All About Incubating Chicken Eggs

Learn how to raise chickens by incubating chicken eggs.

By B.P. Lemmon
Published on April 8, 2014
article image
by E.A. Janes
Four cute and fuzzy baby chicks sit on a perch.

Being “refugees” from the hustle and bustle of city life, we retired to a rural setting, where we bought raw acreage and began the process of developing it with a house and a couple of outbuildings for storage and shop facilities. It was the beginning of our brave attempt to be as self-reliant as possible. We had little previous experience with rural living and took the learn-as-you-go approach.

With the advent of spring one season, we were looking to replace a few of our chickens. When first considering livestock, we settled on raising chickens for eggs and meat; we bought 15 chicks at the local feed and grain store, ending up with 13 hens and two roosters. While the chicks were housed in temporary brooder facilities, we quickly constructed a coop and an appropriate outside run for that size of flock.

Once mature, the hens laid anywhere from six to a full dozen eggs a day in the first year, depending on their moods, the weather, and the season. The roosters fought and played Casanova to the hens throughout the year, with one becoming dominant and the other so intimidated he could not go outside without being chased back into the coop.

Chicks in Stock Feeder Brooder

Let’s try this

The idea of motherhood seemed completely foreign to our hens, and egg-laying became more or less a drop-and-walk-away affair. Around the first week of April, a co-worker loaned us a tabletop incubator so that we could try our hand at hatching eggs.

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