It's that time of year when the chicken farm cranks up to full speed ahead and we hit the ground running. Last fall we worked very hard at choosing our new breeders and look forward to seeing the results of that hard work. It takes producing and growing up many birds to get those who are worthy of putting in the breeding pens. I laugh to myself when customers call and order 6 Black Copper Marans and say they are becoming breeders. When your looking to purchase poultry it pays to do your research.
We began filling the incubator the first part of February, in hopes to get a jump on growing up young pullets. Our incubator holds about 2000 eggs, we put eggs in every Monday night and have a hatch every Monday night. Our incubator sits in our Morton building which is not heated, as you can imagine, the incubator has a hard time maintaining temperature. This weeks hatch was very low which proves it did not maintain temp. Our customers always wonder what is taking so long for my order to get to me. Well this is just one reason, sometimes problems arise. We are working with animals and you can't put a time limit on things that involve animals, they just don't work on our time schedule.
So Far we have two hatches of chicks in the brooder growing. Let's hope for lots of little hens. If you have a pullet order with us please keep in mind it takes awhile to grow up these little fuzzy butts and we occasionally have set backs and remember half of these little chickies will turn out to be roosters.
We hope to begin shipping out the day old chick orders in April. Customers always want to know if we will ship them chicks in February. We found out early on in this business that it's a waste of time and sweet little chicks if we ship during the cold weather. Chicks like a temp of 99 degrees, anything less and they're cold and a cold chick will not survive. If we begin shipping to early in the spring it will put us behind in the long run as we attempt to reship all the chicks that died. For healthy vibrant chicks it needs to be warm. Please be patient with us as we begin to fill many orders, we won't let you down, but it's not a process that we can rush.
Thanks so much to all who have placed an order.
We look forward to sharing some beautiful healthy chicks and young pullets with you soon!
If you haven't placed your order yet, it's not to late we're still taking orders and will ship chicks all summer long.
Have a great day!
Angie
