Heritage Turkeys for Thanksgiving! Egg update

It appears that our breeder turkeys are really getting with the program! Right now we have a total of 55 eggs incubating. The hens are laying 5 to 7 eggs a day, every day! And the best news is... so far.. we have 100% fertilization!

The first set of 17 eggs has been in the little incubator for 1 week now, so we candled them tonight. All 17 eggs were fertilized, and only 2 were bad. Those two had succumbed to bacterial death, most likely due to the length of time they spent outside before we discovered them. Those first few days can be crucial for a developing embryo, especially in the rainy season. Water on the eggs will usually mean low hatch rates.

We also have been collecting the rest of the eggs and placing them in an old styrofoam incubator just to get them going. I considered storing them, but to store a turkey eggs for hatching is tricky. Even if you store them properly, the hatch rate declines slightly every day. So we decided to put them in the incubator while waiting for our new tray type incubator to arrive. It is due next Tuesday.

So we had 40 eggs in the styrofoam incubator getting started, 15 in the computerized incubator, and 5 to 7 due each day. Turkey eggs take 28 days to hatch, and the turkeys need to grow at least 6 months to be market ready. So at this rate we will have plenty of turkeys for thanksgiving and especially Christmas!

It will be tricky to keep all the eggs rotating through the incubator and hatching, but I think we can manage. If all goes well we should end up with perhaps 100 to 200 turkeys for sale for Thanksgiving and Christmas.