Starting a Hatchery

[TwinWillowAcres]

Looking at my budget I do have $10 for maintenance every year. After 10 years that may pay for a new roof for the building

 

[WalnutHill]

Okay, one more challenge question (I've been a small scale commercial farmer since 1998, selling about $15,000/yr in table eggs, old laying hens, and turkeys). As you are developing your breeder stock for breed specific qualities, how will you manage your breeding program to ensure that the parent stock and the subsequent generations of your breeders produce the qualities that you want to develop? While you will be buying your first generation parent stock, you don't know what their rate of lay will be, if colors run true (no recessive genes), or if their traits will successfully pass to their offspring.

Besides taking excellent production notes and using trap nests to determine which hens are the most prolific layers, you will also want to hatch and raise the next generation of breeders from the most productive pens. You will need to band or toe punch them, and when those pullets and roosters are mature, you need to do the same again to ensure that you keep only the best layers with good physical traits for production. Then you need to manage your males so that you are not breeding in the same line unless you have a specific need to.

There are many online resources available to you in creating a breeding and improvement program. It's not cheap, not easy, and not fast as you are looking at a minimum of six months per generation, plus a year in production testing, during which time you feed the birds and sell the eggs as table eggs. You could sell chicks, but the quality will be variable. And if you want to market them, you will find that people will want to buy chicks in quantities of 10, 25, 50, 100...not one or two per breed, for the most part. So you will need a larger number of birds of each breed to fill these orders. I'd suggest starting with one breed, and add one every year or two so you have the time to do it right.

If you plan to do this with 10-15 breeds, the investment of time will be MUCH higher than you realize. You mentioned 20 minutes a day for collecting eggs. Besides my breeding pen of Narragansett turkeys, I also have 275 red sex link hens, 175 in one coop, 100 in the other. Both coops have roll out nests that collect the eggs in trays up front. It takes about 20 minutes just to collect those eggs, then another half hour to sort and carton them. If I had to deal with trap nests or documentation, it would take far longer.

 

[TwinWillowAcres]

I will be breeding my hens and culling non layers. My plan is to have 14 hrs of light available to them all the time so I will be checking when production drops which hens are laying or not.

im on my phone but when I get home I will give a more detailed answer.