As an expert in the area of parent stock poultry farming, I have taken it up on myself to treat a lot of begging questions that requires answers in this aspect of poultry that very few people have deep understanding as well as technical expertise.
Without any further delay, in this first series of questions and answers to parent stock breeding know how, I have answered some begging questions that need answers to. Enjoy
How reliable are the hatcheries that will be incubating your fertile eggs?
How do you ensure they don’t give you false hatchability figures which could eat into your profits?
I love this question, and I will give you a simple past experienced story to answer it.
If you can afford to purchase an incubator, go for it. Now back to the story.
I remembered some two years ago (2016) when we set some hatchable eggs for hatching , we also sent out some of the eggs to two different hatcheries, this was done purposely to compare and contrast the percentage hatchability of the three different locations.
Once the result came out after 21 days, it will surprise you to know that despite our high hatchability, one of the hatcheries still had a higher hatchability percentage than that of ours.
That shows that they are doing the right thing and there’s no doubt that other breeder farms will also be experiencing the same impressive results from the service of that particular hatchery as well.
Can one start hatching in small scale if yes what are the requirements?
First of all, this is an entirely independent business structure. So you need a huge amount of capital to set up your hatchery , you also need constant source of power supply as you cannot afford to let power go off for a couple of minutes or else… There will be problems.
But if you want to go really small scale like say 60 – 150 egg capacity incubator, then you won’t be thinking of commercialising the incubator but instead it will be basically meant for personal use.
How can one get Homemade incubator,and how much can it cost?
Honestly, the few homemade incubators I have seen are of very minimal capacity and so they cannot be used for commercial hatching purposes, just as I aforementioned in the previous answer above , and I quote
_”if you want to go really small scale like say 60 – 150 egg capacity incubator, then you won’t be thinking of commercialising the incubator but instead it will be basically meant for personal use_ ”
In conventional incubator, mother birds stay up to 21days hatching already fertiled eggs in Chickens while in Turkeys stayed for 28days, My questions is this…
*How long will it take incubator to hatch eggs either homemade of automatic?*
Whether homemade or automatic or natural or artificial hatching, 21 days is 21 days for chickens to hatch their chicks and hatcheries to hatch their chicks. So far the temperature, humidity and ventilation conditions are in order, then you are good to hear from your newly hatched baby chicks in 21 days time. So as far as hatching of eggs is concerned, once the appropriate hatching conditions are met, you should be expecting your chicks after 21 days in the case of chickens and 28 days in the case of turkeys.
*I have a 5000 capacity incubator sent to me by my relation from China.* How do I get parent stock (broiler) to feed the equipment? How many, cost, other provision etc
This particular question involves some calculations here and there before any tangible figure can be arrived at. But let me summarily work with a 10,000 capacity incubator.
To feed a 10,000 incubating machine, it means that an average of 300+ hatchable eggs will be collected from the farm daily. You know that eggs are being set twice weekly reason why you buy day old chicks in the market on Monday and Thursday weekly.
So in order words you can decide to start with 500 broiler breeder parent stock birds.Each one costs +/-#1450 at the parent stock hatchery. So you can calculate the estimate . Just as in raising commercial birds, there are a lot of other variables involved as regards total cost, but in the long run with a benchmark of say #120-#150 total production cost per bird once they start laying your hatchable eggs you are in profit.
As regards the issue of purchasing your parent stock birds, you can get abor acre from Chi Farms or Marshal from Obasanjo farms.
It all depends on your choice of breed due to their different genetic characteristics.
