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ambience: chicks peeping
You’ve heard the expression “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”? Well, it takes on new meaning if you’re working in the time-sensitive conditions of an egg hatchery. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. When you place an order at a hatchery, the eggs incubate for three weeks, but knowing when and how many will become chickens is not so simple. Hatchery owner Murray McMurray.
“Well we bring in x number of eggs every week, and we’re totally computerized and we have 105 different varieties, and we know, we track each week the percentage of those eggs that hatch. 100% of ’em don’t always hatch. So we track that, and we know then for a hatch 3 weeks from today, how many eggs we’ve set, and are gonna incubate, and we’re gonna estimate how many are gonna hatch. Consequently, we then sell against that number. To make it easy, we bring in 1000 Rhode Island Red eggs. We’re estimating that they’re gonna hatch at 80%, so we’re gonna have 800 Rhode Island Reds to sell three weeks from now. Now an interesting point, I think, is that even though we say it’s 21 days that all eggs are gonna hatch, that really is not quite true. Some hatch in 20 days and 3 hours, some in 22 days, so it’s, it’s, not all the same. So we are not setting them all in at precisely at 4:00 on Friday afternoon for 21 days later to hatch. We’re starting to set some of them Friday morning all the way through Saturday night, but they’re all gonna hatch at 4:00 on Friday afternoon. And that’s experience, and tracking, and following statistics.”
And when you’ve promised to deliver poultry in the mail within 72 hours from the time they’re born, you’ve got a built in incentive to have timed and counted your chickens before they’re hatched.
Pulse of the Planet is presented with support provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.
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