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Chickens and eggs
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Hello ladies,
I know that there are many ladies here who raise chickens so I thought I would take a stab at getting some advice about this. My hubby and I are helping out some friends who just acquired a WHOLE BUNCH of chickens in a relatively short amount of time and they are really needing some help. Right now we are trying to help figure out how to tell which eggs are fertilized in order to know which ones to wash and sell and which ones to put into the incubators. From everything I have read you can’t really candle an egg and tell if it has been fertilized until about five days AFTER you have already started incubating them. They cannot do things this way, though, they want to try to know which ones they should be incubating to begin with. They simply have to many eggs and chickens to be able to have a hunch as to which ones may be fertilized to begin with. If they could, they would just put those clutches in the incubator to see, but…??? Any advice? Is this just impossible to do this way?
Appreciate any help on this,
Miranda
As I just got my 1st Roo I would also like to know this answer.
I would also like to be sure I have this right (sorry to add to your post) so I can just whisk up my eggs, put in ice cube trays, freeze and seperate for recipes and scramble eggs in the winter when production slows down. Does this sound correct?
I only have a second so I”ll make this quick…
Yes, it’s five days to a week for brown eggs; sooner for white. However, you can still eat them up till nine days.
Freezing eggs (according to Stocking Up directions I followed last year)-first, you don’t want to eat eggs in scrambled form after they have been frozen. yuck; I don’t care what my book says-it’s just not worthy for fresh use. These eggs are for baking only; use any of the eggs you get in the winter time for fresh eating. I was able to completely live off the eggs we got from them for fresh eating, though I didn’t have an egg sandwich every morning, and then I used my frozen eggs for all my baking.
Secondly, with freezing whole eggs in ice cube trays:
…you need to stabilize them with either salt or honey. Add 1 tsp. of salt or honey to each cup of eggs (5 eggs = 1 c.) Gently scramble the eggs w/the salt or honey before packing or freezing. measure 3 tblsp. of scrambled egg mixture( which = 1 whole egg) into each separate compartment, freeze.
HTH (off to butcher now!)
Rachel
If your friend has a rooster at all (well, one rooster per about 20 or less hens) then all the eggs should be fertile. If you want to incubate eggs, you should use the freshest, cleanest, most uniform eggs that have not been refrigerated. If you have to clean them it generally removes the protective coating from the shell and they do not thrive in the incubator.
Hope that helps! Gem
Thanks Gem! That did help. I am not sure what the rooster to hen ratio is, though. They have about 600 chickens, though. I don’t know how or if they would be able to keep them straight to tell which are fertile or not when they are gathering them. They were hoping that we could learn how to tell the difference, but I am starting to think that it is not possible in the order that they were hoping for! Maybe they just need to organize the chickens! LOL!
-Miranda
No, to my knowledge there is no way to tell just by looking at a freshly laid egg whether or not it is fertile. 600 chickens is a lot! Really a lot! I would think that if you are in the midst of all those chickens and you look around and see some roosters, you probably have enough. A good way to tell whether you have a good ratio of hen to rooster would be to incubate some eggs. If you had a good hatch, you would know you had plenty of roosters. If they just wanted to be sure they had fertile eggs, yes, they could organize the chickens – seperate enough hens to provide the eggs they need and ensure the right number of roosters in with those hens. Don’t overdo it on the roosters though, one per 10-15 hens is fine, if you have too many roosters they will spend all their time fighting and not enough time fertilizing, if you get my drift LOL
My daughter raised chickens and incubated for a long time. She found a lot of help on a forum called Backyard Chickens. HTH!
Our neighbor’s hens were laying eggs in a nest in our front yard. I was sad when the eggs stopped coming. The weather had turned cold and a hen had been brooding on the nest for a little over 2 weeks. I assumed the other hens had forgotten the location of the nest. But maybe it was the cold weather and there could be hope for more eggs when it warms up again? What do you think?
We have the kind of styrofoam incubator that hatches out about 40 eggs at a time. This may be bigger than you want. I have an egg turner and a fan attachment. We have been very successful with this setup, but what happens is that the incubator doesn’t last forever – the heating element goes out and then you have to replace it, and the incubators are not cheap – $75 – $100. You might have some luck selling the chicks and make some $ to pay back for the incubator and not have to deal with too many chickens. (I have too many chickens right now! mostly due to hatching out chicks too much LOL – but it is costing me a fortune to feed them all.)
That said, hatching out chicks and brooding them is so fun and rewarding and you learn so much. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything!
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