45th Parallel Offgrid Homestead

09/01/2024

This is Erin. It is with heavy heart to let you know that on Dec. 10th our world flipped upside down when Mike entered heaven. Mike had been battling stage 4 Esophageal cancer for 2 years and his body could no longer fight.
The two Littles and I moved in with my parents until we figure out what we are gonna do.

Off-Grid Beginners we are changing our name to reflect the new chapter in our journey to provide information on starting down the path to self-sufficiency and Reliance. Come join us as we build our budget-minded homestead while still working full time!

30/11/2023

This is Erin, I just wanted to come on here and let you all know that Mike is very sick. Please pray for our family.

07/06/2023

So this morning we moved 16 of the 20 new checks from the incubator to a temporary brooder. We will be moving them again later to a bigger brooder. This is a 57% hatch rate so far.

06/06/2023

Well our Quail hatching was a failure we had only a 10% hatch rate but of the 11 that hatched we did get 10 that survived and are doing well. I still have to contact myshirefarms since they guarantee a 50% hatch rate. I blame the post office since they miss directed the shipment and it took an additional 5 days to get them into the incubator.

When we candled them at lock down we had 37 of which 18 were not fertilized and 19 that for some reason just didn't progress.

So we will do an update after we contact and see what's what.

We were able to maintain a 35 to 45 percent humidity during incubation and a 69 to 73 percent during lockdown. With Temps from 99 to 101 through the whole process.

Maybe we will have better luck next round.

31/05/2023

The Quail have started hatching!!

22/05/2023

Well we built a quail brooder today not too bad, but it will only handle about 25 to maybe 30 birds for the first week. Then good for maybe 20 birds for the next week or so.

I think we are hopefully going to have a better hatch rate than that. We have 120 eggs in the incubator and at a 50 percent rate that's still 60 birds.

16/05/2023

We are working hard to get things done on the homestead since we have such a short building season on the 45th Parallel, and with all the doctors appointments and cancer treatments it really makes it hard to get things done.

I'll work on getting a post up for our home made incubator this week, it will do about 500 Chicken eggs and almost a thousand quail eggs.

God bless and protect you!

16/05/2023

16/05/2023

We got the quail eggs in the incubator 2 racks of 60 eggs per rack.in a about 2 weeks we will move them to the hatching tray. After are dismal hatch with the chicken eggs, but the controller got hung up and the temperature got way to high for the eggs. We did end up with 2 of the 55 actually hatching but we only had about 30 eggs that were viable so the others were probably just a little too old.

20/04/2023

So here is our first run of the 45th Parallel IncuBeast at full capacity it will hold over 500 Chicken eggs, using the after market Quail egg turners it will do almost 700 Quail eggs or over 1000 Quail eggs.

First run is about 50% older eggs and 50% from the last 7 or so days. We will see how they do in about a week or so for the first candling of the eggs.