90% Hatch rate club anyone?

[frenchblackcopper]

Arbor,last year around here the corn yields were 50% of a good years crop and when corn is stressed many new mycotoxins are grown within the corn.Most feed companies have an acceptance level for certain strains of these but they use this as a general guide with chickens being used as the baseline subject.Peafowl fertility is very much succeptable to certain mycotoxins that are okay to feed to chickens.Your feed diet may be the same per say but the grain used in making that feed changes from year to year,and down to individual corn fields and varieties of corn planted per it's resistance to certain strains.You can in any given circumstance grind feed all from the same storage vessel(grain bin) and these levels can change dramatically as the mixing grain is ground into feed sized particles. I've found many high protein supplements besides using soybean meal,one is corn gluten which is made by heating the grain to such high temps,it virtually eliminates most all toxins the grain may have.Another one I found is poultry feathers that are heated then ground with over 80% protein.I'm going to try and control and eliminate as many of these variables as possible.

 

[casportpony]

20% club anyone?

-Kathy

 

[AugeredIn]

We have all been there. It sucks.

 

[casportpony]

If the two hatch tomorrow, that will be 25 live chicks out of 69 collected eggs... What percentage is that, lol?

-Kathy

 

[AugeredIn]

36%. To get a true hatching percentage and really know where your problems are you should candle at one week and eliminate infertile eggs. If you have lots of infertile eggs you may have problems in the pen or egg storage and collection issues.

 

[casportpony]

I know I lost a bunch to poor handling/storage... waited too long, not cool enough, etc., but all of the others have had growth on day 5. Next year I'll keep better notes!

-Kathy

 

[Trefoil]

A long time pea raiser in my area told me that a lot of the "newer" colors have fertility problems caused by the amount of inbreeding necessary to "set" the color. It makes sense to me but I know very little about pea genetics. He has many of the more rare colors and doesn't seem to have much trouble. He pays a lot of attention to what he's feeding and it works for him. I haven't been able to find a lot of information on what the nutritional requirements actually are for a pea, I have one pen in which I have a yearling pair of peas and 5 guineas, I recently incubated the last 13 eggs the guineas from this pen laid this year (coincidence) with 100% hatch rate. I'm hoping peas are close enough in their needs to guineas that this bodes well for them. Cathy- are you looking into nutrition?

Edited by staff

 

[casportpony]

Yes, I am very interested in learning as much as I can about peafowl nutrition and how it plays a role in fertility, hatch rates,deformities, leg issues, etc. I think my fertility here is pretty good, probably 95% or better, but my live hatch rates could use improvement, that's for sure. I'm planning on trying some of FBC's formula for next season, so we'll see how that helps.

-Kathy

Edited by staff

 

[frenchblackcopper]

In egg calculations I begin with 3 divisions.
1.) First division is eggs that are laid.
2.)Then I candle to see loose air sacks and possible cracks due to a hen laying the egg while sitting on a perch.You cannot discount a hens laying ability by not keeping track of these eggs.But you cannot expect cracked or floating air sacks to hatch either so these eggs should be put in a seperate group.
3.)Your last group is all the viable eggs with no visible issues

I cannot keep track of individual eggs laid per hen because each breeding pen has 3 or more hens in it.But you can still arrive at an average eggs laid per hen as a group.
In your final group,you will have a few notations
A) Total that hatches
B) Non-Fertile
C) Early quitters-(must at least show a visible blood vein)
D) Late stage quitters within 3 days of hatching
E) Pipped and died or never emerged.

There are many causes as I've learned the past few years on why peachicks quit and die before pip time.Free ranged birds have access to many trace minerals that penned birds do not unless it's supplemented in their diet. Variances of 1degree in your incubator will dramatically change hatchrates.All puns aside,the very best incubator to use if placed outside a regulated temprature setting is a CO2 jacketed incubator.This insulates against higher outside temps causing short temp spikes inside the bator.One very prominate breeder I know gave away many perfectly good redwood cabinet incubators one summer because the temps they kept was too high.The actual reason they did this was because the building the incubators was inside of seen daily temp spikes over 100 degrees. Your outside temprature should always be 10-15 degrees less than your set incubator temp.