[AndynJ]

I wonder why so many hatching eggs/hens are sold
I accept some people don't want a cockerel and therefore can't breed but there does seem to be a lot of hens/eggs sold.

Do people lose that many birds they need to replace them ?

Does anyone know why ?
If you buy hatching eggs every year why ?

Edited How many hens a year do people need to replace ?

[Mammyshaz]

I'm not permitted to keep cockerels so cannot hatch our own eggs therefore bringing in fertile eggs is the closest we can be to running a relatively closed flock ( knowing there are some conditions which can be carried in the egg ). The male youngsters ( not yet cockerels as not fully grown adults (       ) are dispatched for the pot or sold if I have what someone is after.
There is nothing quite like watching a new life emerging from a shell and great experience for my boys ( and me  )

[bloomer]

same as mammyshaz


its fun to hatch them. boys go in the freezer unless they are a good example or something really unusual girls either replace losses in my flock or go to other local keepers.


Backyard chicken keeping is one of the fastest growing hobbies in the uk currently, so long as your not greedy there are plenty of buyers for pretty looking point of lay birds.

[hughesy]

Chickens laying performance isn't a constant thing with the best being the first year after they start generally speaking. If you keep hens for egg production you'll need a constant programme of replacement in order to keep production going. Having said that I'm seriously considering buying in POL birds from now on as the economics of hatching my own and feeding them up to POL are not adding up too well.

[AndynJ]

5 legbars hatched this morning another 15 to go
Next set ready and waiting to go in
All hens ordered   

[Stereo]

It's marginal when you work it all out. Add in labour and land required and it's often better to buy POL, especially if you don't want a freezer full of cockerels.

The flip side is that you have far less risk of bringing disease onto your land with eggs and also, you have a better chance of getting hens from a good flock. We are hatching copper marans this year and are able to choose a couple good flocks and hatch in 24s at a time. Figuring on hatching about 96 eggs and hoping to get 20 good hens, a fridge full of meat and some less good hens to sell on to hobby keepers.

Generally though with eBay eggs you are paying nearly £2 per egg inc postage. Half will hatch and 60% of those will be boys. So you pay £200 for 100 eggs, get 50 birds and only about 20 will be hens = £10 per hen before you even put any food into it. Say £5 to feed it up to POL and a bit more for electricity and bedding.

Of course you will often do better on the percentages but over time, this seems realistic in our experience.

[chrismahon]

We lost about 25% of our mixed age flocks per year AndynJ in England. Losses were for various reasons so that may be a bit high for some people. We moved to France with 28 Pedigrees in August 2012. Since then of the originals three were killed by hunting dogs, four died of natural causes. So that's about 15% per year.


Hybrids have half the life expectancy of Pedigrees, so losses will be much higher.


Reasons I can think of are illness, sudden death, theft, predator strikes and accidents.


We run closed flocks and hatch to replace losses.

[AndynJ]

It's marginal when you work it all out. Add in labour and land required and it's often better to buy POL, especially if you don't want a freezer full of cockerels.

The flip side is that you have far less risk of bringing disease onto your land with eggs and also, you have a better chance of getting hens from a good flock. We are hatching copper marans this year and are able to choose a couple good flocks and hatch in 24s at a time. Figuring on hatching about 96 eggs and hoping to get 20 good hens, a fridge full of meat and some less good hens to sell on to hobby keepers.

Generally though with eBay eggs you are paying nearly £2 per egg inc postage. Half will hatch and 60% of those will be boys. So you pay £200 for 100 eggs, get 50 birds and only about 20 will be hens = £10 per hen before you even put any food into it. Say £5 to feed it up to POL and a bit more for electricity and bedding.

Of course you will often do better on the percentages but over time, this seems realistic in our experience.

Wow thanks for that, I have been offered more than £2 an egg for both my legbars & Marans however the first couple of hatches we are hatching ourselves just to make sure all is well & selling the hens between £12 & £15

I have never bought hatching eggs, we bought a couple of hens in 2012 really good breeding stock, the only thing we bought last year and this year are cockerels,

We keep our costs down (I suppose) by mixing our own feed,
We always have a broody, so we pop 6 eggs under each a week before the incubator, so incu is only on for 14 days ish, then our heat lamp is only 11w or less as it's a ceramic thingy (I think) then into a nursing pen with a broody with no heat.
Labour = love
Bedding = free ish, we use hay, which we gather when the farmer has finished baling next door, we just wander round raking it up & filling dumpy bags this year we will have to make a baler (wooden box type)
Our Speckled sussex & Lavenders are really good broodies, we need them to be broody more than we need their eggs.
60% hatch rate off ebay ? why is it so low ? posting ?

Chrismahon, thankyou for that, I sell my hybrids at 2 years old at the local market for hobbyists, so I suppose we don't see so many losses.

[benkt]

We do most of our hatching for replacements via our 'hatching in schools' scheme. I'm just off this afternoon to collect half a dozen ducklings that a local school has hatched for us. This way, they pay for half of the electricity and  around £200 a hatch so its a good source of income for us!

[Stereo]

It's marginal when you work it all out. Add in labour and land required and it's often better to buy POL, especially if you don't want a freezer full of cockerels.

The flip side is that you have far less risk of bringing disease onto your land with eggs and also, you have a better chance of getting hens from a good flock. We are hatching copper marans this year and are able to choose a couple good flocks and hatch in 24s at a time. Figuring on hatching about 96 eggs and hoping to get 20 good hens, a fridge full of meat and some less good hens to sell on to hobby keepers.

Generally though with eBay eggs you are paying nearly £2 per egg inc postage. Half will hatch and 60% of those will be boys. So you pay £200 for 100 eggs, get 50 birds and only about 20 will be hens = £10 per hen before you even put any food into it. Say £5 to feed it up to POL and a bit more for electricity and bedding.

Of course you will often do better on the percentages but over time, this seems realistic in our experience.

Wow thanks for that, I have been offered more than £2 an egg for both my legbars & Marans however the first couple of hatches we are hatching ourselves just to make sure all is well & selling the hens between £12 & £15

I have never bought hatching eggs, we bought a couple of hens in 2012 really good breeding stock, the only thing we bought last year and this year are cockerels,

We keep our costs down (I suppose) by mixing our own feed,
We always have a broody, so we pop 6 eggs under each a week before the incubator, so incu is only on for 14 days ish, then our heat lamp is only 11w or less as it's a ceramic thingy (I think) then into a nursing pen with a broody with no heat.
Labour = love
Bedding = free ish, we use hay, which we gather when the farmer has finished baling next door, we just wander round raking it up & filling dumpy bags this year we will have to make a baler (wooden box type)
Our Speckled sussex & Lavenders are really good broodies, we need them to be broody more than we need their eggs.
60% hatch rate off ebay ? why is it so low ? posting ?

Chrismahon, thankyou for that, I sell my hybrids at 2 years old at the local market for hobbyists, so I suppose we don't see so many losses.

Probably damage in the post, yes. Although our customers seem to get good hatch rates. Sometimes you get zero and you just don't know if they got a whack in the post, were old, had to be washed or were never even potentially fertile in the first place. It's the nature of eBay and it's why we are starting to keep careful records of sellers and hatch rates / quality of birds.

[Marches Farmer]

If you run a closed flock you need to be extremely careful not to breed in genetic problems and sometimes need to use hatching eggs to bring in fresh bloodlines.

We live in a very exposed location and hens over 18 months old find it difficult to cope with our winters - wind more than cold or snow - so we aim to take only POLs or really exceptional hens from the previous year through the Winter.

[ballingall]

We keep a few laying hens, and a few pure bred bantams. My bantams are supposed to be for show as well, but in practice I show them very little. The breed I have do not go broody hardly at all naturally, god know how they would make it if they were left to it. In three years I've not had a hen go broody (out of only 4 hens to be fair). But if I don't incubate, I'll never get any new younger stock to replace into the flock. Which is what happened to me once previously, and I suddenly realised my hens were too old to get any offspring from. So now I am trying to incubate even just once a year, to make sure I get some younger ones in. The positive side with them being a rare breed, is that I can at least try and sell them.

Edited to say that the breed I have, hatching eggs cost £5 for 6 on eBay, plus £5 postage!    Think I need to start selling my eggs.....


Beth

[AndynJ]

Edited to say that the breed I have, hatching eggs cost £5 for 6 on eBay, plus £5 postage!   
Think I need to start selling my eggs.....
Beth

That comment surprised me, wow so £1 an egg is good in your mind then ? I have orders for some of my eggs from £2 to £5 per egg dependant on the breed, the £4 & £5 ones do have a guarantee with them for egg production quality (assuming they produce a hen)
I have never sold hatching eggs before only hens £12-£38
 

[ballingall]

Edited to say that the breed I have, hatching eggs cost £5 for 6 on eBay, plus £5 postage!   
Think I need to start selling my eggs.....
Beth

That comment surprised me, wow so £1 an egg is good in your mind then ? I have orders for some of my eggs from £2 to £5 per egg dependant on the breed, the £4 & £5 ones do have a guarantee with them for egg production quality (assuming they produce a hen)
I have never sold hatching eggs before only hens £12-£38

I've never sold any of my hatching eggs before (as perhaps indicative of my last comment of maybe I should start selling them), so yes it seemed quite good to me. Perhaps it's not in your area, given what you have been offered.


 Beth