Evolving beyond personal/hobby hatching

[allenandemily]

I recently got into small scale incubating and hatching of chickens and guineas for myself and a few friends. It’s all been very successful. I have three small incubators with various capacities: 41, 24, and 12. I live in the heart of Amish country and have recently built some new relationships. For the last month, I’ve been selling 8 dozen guinea eggs for hatching a week to just one person. They hatch them, raise them, butcher them, and sell them to the Hmong community. It’s all a pretty interesting supply chain! They are looking for 500-1000 eggs a week so they buy from various sources in the community. Instead of selling eggs, I’d like to look into incubating and hatching around the same scale that I am selling the eggs — 100/week. My questions are:

• How do I grow to that scale? Does anyone have tips or resources they can point me to?
• Do I get multiple 100 egg incubators or something that holds more but then start different shelves each week? Which large scale incubators are best?
• How do I manage eggs that require different levels of humidity pre and during lockdown? Or do you move eggs in lockdown to a different incubator?

Ultimately, how do people evolve to the next step of hatching beyond just personal or hobby? What other equipment or things are needed to scale up that are overlooked? Any help, guidance, or advice is appreciated!

 

[ChickenCanoe]

The easiest thing is to have a dedicated separate hatcher, so you don't have to change turning routines or change humidity.
Another thing I highly recommend is a good digital gram scale. This will negate the need to do most candling. Ideally it will have a large enough platform so you can weigh a whole tray of eggs at a time. This will save a lot of time.