What a weekend. We stayed busy but nothing got done, I bet you know just what I'm talking about. Everyone has those types of weekends from time to time. It primarily consisted of cleaning out pens and trying to improve the overall operation.
It did not help that it came a monster rain most of the day Saturday, but all that did was push me into the barn to kinda do some much needed reorganizing.
All in all we hatched 18 chicks out of 48 eggs. If you do the math that is a 37.5% hatch rate. Not as good as we were hoping for but it's what we got. We are still using still air incubators with automatic turners. If I can remember right, years ago we used the big self turning GQF forced air incubators and never got a hatch rate below about 85%.
I have the plans for a DIY forced air and even though I have talked about it before, this shows why I need to go ahead and get it done. I priced it out and I can built one for about $100.00 which is a far cry from buying them new at $600.00
We spent this afternoon with some family that could not make it to the cook out last weekend so we decided to have another one just for them, (any excuse to cook out, right). The only difference was, this time we only did hamburgers.
This was their first time here at the mini farm so they got the grand tour and even though it was muddy, they loved it.
I wanted to give a big howdy to Anna, the newest member of the Modern Day Redneck family. Let me know if you need anything or need me cover a topic you want my point of view on. Thanks for joining.
You had a far better hatch rate than either of the three times we tried it, that is why we let the hens do it*wink*
ReplyDeleteHey, I absolutely LOVE the photo at the bottom of this post, it's just beautiful! Thanks for sharing it. :o)
I hope to improve the hatch rate with the forced air incubators cause it really is not worth it if under half hatch out. Thanks for the complement. The storm that was rolling is was spectacular.
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