What Comes First The Egg, The Chick, or The Started Bird?
Getting started with any poultry should be thought out and not an impulse buy. For some, hatching eggs is the answer, but you can also started with chicks or started birds. Get the pros and cons of all so you can decide for yourself which is the best fit.
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Carey Blackmon: 0:00
Hi, and welcome to the Poetry Nerds podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, and I'm here with my co-host for the show, Jennifer Bryant. And we are here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest, and highest quality birds possible.
Jennifer Bryant: 0:24
We're gonna talk about if you wanna order hatching eggs, or do you just wanna order chicks or do you wanna wait and order started birds, like the pros and cons to all three of those options?
Carey Blackmon: 0:35
I guess that would depend on what comes first, the egg, the chick, or the started bird.
Jennifer Bryant: 0:42
The breeder comes first.
Carey Blackmon: 0:44
There you go. We've already talked about breeder selection, right? That's in a previous episode that people could go pick up. So where do you get your bang for your buck?
Jennifer Bryant: 0:55
Personally, I think it just depends on your infrastructure. If you are already set up with an incubator and a brooder and you know what you're doing, and I think hatching eggs would probably be the best bang for your buck at that point.
Carey Blackmon: 1:14
So I am very pro. Started bird even though I have two large cabinet incubators, two barns 16 different breeder pens, all that good stuff I'm more believable with started bullets or some type of started bird period for me.
Jennifer Bryant: 1:37
So when I got the cochin, I started with, a started Trio, they were four months old. So I think that each category has its own pros and cons depending on what you wanna do.
Carey Blackmon: 1:53
Like for me, I like reds and I had found some really good looking reds. But they were not standard reds. They were close. But when you order hatching eggs if you're just starting out and you did not go through our selecting the breeder and follow those, you're still trying to figure it out and. When you look on the internet and you see what people have, they have pictures, but is that what you're really getting when you order hatching eggs?
Jennifer Bryant: 2:32
Let's just talk about hatching eggs for just a minute. Okay? So you're going to get quantity for your monetary investment. Gonna get the least amount of shipping cost. And you're. Chance, like a lottery ticket to have more chicks. So when you order hatching eggs, the industry standard is a 50% hatch rate. You could get zero and you could get a hundred percent. I have had people do both from my eggs because there's so many variables. The shipper handling, how much does the post office guy mad at you that day? The heat cold isn't necessarily such a problem, but the heat in the summer is an issue. Your incubator quality and skills. What else? Hatching eggs is a gamble. It's like pulling a lottery ticket in a lot of ways.
Carey Blackmon: 3:35
Yeah, I agree. When you're, when you buy hatching eggs, it's a gamble from everything. Are you getting what you think you bought? Is half of'em gonna hatch is more than half. Because if you, so let's say you want to get a decent amount of chicks because you know that roughly, if you're looking for a standard bird, something that's really good quality, a lot of breeders will suggest 10%. So with that in mind, you're gonna order a hundred eggs. You're going to hatch out 50 of them. Out of that 50, you're gonna select five keepers.
Jennifer Bryant: 4:19
If we're talking about chickens, I agree with you.
Carey Blackmon: 4:21
Yes. Yeah, with, I'm talking about chickens on that part now, obviously with quail, most people are into your meat and eggs and if it hatches and it grows, they'll be able to do something with it, even that, if, if you're wanting to start your farm off and so you order a hundred eggs, 50 of'em hatch out of that 50, you're gonna have a hen-roo pull it, a hen-roo mix. That's again, like the lottery. You could be like my most recent hatch of pharaohs and it was over 80 per 80% rooster on that. And I was like I put 200 birds in my incubator'cause I needed some hens and I got a lot of dog meat. Yep. A lot of animal food. And so
Jennifer Bryant: 5:18
if we're talking about quail, for those listeners, if we're talking about quail, yes. We talk about quail eggs in the hundreds. At least when I ship we talk in the hundreds Now if we're talking your standard bread chickens. No, you probably would only order maybe a dozen, two dozen eggs if you are even lucky enough to find a breeder to share hatching eggs with you. I, for one, do not offer hatching eggs off of my chickens. I will offer chicks and started birds, but I don't do hatching eggs
Carey Blackmon: 5:55
well, and that, that also depends. For the listeners what kind of bird, because if it's one of your dinosaurs or no, not necessarily the dinosaurs, but one of your Cochin's, they have an exorbitant amount of feathers and unless the breeder know even if the breeder knows that they have to trim some of those. The fertility is still correct. Usually not good. A reputable breeder is not gonna sell 12 eggs knowing that the fertility may only say two or fertile'cause it's gonna make'em look bad and they're not
Jennifer Bryant: 6:38
gonna do it. Which is why I don't do it right. Lemme see how I got started with the Cochins. So I found a breeder and I liked the pictures of her birds. Looking back in hindsight, I'm glad I didn't get birds from her. I ordered very expensive,$300 a dozen hatching eggs and none of them hatched. She, she replaced them. I paid for shipping. She sent me 12 more. I got one to hatch and it didn't make it two days. So I had zero chicks for over$300 in investment.
Carey Blackmon: 7:19
What kind of incubator did you put him in?
Jennifer Bryant: 7:21
Those 1502. I was a 1502. So
Carey Blackmon: 7:24
You did go, you did stick them in a good cabinet incubator and still had awful results.
Jennifer Bryant: 7:30
Correct. Because right after that, all of her birds went broody, so fertility was already dropping anyway. So then what I did was I went back to. To ground zero, found another breeder with exactly what I wanted. And he offered me a STARTED trio. And so what that means is they were four months old. In this particular case, they were four months old. He assessed them for any dqs that you could find at that age, and made sure to send me birds. Two females in a rooster for, with no apparent DQs to start me off the best I possibly can. So in the hatching egg side, I spent over$300 and had zero birds. And on the started bird side I had four month olds. And with shipping it was$475. At the time, I don't know what it would be now. But I had three healthy birds that started laying, of course, the next spring. But they were already, had been critiqued, had been started. They were past the super fragile stage and I was on my way and I had a reputable breeder assess them for me. And send them to me. So not only did I get birds and shipping, they were off-heat. They were started disease-free, healthy, and assessed by, and he's an APA judge also. And so they were already assessed by him to be DQ free at that age. So that was well worth the money for
Carey Blackmon: 9:24
me. Most definitely. Yeah. Definitely worth the money. So for me, the ones that I got I bought my 40 chicks and after talking to some people that have been breeding longer, I've been alive. I knew that what I had was decent, but I also knew that. I was anywhere from five to eight generations from getting a bird that I could enter into a show and have a chance at winning. Which, that can be done. And you know these chicks, I got'em as chicks. And the, when this statement was made, they were four or five months old. And I know that's still young, but who you got yours from? He was an APA judge and he was able to say, Hey, at four months, these are defect free. The person that looked at mine. Started telling me, the issues and the things that I needed to work on and how I needed to find a pullet to put with this cockerel and with these traits and that traits to be able to breed that out. And once I bred one thing out, I'd have to breed another thing out and going on down the track like that. And for me, I essentially hit the red lotto with the bloodline that I have and. I was able to come across some really good birds that somebody, an APA judge said, Hey, these birds right here, you could put these in a show. And they don't have any disqualifications. But here's the issue with your cockerel, your two pullets. They have these traits when these breed. Their offspring will not have that issue. And I was excited about that. And when I bought 20 No 30 chicks, what I spent on those 30 chicks is less than what I spent on the trio. Unless you include gas and drive time to go somewhere that I was going already. To bring them back.
Jennifer Bryant: 11:52
Let's order, let's talk about ordering chicks then. So chicks, I would say would be just a step above ordering hatching eggs. Is, there's no real way to assess them. Typically you're going to get. Just hatched chicks sent to you. Now, I personally don't do that. I try to send mine at about a week old. But hatcheries and post office guidelines, they're supposed to be just hatched. But I guess I'm the rebel. So if you order chicks, just for general purposes, let's say they're straight outta the incubator. Then you're getting a certain number of live checks. So if you wanted say 20, you order 20, you're probably gonna get twenty-two, most people will send you an extra one or two. I send one extra for every 10 ordered. And so you'll get what exactly what you're paying for, and at that point, it's up to you. To keep them alive and get them going. But now keep in mind that they have been stressed and the yolk, they're living off of the egg yolk. So you are making an assumption that egg yolk was healthy to begin with and full of nutrients, and then. That the post office was quick to get them to you, and the verge are not stressed to the point where you can't bring them back, which is why I started shipping at a week old. Kind of weeds out the weaker ones, gets them good and started, and they can handle the stress of being in a box for a day. Which is typically what I have found is just takes about a day for stuff to get there. And the post office has never once asked me how old the birds were inside that box. And I don't prep the information, so that's the way that I handle it, but I, you can't assess. A week old check for anything other than does it have three toes and two wings? That's pretty much the end of it. So you get what you get at that point. You will get more bang for your buck with chicks. So if you wanna just do numbers with hatching eggs, let's just say for the sake of. Of the conversation, you pay$2 an egg for hatching eggs and only 50% hatch, then you paid$4 for that chick, right? And so if you can order chicks that are already hatched and healthy and are going at$5 a chick, then that, but for sure is a better deal in my mind. And then if you can order sexed chicks, you're even doing even better. Especially if you live somewhere where you can't deal with a bunch of roosters.
Carey Blackmon: 14:55
Yeah, that's true. So for me I like chicks. Obviously they're cute. But like you said, when you order a chick. You at least know that the hatchability of that egg was a hundred percent because it's there and it's walking around. So you eliminate that part of the gamble. And at that point, it's really a matter of genetics and nutrition. Bird has to have vigor to be able to survive that trip, and then you have to provide it with adequate nutrition. To rehydrate itself and carry on with life. To me, that increases the odds. Now, I do know that getting chicks shipped is more expensive than getting eggs shipped. It is less expensive than getting started pullets or cockles shipped. But isn't that what you pay for is the odds
Jennifer Bryant: 15:57
I would say my average shipping cost on hatching eggs is somewhere in the$16 to$20 a box. The chick orders are gonna be somewhere in the$50 to$60 range because, but you also have to keep in mind it's not just the shipping cost, it's also the cost of that shipping box. Because it's a box feed gro gel shavings, everything, heaters.
Carey Blackmon: 16:23
Them heater pads are expensive. They are!
Jennifer Bryant: 16:25
I need some more of them. And I was like I need to find a deal on those.'cause they're like$3 a piece on Amazon. So I'm gonna try to look somewhere else but. So I probably just in a box shipping out before you even put chicks in it, I probably have$20 in that box. So just keep that in mind. And then started birds would be about the same thing. I've shipped, started birds out and I still put grow gel in there. Still put shavings and feed. But obviously for size. Zing, you can put less birds in there. So I shipped a trio out to Oregon last fall, and it took two boxes, the cockerel filled up box, and the two pullets went in a box together. So she had to pay for shipping for two. But typically the. That stuff is gonna run you about$80 a box. For that third, and then that's about what I paid to get the coachings down here. And I would pay it again in a heartbeat because it got my program started on a foot that would've taken me two years and the shipping for But, all right, so the shipping on the started birds, let's just say you have 150 in two boxes for a trio. Oh, that is significantly cheaper than a brooder feed, heat, a nd time. You're gonna have more than that in eggs or chicks.
Carey Blackmon: 17:56
Yeah, I was, that was fixing to say, you started off, when you started with the hatching eggs, you had an incubator that was a thousand bucks. Right? Which, obviously a lot of people go with a$200 or$300 incubator, but still you're$200,$300 for the incubator.$100,$200 bucks for a brooder setup, depending on what route you go. Even if you go cheap with a storage container, by the time you get your heat plate and all that, you're in it a hundred bucks. So you're looking, like$300 for an incubator,$100 brooder, that's$400 bucks. And then you got let's see, 10 chickens will eat a bag of food in two weeks. So you're looking. Another a hundred bucks in feed, easy for a trio to get'em to three to four months. So you're at$500 to$600 bucks right there, right? And you could have sped the process up four months and saved a few hundred dollars.
Jennifer Bryant: 19:01
And got'em
Carey Blackmon: 19:02
judged. Yeah. And got'em from somebody that knows what they're getting. What you're getting.
Jennifer Bryant: 19:09
Exactly. And that and of that trio, I still have one of the hens, the other two are gone now, but one of the hens is still kicking and she lays me an egg about every day.
Carey Blackmon: 19:18
Is she still doing her job? She's still
Jennifer Bryant: 19:20
doing her job. She's broody all the dang time, but
Carey Blackmon: 19:26
yes. What's the offspring of those eggs?
Jennifer Bryant: 19:28
They're showstoppers, aren't they?
Carey Blackmon: 19:32
Those are the ones, those are what you're showing right now. Yeah. Yeah. I seen you win platters, ribbons. Trophies Plaques. Yeah, they're, she's still definitely doing her jobs. If that's the offspring she's throwing off, that's really nice. Yep.
Jennifer Bryant: 19:49
Exactly. But now even with started birds, you still have to breed them. You still have to cull hard, you can't just assume every offspring is going to be a show winner. Yeah. Let's kinda recap here'cause it went all over the board. So if you have an incubator and you're set up to brood and you're set up to handle extra roosters, then I would order hatching eggs, but understand that it's typical to get 50% hatch rate, but it's also typical to get zero. And some of it may be the breeder's fault, but chances are it's not. It's just circumstance. And then if you decide to order chicks, you still need a breeder, still need heat, still need chick food. But you, the money you saved on the incubator, you're gonna spend on shipping at least some of it. But you have started birds. You have birds chirping and cute and fluffy and deliver to your door, and then started birds. They're gonna be older, they're gonna be off heat. You can put'em straight outside. You can. expect to get eggs off of them whenever they're supposed to lay. Some may lay pretty quick, and then you get big ones like mine that won't lay for a year, so you know it, know your breed that you're ordering, but that sticker shock. I don't know, how can I explain this? The sticker shock of the shipping and of the birds. If you would step back and do the math on and the work put into it it's still probably cheaper, honestly.
Carey Blackmon: 21:44
And like I, I sell, I usually cull or have a cull about Point of Lay and some of them will get cold to the freezer. And some of them will get cold to people. And I have people they say, I mean it is, why do you want thirty-five dollars? It's just a chicken. Yeah, thirty-five dollars for a four to six month old bird if you pull out your calculator. And work a little bit of math to get over the sticker shock. You'll actually find out that the bird is free. I'm charging you for the feed that it ate for the last four to six months. And when I've explained it to people, sometimes they're like, oh, I never thought about it that way. And then I've had, I actually had one person say I'm not spending more than$15 on a bag of feed. Yeah, and I'm like so what you're telling me is your chickens probably don't have adequate nutrition. And that's important to me because if I'm gonna give one of my birds to somebody, that's a red flag because I wanna make sure that they're gonna be well taken care of.
Jennifer Bryant: 23:00
So let me tell you a story. I went to the Green River Show last fall in Kentucky Bowling Green Kentucky. And I had the only cochins in the open show and then there was some in the junior show. It's a smaller show. and I walked around quickly and looked at some of the other birds. But I'm pretty set on my breeds and I don't usually pay much attention to too many other birds. I was sitting there just waiting for the judging and everything. And this kid come over to me and it turned out he was 17. And he come over to me and asked me, he's are those your cochins down there? And I said, yes. And he goes, gosh, do you ever sell them? And I said yes I do, but I don't have any with me for sale right now. And he said I brought one with me today. But mine doesn't look like yours. And I have to tell you, I had walked by this bird probably 18 times. And was literally sitting six feet away from it and had no idea it was a cochin. and the reason being is it may have weighed three pounds. It was so small and it didn't even look like a bantam cochin. He was meant to be a full-size bird and they did not have any money to feed them. So it only got kitchen scraps in what it could find in the yard. and it may have weighed three pounds. He was so scrawny and I felt bad for the bird. But I just politely and kindly told him that until he could afford proper feed or at least some feed at that he needed to just have yard birds. It was hard for me to say that to him. The rest of the story was his dad got hurt and he had to quit school and get a job and blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't change the fact that these are living animals that have to have feed. and if you're gonna have to have them, you have to feed them at least something. Now, obviously this bird was alive and it was crowing. But you could tell by looking at it, it was nowhere near what it should have been. I had didn't even recognize that it was a cochin until he pointed it out, and we stood there and looked at it for a while. That's how scrawny and malnutritioned it was.
Carey Blackmon: 25:28
And that is actually the perfect lead-in to a show that we'll have coming up in a few weeks where we're gonna talk to Jeff from Fertrell about nutrition and what it looks like. So there's that. Good. But that's one thing to me, that, that is sad. Usually there's a sad story whether it be the person had an unfortunate life incident or they just don't know.'cause some people think, oh I mean they're natural scavengers. And they are, and they can pick up a lot of nutrition if you plant cover crops and have. Just worms and stuff that they can eat, but that's not always the case either. So you know, the bird suffers.
Jennifer Bryant: 26:18
Exactly. I hope that we helped people maybe make a decision that hatching eggs versus ordering chicks versus ordering started birds. And these would apply to all species. Quail, Chicken, Turkey Ducks. A started duck though, might make a soggy mess out of a cardboard box in the mail.
Carey Blackmon: 26:42
Yeah, probably. So they can be pretty messy. I have to
Jennifer Bryant: 26:45
ship them in a plastic tub.
Carey Blackmon: 26:49
But to me, when somebody asks me, I'm like it's like everything else poultry related. It depends on what your goal is. What do you want to do? Do you want this? Do you want that? Do you want the other? So that's why, we wanted to talk about this.'cause in some situations, hatching eggs is the best thing to do and others chicks is the best thing and. For other people and their goals, getting the started trios it, that's the route to go because like for me, I had the ability to do all of them, but getting the started trio sped my breeding process up to get what I was looking for. My ultimate goal, five to eight years. Maybe longer.'cause that's, when you're dealing with genetics, it's a guess and like for you to get you where you wanted. It sped your process up a lot too. It did. And with the luck that you had it made up for some time.
Jennifer Bryant: 27:51
And if you wanna talk about quail for just a minute, I ship Celadon hens and roosters breeding sets and though they're not feather sexable typically, and so people who just want to start off with a known breeder set so they can move forward from there. We'll order from me and I will send them out. After they start laying, after I have confirmed, which I know my line is true blue, you don't know until, you know when that mess up may, may occur. So the birds don't leave this property until a blue egg pops out of'em, and then they go in a box and they get shipped to the purchaser. And I've not had a problem, and knock on wood, I won't have a problem, but I. Those customers takes me back that they're so happy because when they get that box, typically there's a blue egg in the bottom of the box too. So not only do they get the bird, but they also get the blue egg to prove. Yes, it's a celadon, that they didn't add, so there's a, they
Carey Blackmon: 28:55
opened the box, they look down and they're like, oh. It's like winning the lottery instead of playing the lottery.
Jennifer Bryant: 29:02
While I was trying to log in with you, somebody was texting me. They had just got their birds and they were, there was eggs in the box. They were so excited. Yeah, think about it. Sit down and think about your situation and what you're wanting to do. If you don't wanna brood, get started. birds. If you wanna brew, but don't have an incubator, get chicks. It's okay. Everybody has their preferences
Carey Blackmon: 29:27
and some people, they just have that chick addiction. And I gotta be honest it right there in chick season. I gotta stay outta Tractor Supply because you walk in the front door and you hear the chirps and the natural inquisitiveness inside of you wants to go look at'em. And then when you look at'em and you're like, I don't have one of those. Oh man. That thing, it's just a couple bucks. You take it home, don't have to worry about shipping or nothing. Yeah. So I have to stay out.
Jennifer Bryant: 30:02
Yep. Yep. No, that it doesn't get me anymore. It used to get me, but now that I know what quality looks like, I can just walk on by. It doesn't bother me, but honestly, I don't go in tractor supply very much. So very rarely do I go in there.
Carey Blackmon: 30:20
I try especially during chick season. All right that, it concludes the show for today. If anybody has any questions, make sure you send us an email at PoultryNerds@gmail.com Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released and they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds@gmail.com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it egg-citing. This is Carey signing off from Poultry nerds. Feathers up everyone.
