Newbie Question

[cowboysdad]

We are planning on getting our farm up and running in the spring and I am trying to get as much info as I can on Barred Rocks, as that is what we are planning to raise here in South East WI.

How do you know which eggs to harvest from nesting boxes, and which eggs to leave for brooding and hatching into chicks?

This may be a stupid question, and it may have already been answered somewhere in these 300+ posts, but I have not yet read them all. Any help is appreciated!

 

[UrbanMama]

If you have a roo in with your hens, they should all be fertile (just make sure the roo to hen ratio isn't too high) so you could, theoretically, incubate as many as you want.

When it comes to figuring out which egg is in the process of being incubated, I would just mark them with a pencil.

 

[speckledhen]

Barred Rocks are my favorites. I have ten hens and three roosters of that breed within my laying flock of misc breeds. If you have a mature rooster with the hens, then you can assume that all eggs are fertile. Barred Rocks are not broody, generally, though there are exceptions. If you want to incubate eggs, you just collect however many you want over a period of a few days and put them all in the incubator at the same time.