Starting a hatchery

[braray]

I have a question that i hope someone can answer. I am interested in starting a hatchery from chickens I plan on having on my property. I plan on selling hard to get chickens for this area. Do I need to get a business license and a tax ID for this? I have been trying to research this and i can't seem to find info on it. Thanks in advance!!

 

[lomine]

You're going to need to provide your location.

 

[lazy gardener]

Your best bet is to contact your state business bureau. If you are looking to do this to earn money, I can almost assuredly tell you that you will be very unlikely to turn a profit. You will probably be required to be at the very least, NPIP certified. If you are informally looking to sell a few chicks to help cover your feed and housing costs, that may be a workable solution for you. But it's very hard to breed to SOP with one breed, let alone more than one breed. Do you have plenty of land available, away from neighbors to be able to successfully house multiple flocks, and the roosters who will most assuredly have day and night singing contests, to see who can achieve the most ear splitting crow? Sorry to present a downer, but from the stories I hear from all directions, breeding animals most often comes about because of a passion for that animal, and very rarely becomes a profitable venture. Most often it's just a labor of love.

 

[braray]

Hello! And thanks!! I am in southeast texas. East of Houston. Well that's the thing. If i don't make much of a profit, do i need to get one before selling my first chick? And it is probably more of a hobby. And yes, it would probably cover feed and supplies But i was hoping to make a little money doing what i enjoy . And certain breeds are scarce to nonexistent around here but there are chicken lovers because when I have to sell some of mine, I get plenty of calls. I was gonna start small to see how it goes. I do have a lil over an acre so plenty of room for that. I just hate to bother with a license if this does not work. But I don't work and this is something for me to do for enjoyment. Thanks for the input!!

 

[yes2matt]

There's a farm here in NC who gets rare breed eggs from breeders and conservatories, hatches them, and sells either day old unsexed, 5-6 week old sexed, or trios of adults. For a significant profit, depending on mortality and feed costs. It can be a good business.

I don't think they maintain any breeding stock at all. They are NPIP certified. They are probably registered as farm.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

If a farm is selling chicks and up of rare breeds then they indeed have breeding stock. If not then anyone could purchase from their source and that would not be for rare breeds unless they are purchasing "rare" breeds from hatchery in bulk to sale at gross mark up- raise the birds and sell at ages then group up to to sell as trio and quads until they sell out and redo all over next spring. That would be so misleading to public. I sincerely hope they keep breeding stock and do indeed work for SOP of each breed and breeds were obtained from good sources not a hatchery.

braray- An acre is not a lot of land for multiple breeds. To really work on one breed and move it to SOP it takes space.

Choosing a breed to work on then finding the best birds available to you in the country then growing out to see what you ended up with to evaluate how to improve on them or select best cock and hen or two only breed forward is a lot of work. Takes a lot of patience too. You get excited about a particular mating your doing then have to wait it out for months and months to evaluate how it did. The numbers one has to hatch out of a single breed to cull down to a few breeders is staggering. Say you start with two or three dozen eggs, grow out and choose two trios or two cocks and hens to breed. That's two breeding pens that you'd mark and collect eggs from then rotate the cocks so you have the other pairing later in spring and keep hatching. Put out a few hundred chicks in doing this in that spring. Evaluating them from start to sell off the poorest ones so you end up with the best of best by fall and still have room to support them. Then and only then do you have something to evaluate and means of diversifying the breeding lines as they are all tagged so you know which cock and hen are each of their parents. Sell off a bunch of finalists as good birds not layers like the start of year young but premium birds. Your left with breeders for winter to start again in spring and will have enough breeders this third spring to have more breeding pens and actually sell hatching eggs and chicks of potential quality. All the while hatching out perhaps a hundred more and culling down again to finalists.

It's a lot of work and still requires a lot of space for just one breed. It will pay for feed and upkeep no problem with some pocket change perhaps. Really good breeders do it for the love of the birds. It's a hobby that pays for itself but not much more. Which of course is much better than a hobby like golf or shooting big bore airguns that is a lot of money out of pocket.