Students in 黑马磁力 and surrounding communities are getting some cute and fuzzy additions to the classrooms thanks to a recently launched hatching program at Pips Farm.
Instead of going through all of the trouble of trying to bring the kids to the farm, this program brings the farm to the kids, giving them a chance to get an up-close look at how various farm birds are incubated and hatched.
Pips Farm co-owner Adam Williams explained that this program arose from a desire to give back to the community and take full advantage of an excess of viable pure-bred hatching eggs.
"It's no secret that school budgets are tight, and in the event that a school could not afford to pay for hatching eggs for their classroom we can offer an option for kids to observe the hatching process, learn about animal husbandry, biology, care, and patience, while giving teachers the opportunity to instruct their class with a physical example rather than images or text," Williams said.
He explained that the subject of animal husbandry is an incredibly important thing for children to understand, as it relates to many different parts of life.
"The birth of a newborn animal gives children a demonstration of the responsibility we have to all living things, the vulnerability they have to the environment without care and nurturing, and a respect for livestock as well as the origins of food," he said.
This isn't just a program for young children, Williams said, with there being lessons to learn with the hatching program at all grade levels.
"Though most of the classrooms are early grades, there are also opportunities for teachers of later grades to use chickens to demonstrate genetic concepts like traits, alleles, and phenotypes, as some breeds we carry like the Icelandic chicken are landrace and produce a wide variety of visual characteristics like feather colours and comb shapes."
As part of this hatching program, classrooms can get a set of eggs delivered to them for free, with the school only needing to supply the incubators. Then, the children will have several weeks to enjoy watching the eggs develop until the baby birds finally emerge.
After the eggs have hatched, Pips Farm will come again to collect the baby birds, allowing the children to witness the entire birthing process that farm birds undergo.
The types of eggs that this program has available are turkey, quail, and various chicken eggs. While the quail eggs are available year-round, the chicken eggs are only available during the spring and summer, and the turkey eggs are only available in mid to late spring.
"If a school is interested in providing their students an egg hatching experience, we can provide them an option regardless of the seasons or the weather," Williams said.
In terms of difficulty, Pips Farm lists chicken eggs as the easiest to deal with thanks to the very low mortality rate and relatively short 21-day incubation period. Quail eggs have an even shorter 18-day incubation period, but also suffer from a higher mortality rate. Due to the size of the eggs and the lengthy 28-day incubation period, turkey eggs definitely pose the hardest challenge.
"We are hoping as we gain more exposure that more schools contact us for hatching eggs and we can try to make the experience for the teachers as easy as possible by providing not only the eggs themselves but also an information package that they can display, use as talking points, or just refer to in the event they are unsure of what to do or when to do it," Williams said.
In the short time that they've been offering this hatching program, Pips Farm has already had six local schools participate, and they're eager to bring even more schools on board.
Schools in Abbotsford, Mission, and 黑马磁力 are all eligible to be a part of this hatching program, with interested teachers encouraged to find more information at .
