The Hatchery
Double Barrel Game Farm and Hatchery is one of the largest gamebird facilities in the country. From March to August we hatch around 100,000 chicks each week, equating to 1.7 million pheasant, quail, and chukar eggs a year.
Our state-of-the-art hatchery is comprised of four main areas which include an area for the eggs to be washed and trayed, a cooler room, an incubator room, and hatching/sorting room for shipping preparations.
In all areas we maintain a very tight bio-security protocol.
The Process
Eggs are collected six times daily from our pheasant breeding areas.
The eggs are transported to the egg wash room where they are initially inspected and washed.
The good quality eggs are placed into trays and stored in a cooler room. The cooler room allows us to synchronize the eggs to prepare them for transfer to our incubators each week
From the cooler room we transfer to our incubators. In our facility we utilize Natureform incubators which hold 21,528 eggs each.
The heat and humidity in each incubator are closely monitored, and the eggs are automatically turned every hour to maintain the eggs until they are ready to be transferred to the hatchers.
The hatchers are run one degree cooler and 10% higher humidity for the remaining 5 days until eggs are ready to hatch.
The day that they hatch, chicks can be sexed and sorted into specialized cardboard boxes for transport. The boxes are well ventilated, clearly marked with handling instructions, and contain a nutritional supplement.
