The Heritage Rhode Island Red Site

[Fred's Hens]

I love humor, and I hope you can see the humor in my puzzled response...

Uhm... I must have missed something in this method, so I have a question.

Suppose I collect eggs from Pen A for seven days, set those eggs at the end of seven days, incubate for 18 days and move them to a hatching incubator, how will 8-10 chicks hatch in 21 days? This isn't considering that the pullet/hen may not lay an egg every day, either. Best case scenario, each female lays 7 eggs in 7 days, and these eggs are set every seven days with alternate weeks for Pens A and B. Even with 100% hatch rates, I'm only able to come up with 7 chicks each week under these ideal conditions. I can be easily confused at times, and this is obviously one of them. Which part am I missing to come up with the extra 1-3 chicks?

Do this. Take a calendar. Any calendar with big white squares. Pretend you're collecting eggs from two pens and start marking the days from Sunday, Feb 1.(mythical). By Feb 7, you've collected eggs from both pens but only set from pen A. Might be as few as 5 eggs. Keep on collecting from pen B and your count is growing from pen B until Feb 14 comes when you set them, two weeks worth, so likely 10 eggs. On Feb 21, you set pen A, likely 10 eggs, and on Feb 28, back to setting pen B, again likely 10 eggs.

During the month of Feb, your 4 females laid an imaginary 40 eggs and you've put every last one of them into the pipeline. Every last egg. You could likely expect 30-34 live chicks in a month's worth of breeding. Nice. You now have choice. How many more chicks do I wish? How many can I handle? Put the cockbird in his bachelor pad. Clean the equipment. Rest those hens and eat those eggs. If there is to be a round 2? Wait until everyone has had a good week or two of rest. Start again, if you wish.

 

[cmom]

Quote: I use a calendar and mark my eggs. I know I've posted these pictures in previous posts.
I use my styrofoam incubators as hatchers mark the eggs and the hatchers

I do staggered hatches.

This is my brooder for the chicks Each tier is also a different hatch.

 

[cmom]

If I need more space I put the first hatch in a melon box. They work great.

 

[Ur-ur-ur-urrr]

Do this. Take a calendar. Any calendar with big white squares. Pretend you're collecting eggs from two pens and start marking the days from Sunday, Feb 1.(mythical). By Feb 7, you've collected eggs from both pens but only set from pen A. Might be as few as 5 eggs. Keep on collecting from pen B and your count is growing from pen B until Feb 14 comes when you set them, two weeks worth, so likely 10 eggs. On Feb 21, you set pen A, likely 10 eggs, and on Feb 28, back to setting pen B, again likely 10 eggs.

During the month of Feb, your 4 females laid an imaginary 40 eggs and you've put every last one of them into the pipeline. Every last egg. You could likely expect 30-34 live chicks in a month's worth of breeding. Nice. You now have choice. How many more chicks do I wish? How many can I handle? Put the cockbird in his bachelor pad. Clean the equipment. Rest those hens and eat those eggs. If there is to be a round 2? Wait until everyone has had a good week or two of rest. Start again, if you wish.

Now I see where I messed up. I wasn't taking into consideration that after the first week's setting, eggs from the separate pens will be set every OTHER week. Duh!

Told you I was easily confused...

 

[Fred's Hens]

Simple Trio Mating

This is the most basic breeding group that most folks start with unless of course, they begin with a pair, single male and single female. With only one female laying and one male over her, you may find he just wears her out and she is too stressed to be good layer. You can only expect 20 chicks from a pair mating, so give her a break, often. He only needs to be with her a couple days a week to keep her fertile. Everyone needs a bachelor pad to rest that cockbird and keep him away from females so the females can also not be constantly jumped. Males DO play favorites and over mate them.

OK, the basic trio pen. The more closely the two females are "twins" by being sisters with identical phenotype and genotype, the more closely this resembles single mating. This is the VERY reason I personally like to keep hen "pairs" and pullet "pairs" I want them to have the same parents, and to visually look like twins. Same size, type, etc. Since the eggs will be nested together and incubated together, this comes as close as possible to single mating as can be done.

The eggs should still be pencil coded with pen/date to insure they get set in a timely fashion, normally 8-14 days Two females in the breeding pen will only lay 30-40 eggs per month, but I want to set every last egg they lay. I cannot hold a month's worth of eggs, so I still forced to use the staggered start, staggered hatcher method. I must devise a system to keep the assembly line going if I wish to compress hatching to a certain period of time. The earlier I can hatch out my Large Fowl, the better. They take so long to mature that I dislike May hatched chicks. The heat of summer also slows down their appetites as well. The earlier the better. Each to their system and climate.

In my breeder book, I list the dam as one of the "twins" and I identify those "twins", and consider the twin set of females as a single dam. No way is it as accurate of pure single mating, but to produce more chicks in a timely fashion, this is often what is done.

But wait, what if you, like me, have two sets of "twin" females? What if you have three sets of "twin" females? Perhaps you can see where I am going with this. You can now have pen A, pen B and pen C be three sets of "twin" sisters. You now can have the potential of setting up to 70+ eggs a month. This assumes a single, rotating cockbird.

Remember, this only "works" to improve your birds through selective breeding by having, raising and selecting "twin" females based on an honest criteria of identical genotype and near identical phenotype. No fudging. No cheating. Large pen breeding or small flock breeding gets you almost nowhere in improving your birds. It much more approximates non-selective propigation than it does real breeding.

Hope your imagination is spinning and I've peaked your interest in working out a system that meets your personal time, space, resources and goals.

 

[Ur-ur-ur-urrr]

Simple Trio Mating

This is the most basic breeding group that most folks start with unless of course, they begin with a pair, single male and single female. With only one female laying and one male over her, you may find he just wears her out and she is too stressed to be good layer. You can only expect 20 chicks from a pair mating, so give her a break, often. He only needs to be with her a couple days a week to keep her fertile. Everyone needs a bachelor pad to rest that cockbird and keep him away from females so the females can also not be constantly jumped. Males DO play favorites and over mate them.

OK, the basic trio pen. The more closely the two females are "twins" by being sisters with identical phenotype and genotype, the more closely this resembles single mating. This is the VERY reason I personally like to keep hen "pairs" and pullet "pairs" I want them to have the same parents, and to visually look like twins. Same size, type, etc. Since the eggs will be nested together and incubated together, this comes as close as possible to single mating as can be done.

The eggs should still be pencil coded with pen/date to insure they get set in a timely fashion, normally 8-14 days Two females in the breeding pen will only lay 30-40 eggs per month, but I want to set every last egg they lay. I cannot hold a month's worth of eggs, so I still forced to use the staggered start, staggered hatcher method. I must devise a system to keep the assembly line going if I wish to compress hatching to a certain period of time. The earlier I can hatch out my Large Fowl, the better. They take so long to mature that I dislike May hatched chicks. The heat of summer also slows down their appetites as well. The earlier the better. Each to their system and climate.

In my breeder book, I list the dam as one of the "twins" and I identify those "twins", and consider the twin set of females as a single dam. No way is it as accurate of pure single mating, but to produce more chicks in a timely fashion, this is often what is done.

But wait, what if you, like me, have two sets of "twin" females? What if you have three sets of "twin" females? Perhaps you can see where I am going with this. You can now have pen A, pen B and pen C be three sets of "twin" sisters. You now can have the potential of setting up to 70+ eggs a month. This assumes a single, rotating cockbird.

Remember, this only "works" to improve your birds through selective breeding by having, raising and selecting "twin" females based on an honest criteria of identical genotype and near identical phenotype. No fudging. No cheating. Large pen breeding or small flock breeding gets you almost nowhere in improving your birds. It much more approximates non-selective propigation than it does real breeding.

Hope your imagination is spinning and I've peaked your interest in working out a system that meets your personal time, space, resources and goals.

Early morning and a cup of coffee before my head becomes clouded... that makes perfect sense. I'm ready to take the quiz now...

 

[Fred's Hens]

By Year Two


By the second year, you should have selected your "keepers" and you'll want to begin line mating, i.e., putting the daughters under their sire and putting your chosen cockerel back over his "mothers" (twin sister mating assumed here) or mother (single mated cockerel). But why line breed something back if it is junk? All you do is go backward and faults will soon swallow up your entire group of birds. So make sure you are actually moving forward here.

You've also had the opportunity to evaluate the success or failure of last year's breeding program. Since you carefully kept your eggs separate, hatched separately, punched the chicks and grew them out, you KNOW their pedigree. It may well be you discover that pen A chicks were far better than pen B chicks. It may be that pen C chicks tell you that the combination of male and females used produced JUNK, black everywhere, pinched tails, bent combs everywhere, etc and you say, "I will not repeat that again". Check your breeder book records and figure out which male threw junk when paired with which female? You have to, you HAVE to figure this stuff out to be a breeder. What worked well and what was a failed experiment and produced poor results.

Pedigree breeding is the ONLY way to practically arrive at those answers. Otherwise, you have no ability to weed out birds that throw junk. Without careful breeder records, you just rinse and repeat, doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Your program goes nowhere and in fact? Poor breeding management and poor breeding systems can actually take pretty good birds and screw them up in a generation or two until the "flock" is nothing more than scrub birds full of common faults. Too much time, feed, watering and chores to produce junk that just has to be culled away anyhow. I don't know about you, but I don't have the time, money or energy to carelessly make a bunch of fault riddled scrubs I gotta feed.

When you make up your breeding pens at the end of year two, you can try some different things. You absolutely want to repeat what was successful and absolutely want to avoid what did NOT work the previous year. You also may to do some "trial" matings, hoping to match of birds for compensatory matings. If the male has a good quality that the female needs or vice versa. This is called "fixing things".

 

[Fred's Hens]

Small Pen Matings

A small pen mating system is a cockbird covering 3, 4 or even more females. Forget this system.

How in the world can a small time breeder tell me, with a straight face, that their birds are so good, so level, so identical that 4 or 5 copy-cat sisters can be penned together? Really? I have serious doubts. This is largely propagation, not breeding. All you MIGHT be able to track is the sire. That's it. Record keeping is almost useless, as good results will prove difficult to replicate and poor results difficult to diagnose the source and avoid in the future. This is largely just spin the wheel, roulette "breeding". You are gonna hatch and feed a BUNCH of birds, hoping against hope that just maybe, if you're lucky, a good bird pops up.

Much better to have Pen A, Pen B and Pen C as I discussed above.

But what if you "need" to put 200 chicks on the ground? Lots of breeders do. BUT.... What they will have in place is 3 cockbirds working on 12 females, using the Pen A, Pen B system described above. Then keep on going. Pen D and Pen E and Pen F if need be.

Cock #1 has a pen or pens to be rotated. Cock #2 has a pen or pens to be rotated and Cock #3 has a pen or pens of single or trio matings to cover. The procedures are virtually identical to what was described earlier. But now, there is simply MORE of everything. More pens, More females, More cockbirds, More bachelor pads, More of everything including hard work, longer chores, more and more feed and more pasture needed. Everything upticks exponentially. See how this goes?

In the Bible, Jesus taught a parable in the gospels about "a wise man first sits down and counts the cost before beginning to build a tower". Still good wisdom.

 

[cmom]

I don't have the room for 1 to 1 breeding. I know Matt hatches a lot of chicks every year. Next time I see him I'm going to seek his wisdom.

 

[Fred's Hens]

Some folks have already messaged me about a hatcher. They say they have an incubator, but need a hatcher but don't want to spend a lot of money.

Cmom has built most of hers. I have built a dozen incubators and hatchers or more and hatched hundreds of chicks out them..

I don't wish to have this thread on Reds get side tracked into a hatcher incubator thread. Goodness knows, there's enough of those here on BYC already, so I suggest you search up those many, many threads. Caution. Lots of threads on building them are quite amateurish and they won't work. These eggs are too valuable.

My suggestion is to get up cmom privately, via pm. She can show you many, many photos of her home made equipment. This does NOT have to cost an arm and a leg. All mine are simple Omaha Steak shipping boxes they mail out frozen meat in. Nothing special and they work like a charm.

Get up @cmom for further guidance.