Recently I was asked to be a part of an American Pastured Poultry Producer Association live discussion on how to troubleshoot incubation and hatching problems. It's a topic that I've always been interested in and motivated by my own experience to research better incubation practices to help increase my hatchability.
Over the years I've developed some data sheets to really hone in to my incubation practices. When an egg doesn't develop, stops developing at some point during incubation or the chick reaches hatch but doesn't actually hatch, you have to ask yourself why. Getting to the cause of the problem will help guide you to a better hatch in the future.
The most revealing thing a person can do to understand what caused an early embryonic death or an unhatched chick is to open the egg once it's confirmed dead inside. Being able to see the stage of growth that it died in is important in understanding what factors allowed it to make it that far and what factors could have caused the death.
For those of you brave enough to open up an egg and examine a partially developed embryo or unhatched chick, I've included some links to the data sheets I created and use on our farm to help us better understand and identify any problems we may experience during our incubation processes.
Download your FREE data sheets by clicking each link:
1 comment
Thank you for sharing!!! This is super helpful!!!