From Egg To Chick In 21 Days

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]What is up all my chicken people? It's beautiful day. I think it's supposed to be like 70s something today. I don't know. Um but it's windy which is what's new. Anyway, one question I got asked the other day in one of the comments because I do read comments, you know, a lot of YouTubers don't. I do and I try to respond to a lot of them if it's a simple answer. Um, one of them was a a question about can I do a video on the whole process from the collection of the eggs, why I collected, and when I collected all the way to the day it's hatched. So, I I did a video on brooding 101. Um, everything you need to know about um brooding chicks. Um, talked about in one of my other videos on pasty butt. Somebody asked about that, but I just want to do a whole process on uh from start to finish because it's it's things I do that I don't necessarily think about talking about until somebody asks about it. And so that's why I read the comments because I want to know what you guys want to know cuz that's what I'm here for. I'm here to educate. So, you know, we have we have breeder pens. Let's start that.

[00:01:17]Let's start there. If you're new to the channel, um we have eight breeder pins here. We're still not making any progress on our five over here. Um just be patient with us. But if you're going to breed chickens, um and and I'll probably make a video at some point on how to get into the chicken business, uh cuz it's it's a little more complicated. 2026 is not the year to get into um raising and selling chickens. Uh it's a fun hobby, but to actually sell chicks, it's very difficult this year.

[00:02:01]Um and everything is based off of egg prices. So anyway, to start here, if you're going to hatch a chick, you you don't necessarily need breeder pens, but you do need a rooster. Um, and you need to have a I say a young rooster. Old roosters can breed, too, but you have to have a rooster to fertilize eggs. And so we set up our breeder pins to where we have we can have depending on how many hens we have. Um best case scenario is is one uh rooster for 10 hens. That's kind of industry standards. Uh you know, if you were to sell hatching eggs, you might bump that up to like two roosters for 15 hens. um you're going to see a little more. Um you got to be careful because two different two roosters isn't always better than one rooster. Um like in our blue partridge brahmas here, we had two roosters in here and one rooster spent more time um keeping the other rooster from breeding than he did breeding. So our fertility was low. And so once we took out one of the roosters, the non-dominant rooster, uh the one rooster that was left in there, all he did was breed. So our fertility went up. So there's certain things to keep uh in mind. So, but if you're going to sell hatching eggs, uh those are things you need to think about and and work on so and pay attention to.

[00:03:45]But all you need is a rooster and hens.

[00:03:48]1 to 10 is kind of the industry standards. Um, a rooster can breed a hen once and fertilize and the hen can the hen determines um if she fertilizes the eggs with the male semen. So she can store uh his semen for up to I believe a month or 30 days and she will fertilize her eggs for 30 days off of one breeding. So just keep that in mind. If say my blue partridge brahma, say I had a Polish rooster in there and I was going to sell blue partridge brahas hatching eggs, I need to take that uh Polish rooster out for 30 days before I can collect or hatch those eggs and call them peerbred because the chance that he bred a hen and she's still releasing or fertilizing her eggs with the Polish roosters um juice is a possibility.

[00:05:00]So anyway, uh those are some things to keep in mind if you're wanting pure bread.

[00:05:08]But moving forward here, so let's just say we come to our breeder pins, depending on the temperature, um we collect eggs about every other day. Uh, and it works out good because we don't have to worry about the eggs uh getting dirty um or laying in the mud or getting stepped on or getting cracked with these Hengear nest boxes.

[00:05:35]Let's see if I can open this one hand here.

[00:05:43]And so we can come in here and all these eggs are going to be rolled out into the nest box and we don't have to worry about a hen sitting on them. Even if for some reason a hen goes broody in here, um the egg will roll out from underneath her and she won't be sitting on it. So what we'll do is we'll collect the eggs.

[00:06:06]This is uh two days worth of eggs we'll collect today. But we'll take these eggs. We'll make sure we aren't collecting any abnormal eggs.

[00:06:16]So, like this one's a little bit longer than the others. U it'll probably still hatch, but if it's a substantially smaller egg or a fairy egg or an oblong egg or a soft shell egg, we aren't going to hatch them. All these look as good as they get really.

[00:06:35]But so we'll collect those eggs and um we usually mark on all of our eggs so we know what breed is what. But then we'll take them down to the incubator room or the Bruder room where our incubators are. Uh maybe I should go down there next. But trying to think if I'm missing anything here. Um, you can collect every day. Uh, once we start selling hatching eggs, we'll probably collect every day just so uh especially when we're getting into the warmer months. Um, an egg or a embryo starts or chick starts developing uh at 99.5° because that's the body temperature of a hen.

[00:07:30]98 99 somewhere in there. So, if the temperature outside is reaching over 99.5 degrees or 98 degrees, uh, you need to start collecting them because once that chick starts developing, even if it's for a day and then you take it off of that temperature, so say I so say I leave it out here for for the day and it starts developing and then um I just put it into room temperature, then I run the risk of the embryo dying.

[00:08:03]and then it never will restart again.

[00:08:06]So, something to keep in mind. Uh we'll we'll start collecting more often when we start selling hatching eggs.

[00:08:14]Right now, the temperatures aren't getting up into that upper 90s. It's in the low 90s, which is fine to take them from 90° temperature, put them in a 70° temperature room, and let them sit. So, one of the other big things to know and the the practice we carry out is um we set on on Sundays here. That could be whatever day you pick, but Sundays just work for us Sunday nights.

[00:08:48]So the uh we'll collect uh Monday through Sunday instead on Sundays. So the egg the oldest the egg is going to be is 7 days. So in one of these days I need to it just takes so long to make this video. But I want to collect an egg every single day for let's just say 25 days. mark every egg and put them in an incubator and see how many days um you can go with collecting an egg and hatching it. So that video would take 25 days to collect the eggs, 21 days to incubate the eggs and hatch the eggs, and then I would have to edit the video and so on so forth. So it would take almost two months to make that one video, but it'd be a very very interesting video. So, if you guys want to see that um see that video, uh I don't even know what I'd call it.

[00:09:43]Viability test in days. I don't know. If you guys want to see that, comment down below. Um because it'd be interesting. Uh 7 to 10 days is kind of what everybody industry standards or what I read online says is you don't want to you start losing your viability after day 10 or 11. I say losing it. It starts going down. So let's just say you have 100% fertility rate in your flock.

[00:10:19]um you can save all those eggs up to let's just say 10 days and then after 10 days the uh the likelihood everything up to 10 days let's just say we'll have a 100% chance of hatching after those days uh from the time that egg is laid uh you run the risk of your chicken or the egg losing its viability. So, yes, you can still hatch an egg that is 15 days old. Um, maybe even 20 days old, but your chances go way down. So, hope that makes sense. We only shoot for 7 days. Uh, if it's like a super rare bird or something, I don't know. I I'll push my luck if I have the incubator space. But if you're going to order chicks from or order eggs from a uh a breeder like myself, that'd be something to ask. How old are the eggs? You know, if you're buying a super rare breed and they only have two chickens, uh two hens of said breed, how long is it going to take for them to acquire a dozen hatching eggs?

[00:11:40]So, let's just say two chickens lay an egg a day and you're going to get two eggs a day. It's going to take you six days to get a dozen eggs if they both lay two a day. Let's just say 7 days. It's going to take them seven days to get all eggs, all one dozen eggs, and then they have to ship them to you. So, let's just say that takes two or three more days. So, you're already at 10 days right there by the time they get to your house. Then you got to let them sit 24 hours and then you have uh then you set them. So, you're at 11 days right then and there.

[00:12:22]So, keep that in mind. Let that be something to think about. Um you're at 11 days. So that very first egg he collected uh on day one um that the chance of that is going to start the chance of that egg is the viability is going to start going down the day you put them in the incubator. So keep that in mind. Uh you know if they have one hen and you want a dozen eggs, best case scenario, he's going to send you a dozen eggs on day 12. You're going to get them on day 13 or 14. You're going to set him on day 15. Now, those first five eggs you got or he collected, the viatility is going to um be getting worse and worse. Anyway, let's go. I hope I answered all the questions out here that I need to answer. Uh roosters to hinge 10 to one.

[00:13:22]we set every seven days and or you know we don't we try not to set anything past 7 days old. So let's go down to the the Bruder room and discuss what we do from the time we set them in the incubator till the time they hatch.

[00:13:41]Welcome to the Bruder room.

[00:13:50]So, I went ahead and collected the eggs because there was one part of this process I needed to explain.

[00:13:58]So, here's some of the eggs from yesterday and some of this morning, I guess.

[00:14:06]Anyway, so we we use the GQF incubators.

[00:14:10]Um, there's a ton of different incubators you can use. I've done reviews on a bunch.

[00:14:15]I specif I personally like incubators that run pointy and down um outside of laying the eggs on the side. Now, I'm not going to say one has a better hatch rate than the other, but all the big hatcheries and all the really expensive incubators, uh, I mean, every $10,000 incubator or $30,000 incubator runs them pointy end down. So, obviously there's probably a higher percent hatch rate if they're ran pointy end down. So, I'm sure somebody in the comments is going to say they incubate eggs on their side and have 100% hatch rate. And that's very doable. So, anyway, these incubators uh run on trays and then every 2 hours the tray turns right and left. So, an egg needs to be rotated so the air sack doesn't sick on one side or the other. Uh if you're if you buy an incubator that doesn't have a rotating option, you need to hand rotate them. Not every two hours, but at least once or twice a day at minimum. Um so, but these these incubators use a hatch tray and it's a good practice. Uh let me grab this other these other trays.

[00:15:44]If you don't have an incubator that runs the trays, if you just have a tabletop incubator and it runs them on the side, uh, that's fine. But I would suggest storing your eggs. So, say you're going to incubate on day seven or 10 or whatever it is. I would suggest storing your eggs with pointy end down.

[00:16:10]So, I'll just uh use an example. So, this is an egg tray. We sell these on our website, 5acrefarmcanansas.com.

[00:16:24]And you can get a couple of these and just set them somewhere that the dog's not going to get them. The kids aren't going to play with them. Don't put them in the refrigerator. Uh, I would just, uh, keep them on at room temperature. So, your egg has a fat end and a pointy end most the time, not all the time, but if you can't tell which is the fat end and the pointy end, turn off your lights, grab a candling light, and put your light on it, and you should be able to see an air sack in there. And the air sack will be on the fat end.

[00:17:02]Whatever side the air sack is on, you want that side to be pointed up. So over your seven days, collect your eggs. Try to keep them pointy ended up. You can use an egg carton, too. You know, if you don't have one of these trip plastic trays, just put them in an egg carton, put them pointy end down, and uh and let them sit for 7 days. So, we don't use these near as much. We'll use these for collecting eating eggs sometimes. But since these trays go right into the incubator, we usually just uh stack them up here prior to to incubating. And then so every day or every other day when we collect eggs, we'll have all of our eggs sitting on top of the incubators. And then on Sunday, we set. So these are these trays are made for chickens. Um, we have some trays for quail. Same way we have some trays for bantams and pheasant eggs.

[00:18:12]And then for like goose eggs, goose eggs are tough. Goose and duck eggs cuz they don't you can set them in these. You just can't set them right next to each other. You kind of got to space them out.

[00:18:23]But these incubators uh don't stand up duck and goose eggs quite as well.

[00:18:31]So, don't mind the dust, but these are the trays for duck and goose egg, and they hatch on their side.

[00:18:43]That's what we do prior to collecting eggs. So, you've mastered your fertility, you've mastered everything outside, you've collected daily or every other day or whatever the case may be. You've brought them in to the house, kept them at room temperature. Um, don't put them in the fridge if you can avoid it. If you put them in the fridge, just plan on eating them. You, yes, you can hatch some refrigerated eggs, but the viatility goes way down once you refrigerate them.

[00:19:13]But anyway, put them put them in room temperature and then on day like for us, Sunday, let's just say day seven, uh, they go into the incubator. So once you put them in the incubator, this isn't really an incubating video, but you want your temperature at 995 and you want on chickens, it's going to take a 21-day process. So on uh I don't get into my incubators after I put the eggs in there until for chicks, for chickens, day 18. So, I know a lot of you guys like to get in there and look every day or every couple days to see which ones are fertile.

[00:19:56]I get on some of the Facebook groups and see people posting photos of eggs, candling eggs at day four and they're like, "Is this fertile or not? Just leave the dang eggs alone." Okay? Just if they're going to hatch, if they're going to develop, they're going to develop. If they're not, they're not.

[00:20:14]Now, if you start smelling something in there, yeah, you need to get in there and figure out which one's bad. But for the most part, just wait till day 18.

[00:20:25]Um, from day 4 through 10, you're going to start seeing some veins.

[00:20:34]you're going to start seeing some stuff, but uh unless you have a really small incubator and you're setting new eggs every couple days and you want to pull the old ones out so you can put new ones in because you only have so much space, then okay, maybe candle on day 12 or 10.

[00:20:54]Uh we don't we just we have incubator space. So we just wait till day 18 when they go into lockdown. So on chicks, uh, we set on a Sunday and then I think it is like a Friday when we pull them out and then they hatch on a Sunday. That make it 21 days. So on day 18, we pull them all out. We set them here in the dark and we candle every one of them. We put all the ones that developed uh into a brooding a brooding tray or a lock down tray. For us, it's this. These slide into the bottom of the incubator.

[00:21:41]Sometimes, depending if I if I feel like it, I'll put a wafer up here and bump the humidity up to 70°.

[00:21:50]I found that the hatch rate or the the hatch rate isn't doesn't hardly change for me if I bump the temperature or if I bump the humidity from 50 to 70. Now, if you have a small incubator, uh there's nothing wrong with adding the second bottle or adding more water. Uh for here, it's just nice to keep the whole incubator at 50°. Once the chicks start hatching, they will bump the humidity up in the incubator. the wet little chick coming out of the egg, as the air goes over it will bump the humidity up. And since the hatching tray is on the bottom, the humidity settles and the dry air rises. So, keep that in mind. It may be more humid down here than up here.

[00:22:35]Now, I know not everybody has this kind of incubator, but if you're going to run a like a tabletop incubator and you're just going to run one set of eggs in it, you might as well bump the humidity up to 70. Uh just got to be careful. Um because if it gets too high, you can ground the chick in the egg. So, which means it'll be too wet in the egg and the the chick can't start pipping. But you want the shell to be just soft enough for them to start pipping through.

[00:23:05]If it's too dry, then they'll start pipping through and the inner membrane of the egg will do what's called shrink wrapping and uh they will shrink on the chick before it can finish rotating and pipping its way out.

[00:23:20]So hopefully I'm not missing anything. I'm trying to think here. I don't do scripts or anything. So, um, talking just about chicks. I'll show you my my hatch chart up here. I keep this up here all the time if you're going to do multiple different breeds of um, birds. I guess it's worth printing one of these off. Just type in GQF breeding hatch guide on Google and find this image and uh print it off. So, it pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Let's just say chickens here. Uh they incubate from 20 to 22 days. 21 is kind of the number.

[00:24:12]Incubator 100°. Humidity 45 to 55. Wet bulb is uh it's like humidity but with a thermometer.

[00:24:24]If you don't use wet bulb, then you don't need to worry about it. Uh stop turning on day 17 or 18.

[00:24:31]Uh we usually go on 18. I don't know why I marked it out and put 17.

[00:24:37]And then you can bump the humidity from 55 up up to 55 to 65°. So or wet bulb.

[00:24:45]So you have a turkeys, ducks, musccoies, uh geese, guineies, feeasants, peacocks, bob white quail, caternis quail, chucker, grouse, and then when we did button quail, we had that up there. So that little chart has seen a thing or two because we had that chart in our basement when we hatched in the basement, but now we have this room. It just goes up there. It's kind of a quick reminder. Obviously, I hatch a lot of um chickens, quail, uh feeasants, ducks. Most of those dates I kind of know. But if I'm not thinking when I'm doing all this, cuz some days we'll sit out here and and uh candle and move and sort for a couple hours. We use a uh whiteboard. There are apps to solve this, but I kind of like this better because then I don't have to worry about my phone.

[00:25:43]But I have three incubators. It's worth just having a little whiteboard if you want to put a little whiteboard by your incubator or set a reminder in your phone or write on the egg. But this is what we use. So let's just say incubator one, which is the left incubator.

[00:25:59]It's got three rows. Row one, we have feeasants in the front of that level and feeasants in the back. We always put the day they're set, the day on lockdown, they go into lockdown, and the day they're supposed to hatch. So, just say uh for two chickens, we set them on 53.

[00:26:22]We need to candle them and put them in lockdown 18 days later on the 21st, and they should hatch on the 24th.

[00:26:31]So, we uh that's how we keep track of everything.

[00:26:39]So, on day 18, let's just say row one, today is day 18.

[00:26:50]On your incubator, you're just going to pull the rotating tray out or take them off a rotation. You want to make sure you have something that they hatch in that they can move around on, but also have not have a slick surface. So, if your little countertop incubator just has a smooth bottom, you need to put something along the bottom, paper towels or drawer liners or something that they can gain a little traction so you don't get splay leg.

[00:27:18]But you're going to pull them out of the incubator, candle them, put them in, wait 3 days. They're going to remember they're going to start hatching on day 21 if your humidity and temperature is right. And then once they start hatching, you really want to leave them all in the incubator until they're done hatching.

[00:27:37]So on usually they all hatch within 24 to 48 hours if your incubator is accurate.

[00:27:43]And you kind of want them all to hatch at the same time. So, it's going to be real difficult to do this if you have countertop incubators and you're setting multiple eggs multiple days eggs in one incubator. So, say you only put three eggs in this day, the next day you're going to or 3 days later you're going to put three eggs in.

[00:28:01]I would not suggest doing that because unless you have a designated hatcher because you're going to have to take eggs off of rotation on day 18, but yet you still have eggs in there that need to keep rotating for multiple days. I hope that makes sense.

[00:28:15]But anyway, you're going to pull them out. You're going to candle them, put them in the hatch tray or get them ready for hatching. Bump the humidity up if you need to. And then on day 21, they're going to start hatching. You can sit there, leave the incubator door closed.

[00:28:29]Um, don't get in there and play with them. Just leave them leave the incubator closed. Once you open that incubator, you let all the humidity out and you can run the risk of shrink wrapping. So, leave the door closed. Look at them with a flashlight. Do whatever you got to do.

[00:28:45]Uh, just watch them, wait for them to all hatch, wait for them to all get fluffy, and then pull them out.

[00:28:52]And today is like day 22 or 23.

[00:29:01]Hey, no, guys.

[00:29:08]And so if you do everything right, you're going to get a tray.

[00:29:14]full of little fluffy nuggets.

[00:29:17]How about that?

[00:29:19]Polishes, americanas, blue partridge dramas, salmon favalls, all the goodness right there. There's a couple in here that aren't quite fluffy.

[00:29:31]So, we're going to go ahead and put them back in.

[00:29:34]Hopefully, nobody jumps out here because I had one faval still crazy on me.

[00:29:46]So, I'm going to look through here real quick and see if I have any eggs that started to pip and then didn't hatch.

[00:29:58]So, I have one right here.

[00:30:04]So, what happened was Coronation Sussex started and ran out of energy. Now, it's still alive. So, what I'm going to do is open up the shell.

[00:30:17]If you do this too early, you run the risk of killing it.

[00:30:23]I just opened up the shell and pulled them out.

[00:30:31]We got one more here.

[00:30:35]Looks like a Polish maybe.

[00:30:38]We're going to open it up. We're going to leave those two in the incubator for a couple more days. But everybody else this evening, we're going to pull out because they're good and fluffy.

[00:30:55]Look at the cute little chicks.

[00:30:58]Little corn Sussex.

[00:31:02]Aren't they just the cutest? So, there you go.

[00:31:10]From egg to chick in 21 days.

[00:31:20]That was a pretty good size hatch.

[00:31:24]I have a whole another hatch tray down here full of chicks, too. This was all one big hatch. So, anyways, if you guys have any other questions on I already did a video, go look for brooding chicks 101 if you want to learn what to do from the time you pull them out to four or five weeks old. So, go watch that video if you want to learn the next proc the next step in the process. But if you're going to start with eggs, I hope this video helped you guys. Uh what you guys learned from it, how and know how and why and what to look for in eggs and picking eggs up to the time you get little fuzzy chicks. So if you're noticing your eggs aren't fertile out of one specific breed, then try swapping out roosters or try something different. So, I'm trying to hope I don't forget anything. Anyway, comment down below uh what questions you guys might have from egg to chick and we'll see if I can't answer them and we'll go from there. But I think that's all I have for today's video.

[00:32:40]Get an incubator, hatch chicks. They're a lot of fun. Buy chicks local. Like I always said, if you don't want to hatch, support your local egg dealer. If you find somebody uh that sells something you want to to hatch, go that route. Uh we were we are going to start hatching or mailing hatching eggs this year. Uh I'm working on becoming an NPIP tester so I can test my own flock. And then once I test my flock, I can get my certificate. Then we can start shipping eggs. Probably only a couple breeds of chickens will be able to ship this year and quail, Katnix quail. So, I hope that answered all the questions you wanted, but you know the deal. We love you guys.

[00:33:26]Don't haggle with your egg supplier. Buy your chicks local and we'll see you guys on the next one.