A flock of chickens enjoying one of the custom-built coops on our high desert homestead, surrounded by lavender, rosemary, and olive bushes and shaded by passion fruit vines and tombstone roses.

If you're early in chicken-keeping, it can be tempting to grow your flock quickly by sourcing from online hatcheries or picking up hatchery chicks from the local feed store. Large commercial hatcheries present as an almost "one stop shop" for a wide range of breeds, often with immediate availability and the convenience of buying sexed female chicks only for unbeatable prices. While there's nothing inherently bad about this model, it's worth considering whether buying chicks directly from private breeders may better serve your goals, or if hatchery chicks are truly the right fit. To help you make the right decision for you and your flock, we've put together a full breakdown of considerations for buying chicks from hatcheries versus breeders!

Hatcheries vs. Breeders

This article wouldn't be complete without answering, what even is a hatchery? There’s no precise definition, but most hatcheries take the form of a large commercial operation that incubates eggs and hatches chicks under tightly controlled conditions with periodic disease monitoring. The adult birds that lay the eggs (the "breeding stock") are usually not raised on the same premises -- in fact, many hatcheries partner with other businesses and farms that independently raise the adult flocks rather than maintaining their own dedicated flocks.

If there is one deciding factor that differentiates hatcheries from breeders, though, it's scale. The scale a commercial hatchery operation allows for dozens of different breeds of chickens, as well as turkeys, ducks, quail, and other fowl, to be hatched and sold under one roof. By contrast, private breeders tend to be individuals that raise a limited number of breeds, often in residential areas. This requires maintaining adult flocks of each breed on their property, and periodically raising chicks into adulthood to replace the aging members of each flock. This process is inherently difficult for an individual to scale beyond a certain level, keeping the breeding program small and typically limited to just a few breeds.

Side Note: Like many things in life, the classification of hatcheries versus breeders is less of a black and white situation, and more of a spectrum. There are hatcheries that have remained fairly small scale and raise all of their adult birds on their premises, and there are breeders that have expanded to the point that they may be considered hatcheries despite still maintaining their former breeding practices. But for the purposes of this article, we're going to focus on the two most common paradigms - the commercial one-stop-shop hatchery versus the small private breeder.

Quality

Perhaps the most commonly discussed difference between hatchery chickens and breeder chickens is quality. Quality is often is defined as how closely a chicken adheres to the standard for their breed, per the American Standard of Perfection (SOP). It is no secret that breeders tend to make more efforts to select for breed standard than hatcheries, and if you're interested in showing your birds, sourcing from a breeder that focuses on SOP is absolutely the way to go.

But concern about quality with hatchery chicks goes well beyond whether or not they are "show quality" -- it may be the case that the birds you order from hatcheries do not even end up having the main characteristics that drew you to a particular breed in the first place -- Black Copper Marans that don't lay dark brown eggs, silkies completely lacking the big fluffy crest you fell in love with, or barnyard-mixed "Americanas" or easter eggers masquerading as the blue-egg laying Ameraucanas you were expecting. Photos of breeding stock and eggs always seem to be extremely limited on hatchery websites, and some hatcheries openly admit that their photos do not even always show the actual bloodlines of the parent birds. It's also not uncommon for hatcheries to initially obtain their breeding stock from a high quality line, but then allow the genetics to derail from their original quality year over year by not practicing proper breeding selection.

Buff Silkie hen showing off her large fluffy crest, one of the most iconic characteristics of the breed. This hen was purchased as a straight run chick from a private breeder for $25.

While it's certainly not impossible to get good quality chickens from a hatchery, the fact is there are a lot of unknowns involved, and many months and hundreds of dollars must be spent bringing these birds into maturity before you can judge whether their quality or breed representation is what you were expecting. This risks losing valuable time and effort that could have been devoted to raising the chickens you were hoping for in the first place!

Beyond breed representation, there are other issues that can occur more readily in hatchery birds or even in breeders that do not tightly control their breeding choices. Recessive traits (traits that are not visible in the parent birds but are carried and can appear in the offspring, such as weird comb shapes or impure colors) and breed non-specific genetic flaws (such as cross beaks, splay leg, crooked toes, split wings, and wry tails) can occur and take time to become visible as the chicks mature. Many breeders actively work to eliminate these traits and even test breed to confirm the offspring are defect-free, whereas farms that serve hatcheries may never even raise their offspring to an age sufficient to spot these flaws, let alone intentionally select against them.

And finally, many breeders get to know their birds well enough individually to select for good temperament and friendliness, qualities that can completely make or break the enjoyment of raising your flock.

Long story short, if quality of a particular breed is something that interests you in the slightest, selecting from an established breeder known for that breed is almost always the best option.

Convenience

There is no denying the satisfaction that results from paging through a seemingly endless list of options for different chicken breeds, feather colors and patterns, size, egg colors, etc. all available at the click of a button. Hatchery shopping is an extremely efficient way of building a flock of a variety of breeds, and will always trump purchasing from breeders in terms of variety and ease. Hatcheries tend to have an immense number of chicks available per week, with lead times as short as a few days between purchasing chicks online and receiving them in the mail. Even more convenient is the ability to pick up hatchery chicks at the local feed store on a whim!

But the convenience doesn't stop at purchasing -- brooding chicks is a great test of patience and logistics, and raising all of them at once is far easier than spacing it out over the season due to mismatched breeder availability. Raising chicks of the same age together also avoids issues with repeated new flock introductions, reducing the overall stress your flock experiences from the newcomers, and vice versa.

Shopping for chicks from small breeders tends to be more complicated - many breeders have long lead times and wait lists, and due to the small numbers of adult birds involved, there is a certain amount of uncertainty involved in when you will receive your chicks. For many, these inconveniences are worth the quality that would be impossible to source otherwise. Again, it is a matter of individual goals and priorities that determine the best fit!

Cost

In terms of cost, it's no surprise that hatchery chicks are almost always cheaper -- but it's not just due to economies of scale. For common breeds, chick prices also seem to be fairly consistent across different hatcheries, indicating a strong impact of competition. Breeder pricing on the other hand fluctuates wildly, and tends to be based on a combination of high input costs and limited supply. Breeders not only spend immensely more per adult bird than hatcheries on feed and housing, they also tend to "grow out" (raise to maturity) a large number of excess birds from which to select their final breeding groups in order to improve their genetics each generation. In addition, many breeders source their initial breeding stock at high cost, and continue to add expensive genetics from other breeders to their flocks as needed to eliminate undesirable traits and add or reinforce desirable ones. All of this comes at quite the cost, and the willingness to invest that cost and consistently continue the process makes availability of these chicks exceedingly rare.

Black Copper Marans, for example, are a breed made popular for their deep chocolate brown-colored eggs. Although almost every large hatchery offers them, only a few breeders across the country consistently offer chicks and hatching eggs of the darkest most coveted shades, and their limited quantity and inability to scale allows them to set pricing many times higher than the hatcheries that make little effort to darken their stock's egg color.

Black Copper Marans are a breed known for laying deep chocolate brown colored eggs, but many of those sold at hatcheries completely lack this trait!

Take a look at the chart below showing pricing for Black Copper Marans chicks across a number of popular hatcheries and well-known breeders. Breeders highly focused in Marans, such as Sage Acres Farms, Burberry Homestead, and Crosshatch Farms, command the highest pricing for the rare darkest-of-the-dark egg shells their flocks produce, which they have demonstrated for years through their active social media presence. Other breeders known for high quality Black Copper Marans also fetch high prices per chick, but aren't necessarily *as* specialized or successful in producing specific traits. And finally, hatcheries may provide this breed for a stable low price, however the birds are unlikely to have the most coveted physical traits or egg shade that the breed is known for, and this means others are not necessarily going to be interested in purchasing their offspring from you in the future either.

Prices for Black Copper Marans chicks and hatching eggs across different hatcheries and breeders, as of March 21, 2024.

Given this breakdown of options, it's important to consider upfront what your goals are for owning a particular breed, and how important the desirable breed traits are going to be to you once the chicks are mature. Also keep in mind that the initial cost of the chicks, even if on the higher end, is usually one of the lowest of the costs entailed in raising chickens overall!

Sexing

No matter how you raise your chickens, choosing the right hen to rooster ratio is a critical part of maintaining a peaceful, healthy flock. Failing to keep enough hens per rooster is a recipe for rooster-on-rooster violence and overmating damage to hens, either of which can be bad enough to cause death. The best balance falls somewhere between 4 and 12 hens per rooster, but keeping hens only and no roosters can work as well (if you're not concerned about the fertility of the eggs). Many municipalities have also taken to banning rooster ownership altogether to cut down on crowing noise in quiet neighborhoods.

All of this makes it much more convenient to opt for sexed chicks if possible from the beginning, rather than unsexed ("straight run") chicks that will have a roughly equal probability of being male or female. The problem is, for most breeds of chickens it's very difficult to determine the sex of the chicks at a young age. Large hatcheries manage this by employing highly skilled individuals trained in difficult to master techniques of sexing chicks at one day old, such as vent sexing and feather sexing. This enables them to offer sexed female chicks separately, often at a higher price than unsexed chicks, but nowhere near the cost it would require to raise excess roosters. Although the accuracy of these methods can be as low as 80%, many hatcheries will either guarantee sexing or provide refunds or replacements for sexing errors.

Private breeders, on the other hand, are unlikely to have sexed female chicks for sale except if offering certain sex-linked breeds that have easy to spot physical differences between males and females. For all other breeds sold as straight run, the chicks will need to be raised through a certain age, at least 4-6 weeks, to determine which are male versus female. Further, it is inevitable that the excess roosters will need to be rehomed or culled before they reach maturity to avoid throwing off the flock balance.

The ability to purchase sexed female chicks will always be a major convenience factor for buying from hatcheries, but what happens to the excess male chicks that aren't sold? Although some hatcheries are openly committed to more humane options, such as donating extra male chicks to organizations where they are raised for meat, many do not disclose their practices. While purchasing straight run chicks may be less convenient, it allows you as the customer to make the decisions on what comes of the extra males. Further, choosing a high quality breeder known for good genetics is nearly a guarantee that the extra roosters will be in demand by other chicken enthusiasts, allowing them to be easily sold or rehomed to owners who care about maintaining their quality and condition.

When purchasing straight run chicks, be prepared to end up with a roughly equal percentage of hens and roosters at best!

Health: Disease

In order for a hatchery or breeder to ships chicks or hatching eggs across state lines, there is a minimum amount of disease testing and monitoring required by law. This is controlled through enrollment in the NPIP (National Poultry Improvement Plan) program, a state-by-state program that has an exhaustive list of requirements that participants must adhere to - from periodic disease testing, to sanitization procedures, to biosecurity principles - all of which are intended to ensure that harmful diseases like pullorum, typhoid and avian influenza are not spread throughout the poultry industry.

It is safe to assume if ordering online from a large hatchery that the company is an established member of the NPIP program (but if you're uncertain, their website should contain the certification insignia), and as such is very unlikely to deliver chicks to you that could spread one of these diseases. In fact, many hatcheries go beyond the required testing to monitor for other common diseases, with testing as frequent as every 30 days.

Although breeders can also enroll in the NPIP program (and must if they plan to ship chicks or eggs across state lines), depending on the state it can be a costly process and large hatcheries certainly win out in terms of having the funds to support it. Because of this, many breeders choose to forego NPIP certification and simply limit sales to their home state. While this doesn't make them more likely to spread disease (in fact, small scale chicken rearing is far less susceptible to contracting and spreading of diseases by nature), it does mean that when considering purchasing from breeders, it is important to spend some time evaluating the conditions the birds appear to be kept in and the dedication of the breeder to cleanliness and biosecurity.

However, if the biosecurity of your flock is one of your top priorities, the ultimate option is actually purchasing hatching eggs rather than chicks, which are usually only available at private breeders. Far fewer common poultry diseases are transmitted vertically (from parent to chicks through the eggs) than horizontally (from chicken to chicken), making hatching eggs far less likely to bring disease to your flock.

Health: Vaccination

Vaccination is a controversial topic amongst chicken owners, and Marek's disease is at the center of it. Marek's is a highly contagious viral disease that untreatable and can wipe out up to 80% of an unvaccinated flock, often appearing as weakness and paralysis followed by death. A vaccine was originally developed to protect the commercial poultry industry, but in recent decades the disease has been found to be one of the leading causes of death amongst backyard chickens as well. For peak effectiveness, the vaccine must be administered on the the first day of a chick's life, meaning vaccination is in the hands of the breeder or hatchery you purchase from.

Hatcheries are easily able to source the vaccine and administer it at scale to day-old chicks. In addition, they typically give customers the option of getting their chicks vaccinated or not, allowing you to easily make the choice you prefer. On the private market, the Marek's vaccine can only be obtained in kits that are suitable for vaccinating 1000 chicks at a time and must be mixed and used within one hour. This not only makes the vaccination process expensive and cumbersome for small breeders, but also makes it even more difficult to offer customers an option.

If getting Marek's vaccinated chicks is important to you, large scale hatcheries are more likely to be a good option. That said, there are many private breeders out there that offer vaccinated chicks, and it is also always possible to purchase and administer the vaccine yourself (although its effectiveness decreases the longer the chicks are exposed to the environment before vaccination).

Of course, since Marek's disease is not a vertically transmitted disease, purchasing hatching eggs from a private breeder is another way to help keep your flock Marek's free, with the added bonus of allowing you to make your own decision on vaccination once the chicks have hatched.

Marek’s vaccination kits can be purchased online from Valley Vet for $34.99 plus shipping. Each kit contains enough doses to vaccinate to 1000 chicks, but must be mixed up and used within 1 hour.

Health: Hardiness

One of the best ways of controlling disease in your flock long term is selecting chicks from naturally hardy, disease resistant parents. Genetic resistance to disease is a result of exposing chickens to a natural environment where they encounter common pathogens, and selecting the healthiest most vigorous birds to continue breeding with. While it's difficult to know whether a given hatchery or breeder has more disease-resistant birds than another, the fact is that many large hatcheries do not even share with customers the conditions under which the adult flocks they source from are raised.

Breeders, on the other hand, are likely to be raising their flocks in more natural conditions - outside, on pasture or in coops or breeding pens, where they are exposed to the area's soil, wild birds, and natural pathogens. Only the birds that survive these pathogens end up being bred, leading to increasing genetic resistance over time. Particularly if a breeder is located in your area, it is likely that the healthy birds in their breeding stock have been exposed to and developed some genetic resistance to the common pathogens in your area, making their offspring a great fit for bringing into your flock!

Our flock of silkies free-ranging on grasses while their coop is being cleaned.

Humaneness

As we touched on earlier, it's rare for hatcheries to raise their adult breeding stock on the same premises as their hatching facility. More commonly, the adult birds are raised in large numbers on separate breeder farms. Whether these farms are owned by the hatchery or other businesses, the fact is that hatchery websites almost never share photos or information about the conditions under which the adults are raised. The cleanliness of their coops, density of birds per square foot, quality of feed they're given, and exposure to fresh air, natural light, and soil, all become unknowns. Similarly, if the fate of excess male chicks is not disclosed, it could be less than humane. If it's important to you to support a business that raises animals under humane conditions, purchasing from a private breeder that openly shares about their practices is always the best option.

A Black Copper Marans breeding pen on our homestead, located in the California high desert wilderness in view of rolling hills and mountain peaks.

Unique Offerings

Hatcheries are no match for private breeders when it comes to unique offerings. From rare and imported breeds to uncommon feather types, colors, and patterns, you can find a breeder out there for pratically anything you might be looking for! Think frizzle-feathered Silkies, lavender-colored Marans, completely black fibromelanistic Ayam Cemanis, or freakishly tall Indio Gigantes. Many chicken breeders also take a deep interest in genetics, using their knowledge to experiment and develop new varieties and cross-breeds with unique combinations of traits.

One of the biggest categories of experimentation amongst breeders is egg color, and the pursuit of a rainbow of egg colors and shades through careful cross-breeding of brown and blue egg layers. Easter eggers and green egg layers may be commonplace at hatcheries, but there is no other option than breeders if you're in pursuit of heavy bloom pink layers or speckled late generation back-crossed olive eggers! There is an entire world of chicken varieties accessible beyond hatchery offerings, facilitated only by a community of creative and tireless breeders.

Many sought-after egg colors can only be achieved through either multiple generations of cross-breeding, or selectively breeding hens that lay eggs with a heavy bloom that can make the eggs appear pink, grey, or purple.

Final Thoughts

By now you’ve probably gathered that there is no single right answer for whether to purchase chicks from a hatchery or a breeder — it all comes down to your personal priorities and goals! For many, the cost and convenience of hatchery chicks will always prevail. But for those becoming more experienced in raising chickens, breeders open up a whole new world of options and quality that are simply unheard of at hatcheries!

So, which do you prefer? Comment below to share your thoughts!

Hatcheries vs. Breeders: The Ultimate Guide for Where to Buy Your Chicks