Nature vs Nurture Hatching Chicks with Hens or Hatchers-Part 2

In Part 2 of Nature vs Nurture: Hatching Chicks with Hens or Hatchers, we explore the time-tested traditions of broody hens alongside the science of modern incubators.
Discover:

• How to prepare housing and bedding for a broody hen
• Why moving a setting hen rarely works and what to do instead
• The benefits and drawbacks of peat moss, straw, and other bedding options
• Why incubator calibration is critical for success
• The importance of stable temperature and humidity for hatch rates
• What to feed chicks in their first two weeks for the best start

From beginner-friendly advice to advanced insights for serious breeders, this conversation blends personal stories, practical tips, and decades of poultry-keeping wisdom. If you’ve ever wondered whether Mother Nature or modern hatchers give better results, this episode will give you the clarity you need.

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Transcript

Alex: 0:00

When it comes to raising chicks, poultry keepers often debate whether hens or incubators give better results. In this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, Jeff Mattocks and Carey Blackmon dive into the pros and cons of hatching with broody hens versus artificial incubators. You’ll hear real-life stories of unexpected broody hens, practical advice on bedding and nest preparation, and expert tips on choosing and running an incubator successfully. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced poultry breeder, this discussion will help you understand the balance between nature’s way and modern technology in hatching strong, healthy chicks.

Carey Blackmon: 0:40

What would you do? Let's say you didn't have any chicks and you had a broody hen. What would you recommend as far as housing and bedding for that broy hen to get her outta the ailments if she doesn't have any eggs. No eggs? No, she's got eggs.

Jeff Mattocks: 1:12

Oh, okay. One or two of'em. Look, you can't move her. All you can do is put, some sort of makeshift shelter over to keep her dry, make sure she's got enough bedding and stuff like that under. Now, if you don't physically take the eggs out, you can, add some additional bedding in there. You can in some, hes, you can actually put the bedding around her. And she will reshape the nest according to what she needs, right? Yeah. Some will, some won't. Some won't. Yeah. So you can put some loose straw and stuff in there. And she'll reshape that nest and make it what it ought to be. But you can't really move'em. Like we talked about earlier, they're not gonna have I very limited success on moving a hen and eggs to another, and not lose the broodiness, where she'll go back to setting. I wouldn't wanna risk it, especially if it's a breed that you really need eggs from or need chicks from you can't really risk that. But so you're, wait, you mean you're your nest box or your brewed area? Should have been, you had to have thought about this a month prior. Hey, mean, a seasoned chicken tender would, yeah. Somewhere by April, by tax day, you really should have cleaned out all the nest boxes, right? Maybe through a little ous Earth or something else in there just to make sure you got bugs under control. Maybe a little lime, high calcium lime and fresh bedding substrate in there, and get a little bit excessive. And actually, if you want a hand to go broy. If you give her really deep bedding in there where she can get really cozy and comfortable I, I feel that the more bedding you put in, the more broody, the quicker they'll go broody. I think you're helping that situation. That makes sense. You're just making a much more comfortable bed for that chicken. Yeah. And she doesn't wanna leave. And. Okay. Yeah. One thing I had earlier this year, I, a lot of times at night I'll go outside and I'll check on my animals before I go to bed and I had a chicken make the godless noise like I thought I'd stepped on Tony and I didn't see one though. I'm looking around and the bushes that we have along the front of our house. One had got on the backside of one of the bushes and decided to lay her eggs. And I'm like, okay, number one, when did you get out? Is this even gonna work? And then I realized exactly when it was that she got out.'cause I do have some cameras back there. And I went and found a drop pin. And for a few weeks I had a drop pen in my flower bed over a bush with his hand in it. I'm watering feed, my wife's what the, I said, Hey, look, you don't mess with him. So I was able to keep her calm for a few weeks and I had to move them. But like you said, don't move them. I just put the drop pin around her to keep her safe.'cause I do live in some very raccoon infested places and my dogs should not be in my front yard unattended. They should be in the fence in the back with everything else. So I had to make sure she was safe. Since you're, since we're sharing those funny stories right. There you go. The reason I learned that Pete Moss was an excellent bedding was in the season of my life, when we had chickens here at my place in the backyard. Of course somebody thought we needed bantams, so I had a small black bantam hen and one day she of course did the disappear thing, right? I was like I had no clue. I didn't even know, through the day she would fly over the fence, six foot high, chicken wire fence in the run. And she would do her own thing. Then one day I didn't see her I didn't know, did. Raccoon did Al get her to talk? Yeah. Anyway, she just disappeared. Everybody's, if you've had chickens long enough, you figured this out. She disappeared. And of course, 21 days later she comes hopping out with 10 chicks. But she, we had a bale of pea moss sitting out by the chicken coop for gardening purposes. And there was a hole cut in that no bigger than a dinner plate, a smaller sized dinner plate. Yeah, she figured this out, right? So she was in there, and this is where she did her thing, right? All by herself. And, but she loved that pea mos man. She'd get in there, she'd bury herself all the way to her eyeballs. She'd just have herself a spa day or something. It was, and I'm like okay, if they like it, why not? Whatever, right? Yeah. I started doing a little research, why not? And. It, look it, it's not great nest box material because you know when they lay the egg and the bloom is still wet before it dries it's, you get pea moss stuck all over the eggs, right? Oh yeah.'cause it, it likes to absorb the moisture, but this is where I learned that pea moss was a favored bedding substrate for chickens. Now people don't like it at all'cause it's dusty, but chickens love that stuff, man. They love meat moss. Anyway, sorry, digress. So what did, what is the best advice you can give for the rookie chicken tender as it relates to them deciding that they want to hatch out their very own chicks? What advice would you have for'em? I'll go back to, I still think they need an incubator. And I think they need to have the incubator experience. I don't think they need to set their expectations too high until they figure out their incubator based on where they live, because everybody's climate is different. Okay. Some people dry hats, some people need to have a, have a lot of water and humidity, working with one lady, she lives at 6,000 or 7,000 feet in Colorado and all these things, all the altitude's, a whole different world. It's a whole different world. So you have to learn how to set your incubator and how you know what you're gonna do, in your part of the country. Because the weather's different, so that's a big challenge. Yeah, don't go cheap on your incubator. If you're gonna be serious about this, don't be cheap on your incubator, at least the GQF if you're not gonna go to the hatch time, somewhere in there. There's other good ones. Don't get me wrong, honestly, the old redwood, if you can get one of the really old redwood incubators and. You get it retrofitted with some newer electronics and equipment. Yeah. That's the big key. So we've done away with wood, but wood, like red wood helps stabilize your humidity. Yeah, because it'll take moisture and release moisture, and it'll help you. But okay, so you do the incubator thing, but you also do the hand hats. It's back to the hybrid. So you do a combination, right? You do a few sets with your incubator, right? To learn it, figure it out, become a be better chicken tender. To make sure that you have genetics moving forward, when a hand goes, Rudy, I would put a dozen eggs under her and let her go. So that, that would be my advice to somebody just getting started. Yeah. And like he said, definitely people ask about incubators and I tell'em they need to get the best quality incubator they can afford in their budget because a thousand dollars incubator may not be in everybody's budget. Maybe only a two or$300 incubator, but whatever your budget is, do your homework. Don't just buy the cheapest one because good crap ain't cheap and cheap crap ain't good. It's got its issues. So do that because everybody needs to dial in their incubator and learn how to use it. But if you're lucky enough to have, they should be doing well. They should be doing their experimenting in the off season, not in your primary breeding se. Don't wait to, February, March, April in your, in the middle of your primary breeding season to see Oh yeah. If you got your incubator do a few test runs in the off season, and also do not don't go buy an incubator and order a$250 dozen of eggs and let that be your first hatching experience. No. And then blast the person you got those eggs from. You see it all the time. You do. You really do. I see it a lot because incubating is a science. You know when you take something from Mother Nature. You have gotta get scientific with it. You gotta have your incubator dialed in. You gotta have your moisture right? You gotta have your temperature right. It's gotta stay. It's gotta stay steady. It can't fluctuate. It's gotta be per almost perfect very consistent. However, you got the hen outside 110 during the day. 80 at night, huge fluctuation. She's just got her down and nothing else sitting on top of them eggs. Now ideally, there's not a lot of fluctuation there, but I've had, hi, I've had hens go broody in the wintertime when it was in the thirties and had really good hatch rates, and I'm like that, that ain't happening in the cabinet. I don't care how much you spend on. So take all that stuff into consideration when you're working it out. cause when it happens in Mother Nature, it's mother nature, it's going to be what it's going to be. You got to be very detail oriented when you do it yourself. So don't be a rookie incubator and blast the person you got the eggs from. Because I would venture to say if somebody's selling eggs for$250 a dozen, they're also hatching a lot of them to verify the fertility. So Yeah. And people don't realize you've got some. Backyard mixes or barnyard mixes. Yeah. And stick them in your incubator. First experiment. To work it out. You take the chicks back to'em when you're done. You don't, but you're just running the experiment. Yeah. So learn the hard way. Your incubator, no matter how good it good or not good it is really needs to be in a stable environment. It should be. In a part of your house that is either heated or air conditioned or humidified or whatever. But it needs to be'cause not all incubators can keep up with those fluctuations like, Carrie just talked about. So keep, you're gonna have a much better success rate if your incubator is in a stable environment, right? Yep. We have a mutual friend up in Canada, and I use this as an example, a good bit. He has a nice tabletop incubator, but where it was, the temperature was fluctuating and so was the humidity, and just by simply moving it into the closet where it's steady, he was able to significantly increase his hatch rate. He was having a big issue with duct toe duct to and curly toe.'Cause that he was going out of range on his humidity. Yeah, it was jumping way up. And, in, in that final week. And right before Hatch, so yeah. Stabilizing that, how stable does it need to be in the first seven days? Don't know. But that last seven days when you have a huge amount of chick formation going on very important. Very important. All right, so wrapping it up in the first week, whether you hatched them out in the hatcher. Or in the brood pen, what are you feeding? You giving any kind of supplements, electrolytes, anything like that?'cause you see stuff in these chicken groups all over. What do you recommend first two weeks of the chick's life? I mean it, it's that really true high quality. Okay. Fresh a. High quality, that meets all the numbers, and we've given the numbers for years now. High, fresh, high quality, start your feed right. You don't need any magic foo powder and you don't like, every time I see somebody talk about Save a chick, right? Going in the chick brand new chick water, I'm like, I cringe. I just, I don't know. Where does it need saving from? It just hatched. I i, exactly. I just need some really good, clean, fresh water that is at room temperature. Okay.'cause you don't wanna, you don't want to cause their body temperature to dive. I need some really great. Chicken chick feed, like 21, 20 2%. Proteins got all the right amino acids, good vitamin levels. And I need it, really easy to find if it's incubator hatched. So I, I like to crowd'em. One's one quarter square foot per check, or I can say it another way. Four checks per square foot. So they're fairly crowded. And I don't want a chick to go more than six or eight inches without either bumping into feed or water in the first four or five days. Okay. They haven't learned how to chicken. No. It's gotta be right there. They won't figure it out. After that first week. You can get the feed up off like trays or cardboard or whatever, and then you can start moving out their boundaries and giving them more space after the first week. Yeah. I don't need them out exploring a huge brooder space, and getting lost and disoriented and chilled over in the corner because it's not warm enough over there. Just don't need that headache. But look, good fresh air, good clean feed, good clean water, just you don't protein that's animal based. Yeah. Yeah. And if you don't, the only thing I would say to supplement with is if you wanted to hard boil some eggs, crush'em up, shell and all, crush'em up a little bit on the finer side. Sprinkle that on top of the feed. Now, when I say that, don't get carried away. It is like one egg per day for 25 chicks. Okay? It's not, a half a dozen. It's not right. Sprinkling hard, boiled egg on top of the feed is always good and it helps'em find that feed before you started, before you made the recipe that you called the perfect chicken feed for me, what I would do is I took a pound of store-bought starter. That was the best I could find. I'd take a hard boiled egg. And mush it behind between my hands, like I was Mr. Miyagi fixing to lay hands on Daniel's son. And then I would throw that in a baggie, and then I would take a tablespoon of oil and a tablespoon, a breeder supplement zip lock. I would fill the bag up with air, zip lock it and shake it just like my wife does her salads. She'll shake'em like this and then open the container, and that's what I do. Yeah. And that's quick. And Easy's, if you're using store-bought feed that's not perfect, then you know that's a great option. You know what we did up in Saskatchewan at Kelly's place is we took some chopped up raw liver. And some hard boiled egg equal amounts. We put a little bit of chick feed in that a little bit of breeder supplement and that's what we started'em on, right? Just to give'em a boost. The liver's full of protein B vitamins the eggs got all the benefits of an egg. That was a win-win situation, in his case. So there's things you can do if you can't get. That awesome chick feed. There are things you can do, but I'm not a huge fan of adding things. I know I designed supplements for you and me and other people, and that's only because I realized that in, in our world most places, you can't get top shelf high quality chicken feed, right? Sorry to say that. The choices at Tractor Supply rural King and elsewhere are not really choices. It, it's it's like when I go vote every four years or whatever, I'm like I'm choosing the lesser of two evils. Yeah. And I hate it. I hate it. I don't like any of them, but. All right all i'm scanning the comment section and I do not see anything that we have left out so well, I wanna, I want to, Rob made a great point. He can leave his brooder for a week unattended with chicks. He can fill up the food and water and he can go and Rob you are 100% correct. I don't disagree with you at all. At the end of the day, hand raised will still outperform anything we do in a brooder. Yeah, we just can't beat Mother Nature, but yeah I don't disagree with you. You can fill up the food and water and leave them unattended for a week. So I agree with that statement. Aside from that, we'll see y'all in the comment section. All right. Goodnight. Goodnight.