To Turn Or Not To Turn

To turn or not to turn. That is the question.

So let’s put this debate to rest. One of the things I strive to do on the homestead is to test these “theories” and separate fact from old wives’ tales. I have always turned my eggs. That is how I was taught and that is how I have always done it. There are a lot of people out there who swear they have never turned an egg while incubating and they get “great hatch rates”. Great hatch rates are relative. If you’ve used to getting 50% hatch rates and now are getting 70% hatch rates, that’s a better rate, not a good one. I use a GQF Sportsman 1502 cabinet incubator with automatic turners and a GQF 1550 cabinet hatcher for my eggs. They are set at 100 degrees Fahrenheit and I always dry hatch. This means that I do not add a drop of water into my incubator during the first 18 days. Ambient humidity keeps the incubator at about 22% humidity all the time. At lockdown in the hatcher, the humidity is set to 65%.

In all honesty, I don’t pay too much attention to the temperature and humidity. I’ve done this so long that I just look at the air cells in the eggs as they develop and then check hatch date. If the air cell is getting too large too fast, I increase humidity. If the air cell is too small, I decrease humidity. You want to shoot for the air cell to take up about 1/4 to 1/3 of the egg at lockdown on day 18. Chicks will pip into the air cell before pipping out of the egg. Too little air, and the chicks suffocate at hatch before pipping out. Too much air and the chicks don’t have the room to move around and zip out of the egg. They will get stuck. Almost all of your chicks should hatch on day 21 and all should have hatched within 24 hours of the first chick hatching. Anything sooner and your temperature is too high. Later, and your temperature is too low or you’re opening your incubator too often. Hatching early can cause chicks to hatch before fully developing or absorbing the yolk sac. Hatching too late and the bones of the chicks will have already started to calcify so you will see lots of curled toes, twisted legs, and the occasional twisted neck. Curled toes can be fixed by resetting the toes but it is extra work and extra care. This is how you calibrate your incubator. When the weather changes or the ambient temperature or humidity changes, it will affect the temperature and humidity of your incubator. Also, if you move your incubator from one location to another, you should also recalibrate your incubator. Last year, I moved my incubator from my dining room outside to the garage. In the summer when it got to 110+ degrees outside, my chicks hatched early even though I made no changes to the settings. I do want to say that my garage is airconditioned, so the temperature is not ever extreme, but it is still warmer than in the house which is set at 72 degrees year-round.

But back to turning. My cabinet incubator has an automatic turner. I’m lazy. I would never turn eggs by hand. In our prior hatch, I placed 36 Ayam Cemani eggs into the incubator. They turned as usual on the racks. 32 made it to lockdown and were placed on their side in the hatcher. 28 chicks hatched with no issues.

For this month’s hatch, I placed another 36 Ayam Cemani eggs into the incubator. But, I had a lot of other breeds I was test hatching so I overloaded the incubator by putting 2 additional trays of eggs in the bottom of the incubator, not on turners, including the Ayam Cemani. I figured, when I candled on day 4, I’d pull the infertile eggs off the other trays and then put those two trays up on the turners and be fine. Well, the fertility rates were excellent for all breeds which meant I had very few eggs to throw out. Good for fertility. Bad for the eggs at the bottom of the incubator. So, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to test out the turn or no turn question.

I left the Ayam Cemani eggs in the bottom of the incubator the entire time. I never turned them. They sat upright in their egg tray and developed as normal. 34 made it to lockdown so fertility was good. I placed them on their side in the hatching trays just like I always do. I also had 28 Silverudd’s Blue eggs in the same hatch tray. The Silverudd eggs were on the turner. At the end of hatch day when I pulled the hatching trays out, these were my results:

Only 3 of the 34 Ayam Cemani eggs hatched. 23 of the 28 Silverudd’s Blue eggs hatched in the same tray.

I candled the Ayam Cemani eggs, and they all had fully developed chicks. Some had even pipped into their air cells. They were just never able to pip and zip out. I opened some of the eggs up and again, fully formed chicks. I did notice that some were stuck to the side of the eggs. I believe this is what people mean by the chicks being “stuck to the shell”. I think this impeded the chick’s ability to move around and break out of the egg. Some couldn’t get to the air cell, so suffocated or drowned. Turning the eggs during incubation is supposed to keep the embryos from sticking to the side of the egg. Although I’m not conducting controlled, double-blind experiments here, I do believe that not turning was the major factor in the hatchability of the eggs. Everything was done the same way as every other hatch, except, the Ayam Cemani eggs were not turned. The Silverudds hatched well even in the same hatch tray, so the issue was not a hatcher setting or location in the hatcher. All other breeds hatched well, including 47 of 49 Black Copper Marans eggs that went to lockdown. Only 2 of the Ayam Cemani eggs were not fertile so it was not a fertility issue. I had successfully hatched dozens of eggs from the same pen of birds previously, so it was also not a genetic issue. My only logical conclusion is: turn your eggs. Turning will affect the hatchability of your eggs. If you’ve never turned eggs and your eggs hatch, good for you. But, you may not be getting the maximum hatch rate you could be getting if you turned them. I wasted so many Ayam Cemani eggs in this experiment but, lesson learned. I won’t be doing that again. Turn your eggs.