Low Hatch Rate

[Fishkeeper]

If you've never gotten a good hatch from that incubator, it might also be that incubator. Something may also be wrong with your rooster's genetics. About the only way to be sure is to eliminate possibilities and see if that helps any.

If you don't intend to keep the chicks past a couple days, hatching them for money might work. I'd suggest looking at the local market, though- how much demand is there for baby chicks, and how much can you get for them? Can you sell them before the lack of proper food starts to be an issue? Is it a better idea to sell eggs instead?

To feed the chickens better in the meantime, I'd see if you can find any food places that'll let you take things like wilted spinach, no good for people but fine for chickens. My other suggestion is to start culturing worms. You can grow earthworms in a big bin of dirt and feed them table scraps and other not-for-humans food, and use those to give the chickens some extra nutrition. I'd also make sure their pen has lots of leaf litter and grass clippings and the like in it- try to go to deep litter and include as much material as possible that already has bugs in it, and that'll help grow things they can eat. Plus, it produces compost, which can be used to grow food for either you or them. Might want to look up what veggies are easy to grow in your area, if you haven't already. Beans are generally a good thing to grow. I know there are wild blackberries in my area, those don't seem to need any care.
Heck- if you have mouse traps out, you can feed them fresh dead mice.

Do they seem healthy aside from the potential egg issues? Good plumage, nice and active?

Do you have a mom-and-pop type feed store nearby? You might be able to negotiate doing some chores or occasional part-time help for them in return for chicken feed.

 

[WindingRoad]

Hello everyone! Thank you in advance for any and all suggestions!
I have an advanced Brinsea incubator and I am having low hatch rates. It is all automatic and everything so it should work really well. I have read a lot of reviews about how they always have high hatching rates because they are such good incubators. It is of my understanding that a good average hatch rate is about 85%.
My last hatch had about a 30% hatch rate with fertile eggs. I am thinking that maybe I am not cleaning the incubator thoroughly enough and that is why it is giving me low hatch rates.
I do everything all natural and I don't use chemicals. I clean the non-electrical parts in the sink with soap and warm water. Then after I have cleaned them with soap I disinfect them with vinegar. For the electrical parts I go over them with a rag dampened in vinegar.
I know that dirty incubators can give you a low hatch rate. I am wondering if perhaps the vinegar isn't cleaning the incubator good enough and that is why I am having low hatch rates.
I am thinking I might try to let the incubator sit out in the sun for a while to solarize it. Maybe it would help get rid of the harmful bacteria.
Does anybody else out there have experience with cleaning incubators with vinegar and still having good hatch rates? Can you think of what the problem might be? Does anybody have any ideas for cleaning an incubator naturally?

How did you afford the advanced model and you can't afford chicken feed?

 

[WindingRoad]

I have not ever got a good hatch rate out of this incubator but I am realizing that is because I have never been able to feed my birds a complete feed.

Losing hatchlings is undercutting me because then it is just a waste of eggs that we could have eaten.
I also want to be able to hatch a larger number of chicks at a time and I want to start hatching extra chicks so I can sell them and use the money to buy better feed for my birds.

You're 100% right, I'm sure that's what it is. Good feed probably would solve it!!!
Unfortunately my dad has been extremely sick for the last two years and hasn't been able to work. That is why we can't afford better feed for them.

Are you a child teenager maybe. Can you baby sit, mow lawns, shove snow etc. To earn money for good feed?

 

[chickens really]

Hello..I'm wondering if it's not the humidity that's causing your issues?..If you live in a humid climate them you need to drop the humidity to around 40 or lower to get the air cells to develop properly.
Best wishes...

 

[Claires Poultry]

If you've never gotten a good hatch from that incubator, it might also be that incubator. Something may also be wrong with your rooster's genetics. About the only way to be sure is to eliminate possibilities and see if that helps any.

If you don't intend to keep the chicks past a couple days, hatching them for money might work. I'd suggest looking at the local market, though- how much demand is there for baby chicks, and how much can you get for them? Can you sell them before the lack of proper food starts to be an issue? Is it a better idea to sell eggs instead?

To feed the chickens better in the meantime, I'd see if you can find any food places that'll let you take things like wilted spinach, no good for people but fine for chickens. My other suggestion is to start culturing worms. You can grow earthworms in a big bin of dirt and feed them table scraps and other not-for-humans food, and use those to give the chickens some extra nutrition. I'd also make sure their pen has lots of leaf litter and grass clippings and the like in it- try to go to deep litter and include as much material as possible that already has bugs in it, and that'll help grow things they can eat. Plus, it produces compost, which can be used to grow food for either you or them. Might want to look up what veggies are easy to grow in your area, if you haven't already. Beans are generally a good thing to grow. I know there are wild blackberries in my area, those don't seem to need any care.
Heck- if you have mouse traps out, you can feed them fresh dead mice.

Do they seem healthy aside from the potential egg issues? Good plumage, nice and active?

Do you have a mom-and-pop type feed store nearby? You might be able to negotiate doing some chores or occasional part-time help for them in return for chicken feed.

Thank you for the suggestions. I could be wrong, but don't think it is the rooster's genetics because he is the directly from of one of the best Black Australorp breeders in the U.S. The breeder I got these chickens from breeds her Australorps for egg production, vigor, and fertility.
My chickens are free-ranged so that helps with their food. We also have 2 acres of organic vegetable gardens that we grow every year and I give the chickens all the extra scraps that we don't eat. I also feed them their eggshells. We butcher all our animals and I give them the liver and leftover meat scraps. In the summertime we dig up ant hills and bring them ants to eat. I have also tried growing black soldier fly larvae but it didn't work. We do have a worm bin going right now, but it is off to a slow start. Last year we grew extra squash and I fed them some squash this last winter. I also feed them weeds from the garden and bad bugs like potato beetles and grubs.
Where I live we have wild chokecherries, wild currants, wild bullberries, wild serviceberries, wild gooseberries, and rose hips. I pick them and can most of them for winter, but if there is any that go bad before I can get them canned, I do feed them to the chickens. We also have mouse traps outside that are just for catching mice to feed to the birds.
They seem healthy and happy aside from the egg issues. They have nice, shiny plumage and are very active.
The closest feed store to us is over 1 hour away.
Here are some pics so you can see what they look like.

 

[Claires Poultry]

How did you afford the advanced model and you can't afford chicken feed?

When we bought the incubator 4 years ago my dad said the chickens didn't need a complete feed and so we weren't feeding them a complete feed. I thought that they should have a complete feed but I didn't realize that it was mandatory. I recently learned that it is mandatory but now we can't afford it and I still can't convince my dad that they should have a complete feed. Everybody I talk to says that chickens should have a complete feed and how important it is but now matter how much I try to tell my dad that's what they need he won't believe me. He thinks they lay more eggs when we are just giving them wheat but I disagree.

 

[007Sean]

Some of the eggs do turn rotten and smell bad and some of them are fully developed and just don't hatch.

Any of the eggs that don't hatch I crack open and look at them. Some of the eggs have half-way developed chicks in them.

The eggs are from my own 1 year old Black Australorp chickens. They have not been shipped. I store them for no longer than 7 days and turn them daily. I store them in egg cartons pointy side down. I only use clean, unsoiled eggs for hatching. I keep the eggs out of direct sunlight and in temperatures around 65-75 degrees Fahrenheit.

I double check the temperature of the incubator every time I use it. I keep the temperature of the incubator between 99.3 and 99.6 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity at 40-50%.

Eggs can start developing when ambient temperatures reach 72°F.

 

[Claires Poultry]

Are you a child teenager maybe. Can you baby sit, mow lawns, shove snow etc. To earn money for good feed?

I am a teenager. We live on a farm with chickens, Muscovies, guineas, cows, goats, and sheep, and 2 acres of organic garden. We grow a large majority of the food we eat. I do little jobs here and there whenever I get a chance but for the most part I have to stay home.
I have 6, soon to be 7 siblings that I babysit at home quite often. I usually stay pretty darn busy. I milk a cow every day and sometimes goats too, manage all the poultry (breeding them, hatching them, and growing them out), cook a lot of our meals, do laundry, help in the gardens, make cheese, put up our food for the winter (canning, drying, and fermenting), collect wild berries, ect.
Any money that I make on jobs I use to buy chicken feed or bedding, but that still doesn't cover everything.
A few years ago I had a trio of peafowl that I hatched peachicks from. I would sell the peachicks and use the money to buy chicken feed. But the peacock became very aggressive to my younger siblings and we had to get rid of them all.
I want to try getting peafowl again and taming them so I can hatch peachicks and sell them to buy chicken feed but first I have to come up with the money to buy the peafowl.

 

[Fishkeeper]

It looks and sounds like your chickens are doing fairly well. I wouldn't hatch chicks with any intent to keep them longer than a day or two (they don't need food for that long, still absorbing the yolk), but your adults seem to be managing well. Sounds like they're eating more or less what they would if they were ferals foraging entirely for themselves. Your problem is probably your incubator. You may be able to build a new one for relatively cheap.

Have you ever had a hen of any species go broody?

I'm not sure peafowl would be the best idea. You'd have to be able to afford the food for them, for one, and for the chicks. Plus, how much demand is there for peafowl in the area? You sell a few batches of chicks, and then everyone who wants them has them. Guineafowl may be better to try to hatch, especially since you already have them, but you'd need to have chick feed ready there.

You mentioned buying bedding for the chickens. If you switch to deep litter in the coop and run, the only supplies you'll need for that are leaves and maybe some sawdust and other compost ingredients, which won't cost you anything.

 

[Ridgerunner]

That's a lot different diet from just feeding them wheat. For thousands of years chickens have lived on farms like yours where they foraged for practically everything they ate in good weather months and were fed home grown supplements like wheat or corn in the winter months. I was raised on one of those farms in the hills and ridges of Appalachia. We didn't have any extra money either. The only supplemental food our chickens got was home grown corn in the winter. We only used broody hens, no incubators, and they just went broody in the good weather months when forage was better. Those broody hens had good hatch rates. If you are trying to hatch eggs in winter maybe diet has something to do with hatch rate but not in summer.

Diet has nothing to do with the eggs going rotten. Eggs go rotten because bacteria gets inside. The material inside the egg is greatly nutritious to bacteria, they really thrive on it. Incubation temperature is perfect for bacteria growth. Once bacteria gets inside the shell it multiplies rapidly. That's why scientists often use eggs kept at incubation temperatures to culture bacteria.

So how does bacteria get inside? Just before the hen lays the egg she puts a coating on it that we call bloom. That's why a freshly laid egg looks wet, it is. That bloom quickly dries and forms a protective barrier that helps stop bacteria from getting inside. It is so effective that a hen can lay eggs for a couple of weeks in a hidden nest on the ground somewhere, then incubate them for three more weeks and bacteria not get inside. Ducks and turkeys do the same thing for longer incubation periods.

The egg shell is porous so without that bloom bacteria can easily get inside. For an egg to go rotten on a regular basis that bloom is probably being compromised. If you wash the eggs, handle them with dirty oily or wet hands, sandpaper dirt off the shell, or rub them clean with your thumb you can remove that bloom. If the egg has clumps of poop or dirt on it that can compromise the bloom. I've seen bits of bedding sort of get stuck in that wet bloom so when you remove it you leave an opening for bacteria. Don't set cracked eggs, those cracks give bacteria a route inside plus the egg will loose way too much moisture to hatch. A dirty incubator can cause bacteria to get inside but how you describe cleaning yours should work well. I use bleach instead of vinegar but just warm soapy water should be real close to enough.

I'll set eggs that have a light dusting of dirt, not poop though. Poop on the eggs is bad. I'll repeat, diet has nothing to do with the eggs going rotten. Something is happening to let bacteria inside.

Can you get some eggs from another source and do a test hatch? It is possible that your rooster has some kind of problem. A test hatch with other eggs should tell you if the problem is with the flock or source of eggs. When you transport those eggs be careful not to shake them on rough country roads. I made that mistake once and got a 30% hatch rate from the eggs being shaken so bad. The breeder I got those eggs from was upset that the hatch rate was that bad but it was my fault, not her flock's.

Your parents probably grew up like I did, seeing chickens do quite well the way you are feeding them. Your grandparents probably did too, all the way back to pioneer days. They know from experience that chickens can do quite well and be valuable livestock raised and kept that way. But you got yours from a breeder, not pioneer chicken stock. Have you spoken to that breeder about your problem? That might be an expert source you can take advantage of.

When you do get chicks to hatch are they early or late? If they are consistently 2 to 3 days early your incubator is too warm regardless of what the thermometer says. If they are consistently 2 to 3 days late it is too cool. If they are pretty much in time the problem is not your thermostat/thermometer.

Other than that try going through those troubleshooting guides and see if you can figure out what is going on. Good luck.