Even if you're a seasoned buyer of day-old poultry, there's a secret lurking out there that is responsible for wrecking orders and ruining the best-laid plans for a season of chick brooding. It's called Hatch Availability.
The interesting thing about hatchery operations is its unpredictable nature. Eggs are actually a commodity and we're buying futures. When we go online to order our chicks, we're buying a future product that doesn't actually exist yet.
Simply put, hatch availability refers to the number of chicks that are ready for sale at a given time. It is an important aspect of the process because it directly impacts your ability to get the chicks you need when you need them. The dates when you can accommodate chicks safely will be defined by your climate and your set up, so a breakdown in hatch availability can shut down your chick growing season if you live in an area where it's only safe for you to receive chicks by mail for a few short months out of the year.
If you've ever tried to incubate eggs, you may be familiar with a statistic known as "hatch rate." This is the ratio of successfully hatched healthy chicks compared to the total number of eggs that were set for incubation. If you set 100 eggs and only got 70 healthy chicks hatched from that incubation, your hatch rate would be 70%. Commercial hatcheries are good at hatching (much better than 70%!) but no one is perfect at it. If the hatchery plans to have 90 chicks available on a given date and they have a bad hatch for some reason, there may not be enough chicks to fulfill all previously placed orders without pushing a few orders back a week or a month.
Another factor affecting availability is the laying frequency of the breed. Not all chickens lay every day. In fact, most hens do NOT lay an egg every day. Those that do command a good price because of that reliability. If you happen to be in the market for a chicken breed whose egg-laying frequency is low, there may only be a handful of hatch opportunities in a year. When that is the case, if you don't get your orders placed as soon as the hatchery opens their order booking for the year, you may find them sold out for the year by the time you get in there to do your shopping.
Most hatchery seasons run from February to October because one of the main requirements for shipping chicks is that the trip is survivable - it can't be too hot and it can't be too cold. Some hatcheries simply can't afford to risk shipping chicks all year round because that introduces too many dangerous factors into the process of live animal shipment. If you procrastinate and put off ordering till mid Summer, it's entirely possible that there won't be anything but turkeys and guineas left to buy.
Hatcheries play a crucial role in meeting the demand for day-old chicks. They carefully manage the incubation and hatching process to ensure a steady supply of chicks. Understanding the role of hatcheries helps you appreciate the effort involved in providing a consistent chick supply and highlights their importance in the ordering process. Rest assured, they want to sell you the chicks you want, they may just not have any more for the specific date you are targeting. This means you might have to choose a different hatch date.
Generally speaking, if on your preferred date, there's no availability for one breed you are shopping for but there is for the other breeds, you have two choices - go ahead and order the breeds that are available for the date you want and don't worry about the others, or move your date forward and backward until you find a date where all breeds you want area available.
At Valley Hatchery, the Availability Chart that was introduced for the 2023 season makes it really easy to visually see the availability of breeds. There's also a function within the shopping area where you can choose a breed, and it takes you to the next available date with the quantity you want and from there you can see a list of other breeds that are also available on that date. You'll want to check the gender availability as well, to see if the available chickens are cockerels or pullets, but overall, the process of coordinating your order for all the breeds you want on the same day has been made pretty easy.