Figuring Hatch Rates

[Storybook Farm]

Okay, so I'm going to be taking the plunge and buying a cabinet incubator. One reason is I want to up the volume of chicks I hatch (planning on selling them) and the other reason is I want better hatch rates. So, two questions:

Question 1: how do you figure hatch rates in general? If you say you have an 80% hatch rate, is it from Day 1, when you set the eggs. (So, I set 100 and 80 hatch, it's an 80% hatch?) OR is it from Day 18? (So, I set 100, but by Day 18 I've thrown out 10. Now 90 make it into lockdown. Of the 90, 72 hatch... that's 80% of the lockdown eggs, not of the original set.) Which do you do? Set # percent or lockdown # percent?

Question 2: What's your hatch rate, and what brand of CABINET incubator do you have? (If Sportsman, how old? I hear newer ones have gone downhill in many respects. I am hovering between buying a Brinsea or a Dickey.)

TIA for responses!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Different people figure hatch rates differently. At the big commercial hatcheries they often have different people running the part where the eggs are laid versus where the eggs are incubated. The people providing the eggs want to know how many eggs are hatchable, their bonuses and job security depend on it. Fertility is part of that. If the eggs are dirty they are not going to be set. Unusually small, large, double-yolked, overly porous, or misshapen eggs will not be incubated. Nutrition and health of the parents makes a difference. How the eggs are handled, stored, and transported makes a difference. Some people like to think it is all about fertility but there can be many different reasons eggs are not hatchable to start with.

Then you have the people that are running the incubators and hatchers. Their concern is how many of the hatchable eggs actually hatch when they are incubated. Temperature, humidity, and turning have an effect. Cleanliness is very important they go to a lot of trouble to fumigate and sterile their equipment and keep them clean. Temperature is not just keeping them warm enough, late in incubation the chicks create a lot of heat. In the incubators that may hold 120,000 eggs one big issue is to get all that heat out so they don’t cook the eggs. Another issue is time. The chicks are going to ship at a certain time. Any eggs that have not yet hatched when that time is up are discarded, even if they have pipped.

They have professionals trying to figure out why an egg didn’t hatch. Obviously they want to improve the number of chicks hatched for the eggs laid. They open enough of the unhatched eggs to get an idea. As a general rule of thumb if an egg starts to develop but dies in the first week it probably had something to do with what happened before it went into the incubator. If it dies in the last week it probably had something to do with the incubation itself. Of course there are exceptions but that’s a general rule.

When you see people on here talk about steadily getting great hatch rates they are often talking about their incubating skills and they don’t count the ones that don’t start to develop. Not always of course but often. That’s what the professionals do if you discount the hatchability part, just figure it against the ones that develop.

When I give my hatch rate I use number of eggs in the incubator versus number of chicks out. I do not set dirty or weird eggs so I drop the number of unhatchable eggs to start with. We all figure hatch rates differently. I don’t use a cabinet incubator but for what it’s worth I had three hatches earlier this year: 23 chicks out of 28 eggs, 9 chicks out of 18 eggs, and 17 chicks out of 19 eggs. You might say I’m not very consistent. A poultry science professional that works with the major hatcheries that might hatch a total of 1,000,000 chicks per week every week of the year said about 5% of the eggs laid are not hatchable and about another 5% of the hatchable eggs don’t hatch. So about 90% of the eggs laid become chicks but if you look at the incubating part only, their hatch rate averages about 95%. They use cabinet incubators.

 

[Impatient]

I personally would base hatch rate off of viable eggs candled at a week showing development. So if you had 100 eggs, 10 infertile, 10 early deaths, with a total of 80 hatching I'd count that as a 88.8% hatch rate (80/90)

 

[Storybook Farm]

Thanks!

 

[Ridgerunner]

I'm a little surprised you didn't get more replies but as you can see "hatch rate" is meaningless unless you know how someone else is calculating it. For yourself what data do you want to track? Use something meaningful to you. When talking to someone else about their hatch rate find out how they calculate it.

 

[Storybook Farm]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm wanting to choose a cabinet incubator and, in reading reviews, people who are using the two are claiming certain hatch rates.

 

[Ridgerunner]

There is more to hatch rates than how to calculate them. Commercial hatcheries find that if they move an incubator (60,000 to 120,000 eggs) from one spot in the incubating room to another they have to tweak the settings to optimize hatch rate. The differences in the temperature or moisture in the air, probably due to where the AC and heating vents are located, change the hatch rates. It's not necessarily a lot but just a fraction of a percent difference can mean a lot when you are hatching a million chicks a week.

We are not that good. If I were doing that analysis I'd look at reliability and ease of operation much more than someone else's hatch rates.

 

[Storybook Farm]

Basically, I'm trying to decide on the best incubator for me. I'm hoping to sell day-old chicks of 4 breeds that I've been raising. My concern is that the price of the Brinsea is so much more expensive than the Dickey's. on the one hand, I think that an incubator should be a fairly simple device. I am not going to ever become a major hatchery, only a family farm.

So, while the information about hatcheries is interesting, I'm never gonna look to hatch 1 million eggs. The price of the Dicky's is something like 1/4 of the price of the Brinsea. However, the Brinsea has a really good reputation. So, I'm torn.

One factor I was looking at, therefore, was how people felt their hatch rates were (but then I got to wondering: how do people figure hatch rates? Maybe it's an unhelpful criteria. Hence this thread.) A majority of Brinsea owners swear by their machines. The reviews on this forum on Dickey's seem to be a little more variable: some people love them, some people haven't had as good of luck.