How to calculate the hatch rate of your incubator

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to poultry farmers asking the biggest question, ‘What is the hatch rate of your incubators?’

This is a very good question indeed as many claim that the incubators they sell can give anything from 95% to even some claiming it will give 100%?

Take this with a pinch of salt and now let’s see how you can determine the hatch rate of your incubator by yourself and how to manage and store your eggs before you load into the incubator to get the maximum from the eggs that you have collected or purchased.

Eggs

You need eggs to load into an incubator and it can come either from your backyard farm or you can buy eggs from known friends, family or from your neighbourhood provided you know that they have males or cocks to fertilise the eggs.

Make sure all eggs either collected or purchased are fresh, clean and with no cracks or damage.

Once you start collecting your eggs store them in a cool and dry place away from wind drafts and direct sunlight and make sure the eggs are placed in clean dry egg trays with the pointy side facing down.

Depending on the eggs whether chicken, duck, turkey or guinea fowl could be collected up to 10 days and if its quail eggs then less than 6 days before loading into the incubator, but try and keep it less than that if you can, as the longer the eggs stay, less the chances of it giving you chicks.

What most farmers forget is to tilt the egg trays on a daily basis which is important as this keeps the egg yolk centred always. As time goes by the yolks tend to stick to the shell and we don’t want this and this is one of the reason on all ‘Automatic Incubators’ the eggs are tilted every 2 hours and if you happen to have a ‘manual incubator’ you need to turn the eggs by hand and the main reason for this is if not done, the chick would form with the organs growing outside its body and we don’t want that now, do we?

Ok now how do we do this tilting of the egg trays? Your egg tray has 4 sides, and every day say in the morning you can raise one side of the tray and in the evening the opposite side and so on and this is good enough to keep your fresh eggs primed to load into the Incubator.

Let’s assume now that you have the required number of eggs to load into the Incubator. Always make sure your Incubator has been running at least overnight before you load eggs and make sure you have filled your humidifier with ‘warm water’ and its plugged in and switched on before you load your eggs.

You need to plan what you call a ‘load or setting cycle’ so that you will have set dates to load your eggs and set dates when you will be collecting chicks. This is important as you don’t want to load eggs whilst there are eggs in your hatching baskets and another set is due to be moved to the hatching baskets.

Please refer to the chart and you can copy and or modify this as it suits your requirements.

Candling your eggs

Once the eggs are loaded into the incubator and now you need to candle the eggs to see if there is any growth in the eggs and this is another important factor, and how you do this is very simple.

Say on day 10 for chicken and other eggs and day 7 for quail eggs. You can remove them from the incubator and use a torch or a light that does not get hot and hold it against the egg and you will see there is growth inside the eggs and the ones that don’t have any growth were not fertilized and you can remove them from the incubator and these eggs that were removed are safe to eat either by boiling or frying only.

It’s important when you do this to make sure the room temperature is more or less equal to the incubator temperature. This is not possible in a normal environment, but you could minimize the effects by making sure there is no wind drafts and also doing this as fast as you can.

This is very important to do as now you can address the issue of fertility of your eggs.

What’s next? I still don’t know what the hatch rate of the incubator is?

Here we go on that now.

Let’s say you only used your eggs from your farm and let’s say you collected and loaded 100 eggs into the incubator and assuming you candled them on day 10 and based on this information let’s do the calculations.

We will assume the eggs to be chicken.

1. Eggs loaded: 100 on day 1.
2. Eggs with growth by candling: 50 on day 10.
3. Eggs transferred to hatcher: 50 on day 18.
4. Chicks hatched: 45 on day 21.

Now based on the above we can now assume that you got a 90% hatch rate.

How did we get 90% is you divide 45/50 x 100%

If you didn’t candle the eggs, the normal way you could be calculating would be as follows:

1. Eggs loaded: 100 on day 1.
2. Eggs transferred to hatcher: 100 on day 18.
3. Chicks hatched: 45 on day 21.

Now based on the above we can now assume that you got a 45% hatch rate.

How did we get 45% is you divide 45/100 x 100%

Now another question arises and this is where we want to address fertility of eggs.

Assuming you loaded 100 eggs and only 45 chicks came out and let’s assume you were upset and who won’t be at this instance and you broke the eggs to see if there is anything inside the eggs that didn’t hatch and found 55 of them didn’t have any growth and this goes to show that you are having infertile eggs from your farm.

This shows that you either don’t have enough cocks to hens ratio or your cocks are either not doing what they are supposed to do or infertile.

Based on the above you can either change your cocks or add more cocks to your flock. Remember that may be your hens could have problems too and don’t blame the cocks only.

Once you are happy that you have done what is needed and now let’s assume you collected another 100 eggs and this time around you candled them and found 90 eggs with growth and you got 90 chicks coming out after 21 days then you got it right.

You got a 100% hatch rate from your Incubator.

Hope this article was of help and you are most welcome to ask any questions; comments are welcome too!!

Be your own boss, hatch your dream.