Breeding Season Summary Thread

[AugeredIn]

........and just like that, breeding seasonis over for us. No eggs for nine days. Started this thread for everyone to post their results for the year and some of the things they did differently that helped or hurt their breeding and/or incubating/hatching success. We, obvioulsy, still have eggs in the incubator so we are not totally hatched out but some of the things we did tis year and our successes and failures:

1. We are going to hatch around 100 peachicks. It looks like we are going to hatch about 84% of the one week old confirmed fertile eggs. This is WAY better than last year. However, we are going to end up with a fertility rate that is 10% lower than last year. We do have many more birds and many two year olds so I suspect that is the issue.

2. Last year we had a range of problems: We had quitters that were big fat juicy chcisk that took up the entire shell, we had little tiny quitters and we had leg and feet problems.

3. I had several long conversations with larger breeders during the off season and the thing that struck me the most was that there is no single answer to incubating and hatching. YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT YOUR PARTICULAR ISSUES. WE did learn a few things, however.

4. To that end, we raised our pre breeding season protein levels in the feed, performed a mid winter complete worming and maintained higher protein feeding thru the breeding season. It helped tremendously and I am convinced it made a difference as near the end of the season, we began to have leg and feet issues as well as increased quitters. The girls were running out of gas.

5. We decreased our humidity and increased our temperature resulting in hatches at 26-27 days and fewer dead in the shell birds.

Ill post more results later.

 

[Trefoil]

Is it later yet?

 

[frenchblackcopper]

I thought most here would be "bored" with stats so I never brought it up AugeredIN. I probably go waay overboard keeping records,so much so that this year I stopped nightly pen egg collection counts vs. now since I'm incubating everything,I just total each color of eggs and write each week how many from that color goes in the bator. I'm a very staunch believer that protein levels DO increase chicks hatchability,if you remember last year the trouble I had with my new BSSP birds when I got them home from Bigcreekpoultry? Increased protein levels to 26% and eggs laid and incubated within 3 days after this adjustment jumped 75% higher in hatched-live peachicks.
I'm sure here hens are done with their first "clutch" and are now starting the second run on laying. I can make a very detailed list from last year,vs this year and do it by pen of each color.For some reason I'm still scratching my head over here,my Midnight B/S pen that has 4 hens has a better than 90% hatchrate as of today. The latest group of eggs we have due to hatch over the weekend has 10 midnight b/s eggs and checking back when they were put in the incubater,there was a total of 10 eggs so none were taken out during candling.Theres a "lotta love" in that pen,and I already have hatched out over 10 of them,sold 3 the other day but this color is fantastic here.
Keeping records to have a benchmark is paramount if we are to improve. I know I'm doing a lot better than 3 years ago when I started by buying fertile hatching eggs,,been a long uphill road to climb but stubborn Germans don't give in easy to a tough challenge. Depending on who else here keeps records,it would be interesting to see breeder by breeder certain comparisons,such as first day you got an egg,first day you had a fertile egg,,how many eggs per hen,or pen,,most peachicks hatched from one Peacock,poorest breeding Peacock hatched chicks,,ect.

 

[casportpony]

I love the stats, the more info, the better, IMHO, doesn't bore me at all! I'll definitely be looking for ways to improve next season and would love to have comments from both of you on ways to do that.

Once done here, I'll post my stats... My girls are still laying and I have 21 eggs that I need to set under hens and in the incubator today.

-Kathy

 

[casportpony]

Have either of you, or anyone else, calculated your weight loss percentages and found an ideal number? Getting ready to set my next set of eggs and I'm think about tweaking the humidity a little...


-Kathy

 

[frenchblackcopper]

Kathy,when all my past incubating was done in the house here I shot for 12% weight loss,didn't notice any issues with that number but now this year with the larger Humidaire out in the garage without being in air conditioning. Times I've came home and noticed 65-70% rh on one of my thermometers-rh gauges that has a probe inside the bator. Even with high rh I havn't had one chick that was drowning in too much fluid.
I have very good records from last year and this year isn't over here hopefully for another 3 weeks or so but if you like stats I can show everything I keep track of and why,including power outages and their length,,that alone can ruin hatchrate percentages as I've already experienced that this year.

 

[AugeredIn]

We have calculated weight loss before. We had some fairly large variability between 10% & 15% and quit trying to weight them.

The big thing we did this year is incubated all eggs on their pointy end. Did not lay any down and hatched more than ever.

......I may have spoken to soon. Got 9 eggs this week.

 

[TerriLaChicks]

We have calculated weight loss before. We had some fairly large variability between 10% & 15% and quit trying to weight them.

The big thing we did this year is incubated all eggs on their pointy end. Did not lay any down and hatched more than ever.

......I may have spoken to soon. Got 9 eggs this week.

That's very interesting! because I was taught to always lay them on their sides & rotate them -- am interested to see how yours do incubating 'pointy side up' - I just set 5 eggs in the 'side' position -- please keep me posted how yours do.