, and B, they would have more interest in a new hen than the old rooster had.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:32

My cockerels do not get to breed. They're not done growing yet. All right, we're around two weeks. What are your thoughts? All right, we sort of talked about this, but John wants to know what are your thoughts when you lock down putting your egg curtains in a curtain? I think those are two different questions, unless you're locking down with your eggs in a curtain.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:58

And I think that's what he may be referring to. John, I have hatched both ways, sometimes with intent. I would hatch upright, particularly if I had eggs that were being shipped.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:14

Oh, you're a carton without the lid on. I get it now.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:25

I got it.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:27

But if I sometime with shipped eggs, and I don't know if you've ever experienced this or not, but the air cell becomes detached. And you want to make sure that that air cell stays up at the top, and the only way to do that is to hatch it upright. If it slides down, if you if you put them on the sides uh and they they pip in trying to where they would normally go to pip, they'll they'll literally drown. But with that said, if if you're not shipping eggs, I'm I nothing wrong with laying them down to hatch. I mean, you know, Mama Hen doesn't hatch her eggs in a vertical position, so we're just mimic trying to mimic nature as much as we can. So you know, but the bottom line, what works best for you, man? If if if you're having good results with hatching them in a vertical position, keep on keeping on.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:24

The hatch just great in the incubator if you forget to move them to the hatcher, and they're up right there.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:32

Seems to be much better and much faster.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:36

All right, I'm gonna make this the last question. Rip has been wonderful, and I have not pointed out how long this show has gone. I mean we're gonna give just the last one of the night. All right, have you ever put food and feed and water into the incubator? Would that allow you to? I guess maybe it's not Jeff. I guess it's Rip. Can we can we feed and water the ones in the hatcher so that everybody else can I have never done that?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:03

I know that some of the big commercial places are doing that. Uh, I I don't know, you know, I've I've never really looked into it because it's not something I would probably do, because you know, my incubator's not all that big. Uh but Jeff, have you have you had any experience with that?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:21

No, that's a new one on me. You know, and depending on your incubator and how your your hatching trays are, if it's a solid, good, solid bottom, I don't see any reason why you couldn't sprinkle, you don't need a large amount. You could sprinkle some chick feed in there. But again, if you're gonna get them out within 12 hours, you know, like you said, Rip and Craig, you know, confirmed it as well, 12 hours and they're out. So I'm okay with 12 hours, you know. If I was gonna leave them in there longer than that, then I might think about trying that technique.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:54

But I I gotta be honest with you now. After you said that, I'm gonna be have to be I'm gonna be very careful when I walk outside because you know, if you agree with me and I agree with Craig and Craig agrees with you, there could be a good chance of the sky falling.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:11

Right. Or you're gonna get struck by lightning. So yeah, something like that, right? The chances are you know, the moon and stars must have aligned, right? For all three of us to agree. So all right.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:23

So Steven says that uh that when they breed the European birds that they do put chick trays with food and water in the hatcher. I gotta think of in in most hatchers, you're looking at maximum airflow and everything's open. So you start lining those trays, you're really blocking airflow if you're trying to keep feeding water in every hatching tray. So it would just depend on the thing of your and then that's a lot of bacteria, and hatching is so gross, it's so dirty in there. But maybe that's just mine. But all right, are we okay?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:01

I'm okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:01

If anybody nobody has a everybody wants to say thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:06

But folks, thank you for watching, and thank you for being with us, and thank you for participating. We appreciate it, we enjoy it, and you you keep us on our toes and you keep us striving to do a better job to help you because that's why we're here. So until next time, by golly, enjoy your birds. Here's the good hatches, and we'll see you in two weeks. Bye bye.