Last year my now fourteen year old son tried incubating eggs (quail, duck and chicken) in an incubator owned by someone else. There were multiple failures – power outages, chicks that got stuck in the netting….there were so many disappointments.

This year, he decided to build his own incubator. He salvaged a small refrigerator for the housing and traveled to Haifa to purchase a thermostat from a private seller. Then he put them together, rigged it with electricity and got it up and running.

While he was busy setting this up, one of his hens was doing her own incubating, and hatched some chicks!

A week later my son hatched out the first six chicks in his incubator, and then a week later another 25. In the week before the bar mitzva there were another twenty or so, and then a few days ago another 25. I’ve gotten used to the peeping sounds of newly hatched chicks coming from his bedroom. 🙂

He also built an outdoor cage with a heat lamp, to keep them warm and safe until they’re big enough to keep themselves warm. So far the results have been exactly the opposite of last year – his chicks are doing great.

His plan is to sell as many chicks as he can. If some aren’t sold, he’ll keep the hens as future layers to increase our personal egg production. I’d love to have enough homegrown eggs to meet our egg intake, but we’re far from that now. We use a lot of eggs! And of course as of late he’s been saving the eggs to incubate, so we haven’t been eating any.

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The same son asked me to drive him to the feed store to get chick starter. They had no chick feed in stock, which was unusual but he was told they’d have some in a week. While we were there, he got more feed for his adult chickens, and after paying told me he was glad the price hadn’t gone up too much. I suggested he figure out how much it went up by percentages; once he did he realized there had been a 20% increase.

We went back a week later. Still no chick starter. Once we were there, he decided to get some feed corn and wheat for his adult chickens – the price of the corn has gone up almost 150% since the last time he bought some! That is a crazy increase and obviously will affect the costs of the eggs/meat being raised – not just for us but chickens raised on any scale. Finally after a month they got the chick starter back in stock, so he got enough to last for a while.

During this waiting period, he did some research to learn about what baby chicks need to eat, and learned how to make his own chick feed. (He’s already experimented with fermenting the feed for adult chickens, which makes it much more nutritious and cuts the cost quite a bit.) Chicks don’t eat the same thing as adult chickens; they need a different blend of nutrients. Since they need a lot of protein, he did an experiment in growing his own protein for his chickens, which was very interesting and successful!

Now that he’s able buy the starter, he’s not growing protein for them but it was a good thing to learn and know he could do.

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He made his first chick sale a couple of week ago, and it was gratifying for us all to see him getting a return after all of the work and time he’s invested. Right now he has about eighty chicks that are a few weeks old, including the four chicks who run all over with their mother. He has another hen sitting on a clutch of eggs, so in a couple of weeks he should have some more chicks. (The chicks raised by their mothers are not for sale.)

He has a theory that chicks hatched by hens will as adults have the instinct to be broody (sit on their own eggs). He’s doing an experiment to see if that’s accurate. He’s purchased two purebred hens, which supposedly have had the instinct to sit on their eggs bred out of them. Certainly his purebred hens don’t sit on their eggs. He’s switched out some of the non-purebred eggs that are under the broody hen with some purebred eggs, since he hopes to hatch purebred chicks that will grow up to be broody when they reach the laying stage. It will take months to see if this theory is accurate, but it’s a worthwhile experiment.

While all of these chicks might sound noisy and messy, it’s not at all. My son rotates different batches of chicks so that as they get older, they are able to spend the day running around outside. It’s restful and entertaining to watch them; they add a nice energy to the yard area.

Avivah