Farm News 03-19-06
Sunday morning, after chores, 40°
Setting Eggs
It's been a dry winter, a situation which often leads to severe grasshopper infestations the following summer. The best thing to do with surplus grasshoppers is to turn them into ducks. Young, growing ducks happily consume lots of grasshoppers. The best way to cook a grasshopper is to feed it to a duck and then fry the next duck egg.
Currently, there are seven ducks in the yard. A mother coon could reduce that number by one every day for a week quite easily, leaving the place without any grasshopper eaters. So, prudence dictates that we hatch some baby ducks to keep in reserve.
The Ancient Egyptians, those masters of the art of moving large rocks, were also very skilled in hatching eggs. They maintained large, underground incubators where they hatched thousands of eggs, and they only had a few thousand years of civilization at that time. If illiterate bronze age Nile Valley farmers could do it three thousand years ago, we should be able to do it. The trick is to be careful to avoid trying to learn too much from one year.
The geese are laying, generally at the rate of one egg every two or three days for each female, so I might as well set goose eggs when I set the duck eggs. Goslings can be very good fun, and there are few things in the world cuter than baby ducks. It's time to put a clutch of eggs in the incubator.
If you are doing this for a living, and you hatch over 10,000 eggs per week during the season, then it pays to follow good incubation practices. Big incubators have automatic egg turners (eggs hatch better if turned over several times daily), temperature and humidity controls, and other kinds of bells and whistles. Most big hatcheries have incubators and hatching boxes: a day or two before the eggs are due to hatch they are moved from incubator to hatching box; the reason being to maintain incubator sterility.
The Agricultural Extension Service instructions generally tell you to mark an 'X' on each egg with a pencil, so that each egg has an up and down. In the mornings you turn the 'X' up, and in the evening you turn it down. Now, I have known lots of mother ducks, and not a single one of them ever showed any sign of an ability to distinguish up from down. Mother ducks shuffle their eggs around several times a day, which is generally what I do.
There are four incubators out in the barn. The best is a classroom incubator that holds ten bantam eggs or four goose eggs. It has a wet bulb/dry bulb thermometer pair, adjustable temperature and humidity controls, egg turner, circulation fan, and a clear plastic cover. Because it is automatic and can be set to operate for a week or more unattended, it's ideal for loaning out to kids who want to hatch a few eggs.
If you would like to borrow the classroom incubator and hatch some chicks, then send me an email, jlware@ruralnet1.com. I'll loan you the incubator and load it with whatever kind of eggs you wish. After they hatch return the incubator and chicks, unless you want to start raising whatever hatches.
I prefer to put the eggs in a homemade box that has a thermostat, an electric oven heater coil, a 40 watt light bulb for extra heat, and a 1/2” hardware cloth raised floor for the eggs to rest on; it's my favorite incubator. I keep it in the same room with my computer and whenever I check my email I try to remember to roll the eggs around a bit. If at least half the eggs hatch, I'm happy.
If I want to incubate a lot of eggs, there are two hover type incubators. These are shaped like giant jar lids, about 2 ½' in diameter and 6” high. Each of those will hold 75 or more duck eggs. They don't have circulation fans, which folklore says is better for waterfowl eggs, and I have to turn the eggs by hand.
Duck and goose eggs like a high humidity while incubating. A flat pan of water seldom seems to be enough, but a 10” pan with a wad of paper towel sticking up out of it seems to be about right. The paper towel wicks the water up and exposes more surface from which the water can evaporate. If your water is as hard as mine you will want to change the towel twice a week. After ten days it will be fossilized.
The first two days of this incubation season were spent hunting for a thermometer. I like lab thermometers, glass instruments about 12” long filled with a red liquid. I bought two of them several years ago and both have been hiding somewhere. I can remember using one of them to check the soil temperature, but that might have been two or more years ago.
On Friday, 3/16, I put eight goose eggs and fourteen duck eggs in the incubator. Ducks take about 28 days and geese take about 30 days to hatch (it's about 21 days for chickens). This clutch should all hatch within a few days of Easter, an ideal time for hatching baby ducks.
A Reader from Lawrence Describes the Storm
We were awakened by a roaring at 8:10 Sunday morning as an impatient giant child went hurtling through the yard kicking chairs deep into rose bushes and knocking over our heavy iron couch while ignoring the fragile purple martin house between the two. Then it skipped around the house dragging its fingers over the West side of our red roof pulling off shingles and dealing them in a diamond flush to our neighbors while not harming a tiny pink petal on the blooming apricot on the East side. It didn't touch our fences but our next door neighbors lost theirs, had small trees uprooted and large trees topped. As a final act of capriciousness, the wind conceded the woodpeckers their dead tree across the street and pulled down the live tree next door to crush their new truck.
All in the time it took us to jump out of bed! We looked out the window to see the daddy of our little giant, or at least part of him.... A large pendulous roll of dark cloud hung down almost into our back yard. Our storm was a good ol' boy whose huge stomach spilled over his grey sky belt and the gust that ravaged our yard was only a little jingle of change in his pocket or one of his toddlers on a lark.
Setting Eggs
It's been a dry winter, a situation which often leads to severe grasshopper infestations the following summer. The best thing to do with surplus grasshoppers is to turn them into ducks. Young, growing ducks happily consume lots of grasshoppers. The best way to cook a grasshopper is to feed it to a duck and then fry the next duck egg.
Currently, there are seven ducks in the yard. A mother coon could reduce that number by one every day for a week quite easily, leaving the place without any grasshopper eaters. So, prudence dictates that we hatch some baby ducks to keep in reserve.
The Ancient Egyptians, those masters of the art of moving large rocks, were also very skilled in hatching eggs. They maintained large, underground incubators where they hatched thousands of eggs, and they only had a few thousand years of civilization at that time. If illiterate bronze age Nile Valley farmers could do it three thousand years ago, we should be able to do it. The trick is to be careful to avoid trying to learn too much from one year.
The geese are laying, generally at the rate of one egg every two or three days for each female, so I might as well set goose eggs when I set the duck eggs. Goslings can be very good fun, and there are few things in the world cuter than baby ducks. It's time to put a clutch of eggs in the incubator.
If you are doing this for a living, and you hatch over 10,000 eggs per week during the season, then it pays to follow good incubation practices. Big incubators have automatic egg turners (eggs hatch better if turned over several times daily), temperature and humidity controls, and other kinds of bells and whistles. Most big hatcheries have incubators and hatching boxes: a day or two before the eggs are due to hatch they are moved from incubator to hatching box; the reason being to maintain incubator sterility.
The Agricultural Extension Service instructions generally tell you to mark an 'X' on each egg with a pencil, so that each egg has an up and down. In the mornings you turn the 'X' up, and in the evening you turn it down. Now, I have known lots of mother ducks, and not a single one of them ever showed any sign of an ability to distinguish up from down. Mother ducks shuffle their eggs around several times a day, which is generally what I do.
There are four incubators out in the barn. The best is a classroom incubator that holds ten bantam eggs or four goose eggs. It has a wet bulb/dry bulb thermometer pair, adjustable temperature and humidity controls, egg turner, circulation fan, and a clear plastic cover. Because it is automatic and can be set to operate for a week or more unattended, it's ideal for loaning out to kids who want to hatch a few eggs.
If you would like to borrow the classroom incubator and hatch some chicks, then send me an email, jlware@ruralnet1.com. I'll loan you the incubator and load it with whatever kind of eggs you wish. After they hatch return the incubator and chicks, unless you want to start raising whatever hatches.
I prefer to put the eggs in a homemade box that has a thermostat, an electric oven heater coil, a 40 watt light bulb for extra heat, and a 1/2” hardware cloth raised floor for the eggs to rest on; it's my favorite incubator. I keep it in the same room with my computer and whenever I check my email I try to remember to roll the eggs around a bit. If at least half the eggs hatch, I'm happy.
If I want to incubate a lot of eggs, there are two hover type incubators. These are shaped like giant jar lids, about 2 ½' in diameter and 6” high. Each of those will hold 75 or more duck eggs. They don't have circulation fans, which folklore says is better for waterfowl eggs, and I have to turn the eggs by hand.
Duck and goose eggs like a high humidity while incubating. A flat pan of water seldom seems to be enough, but a 10” pan with a wad of paper towel sticking up out of it seems to be about right. The paper towel wicks the water up and exposes more surface from which the water can evaporate. If your water is as hard as mine you will want to change the towel twice a week. After ten days it will be fossilized.
The first two days of this incubation season were spent hunting for a thermometer. I like lab thermometers, glass instruments about 12” long filled with a red liquid. I bought two of them several years ago and both have been hiding somewhere. I can remember using one of them to check the soil temperature, but that might have been two or more years ago.
On Friday, 3/16, I put eight goose eggs and fourteen duck eggs in the incubator. Ducks take about 28 days and geese take about 30 days to hatch (it's about 21 days for chickens). This clutch should all hatch within a few days of Easter, an ideal time for hatching baby ducks.
A Reader from Lawrence Describes the Storm
We were awakened by a roaring at 8:10 Sunday morning as an impatient giant child went hurtling through the yard kicking chairs deep into rose bushes and knocking over our heavy iron couch while ignoring the fragile purple martin house between the two. Then it skipped around the house dragging its fingers over the West side of our red roof pulling off shingles and dealing them in a diamond flush to our neighbors while not harming a tiny pink petal on the blooming apricot on the East side. It didn't touch our fences but our next door neighbors lost theirs, had small trees uprooted and large trees topped. As a final act of capriciousness, the wind conceded the woodpeckers their dead tree across the street and pulled down the live tree next door to crush their new truck.
All in the time it took us to jump out of bed! We looked out the window to see the daddy of our little giant, or at least part of him.... A large pendulous roll of dark cloud hung down almost into our back yard. Our storm was a good ol' boy whose huge stomach spilled over his grey sky belt and the gust that ravaged our yard was only a little jingle of change in his pocket or one of his toddlers on a lark.
posted by The Geezer at 7:50 AM
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