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Five Ways to Preserve Surplus Homegrown Eggs

Homegrown chicken eggs are seasonal. Sometimes you have too many, sometimes not enough. Here are five ways to extend the shelf life of your fresh homegrown eggs, to preserve the surplus for days when your hens take a vacation from laying. 1. Do Nothing You may be surprised to learn how long clean, fresh, unwashed […]

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United Egg Producers Pledges to End Male Chick Culling

United Egg Producers Pledges to End Male Chick Culling

Currently, male chicks hatched to egg-laying hens in factory farms have pretty bleak prospects. Within a day, these chicks are sorted from their female counterparts and tossed unceremoniously into what amounts to a very large blender. It’s a practical consideration for egg producers, but it’s all pretty grisly and dystopian. Roughly 100 million male chicks […]

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Woody Chicken Breast — One More Reason to Grow Your Own

Woody Chicken Breast

As if you needed one more reason to grow your own chicken meat, here it is — woody breast, defined as a hardening of breast muscle, resulting in stiff wood-like fibers that make the breast meat difficult to chew. Woody breast is one of three breast meat myopathies (muscle diseases) that plague the poultry industry, […]

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What Do You Call the Place Where You Keep Your Chickens?

What Do You Call the Place Where You Keep Your Chickens?

Chickens need to be confined to protect them from the elements and from predators, but what do you call the structure in which they live? Chicken coop is a common term for a stationary structure. The word coop derives from the Old English word cype, meaning a small structure for confining birds. Hen house is […]

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Scientists Use Laser Spectroscopy to Sex Chicken Embryos

Scientists Use Laser Spectroscopy to Sex Chicken Embryos

A team of researchers from the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Leipzig has developed an innovative new way to sex chicks before they hatch. The technique is 95 percent effective, and could potentially eliminate the need for commercial poultry operations to cull millions of day-old male chicks each year.   So how […]

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What Is a Standard Chicken Breed?

Crele Old English Chicken

The term “standard breed” is often used in referring to large chickens, as distinct from bantam breeds. So what, exactly, is a standard breed?   A standard poultry breed is any breed that conforms to its ideal description, as formalized (or standardized) by a central organization and compiled into a periodically updated book. The book […]

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What’s the Difference between Sex Link and Autosex Chickens?

What's the Difference between Sex Link and Autosex Chickens?

The terms “sex link” and “autosex” both refer to chicks that may be sorted by gender from the moment they hatch. But the two words are not synonymous. Sex link chickens, or sex links, result from mating a hen and a rooster of two different breeds. Autosex chickens are the offspring of a hen and […]

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Bird Watching: A Look at Pheasants and Chukar

Bird Watching: A Look at Pheasants and Chukar

Spring is an exciting time at Cackle Hatchery and we’re busy getting ready for the season to arrive. Pheasants and chukar are some of our biggest sellers, with chicks beginning to hatch and prepare for shipping in May. As we get ready for the warmer weather to arrive, let’s look at each species.     […]

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