Opinions on Ideal Poultry Hatchery?

[BlueChai]

Hello, I'm having a shipment of bantam chicks coming in tomorrow from Ideal Poultry, and I am curious about anyone's experience with the hatchery. Have it been a positive or negative experience? What was the quality of the chicks once they grew up? I want to know what to expect.

 

[Phoenixheart14]

I live in central Texas, so ideal is my go to hatchery. They don't have good show quality, but I've never gotten an unhealthy batch from them.

I do know that they've been having some genetics problems recently that they have been working out. For example, I got pullet chicks from them in Oct. 4 Delaware, 4 Marans, 4 Welsummer, 4 Americana, and 4 Australorps. This was the only batch (out of MANY) that I have a complaint about. One of the Delawares was rumpless... Which is adorable but not ideal (haha pardon the pun). Another "Delaware" turned out to be a Easter egger. One of my americanas had a cross beak. And two of the marans were roos.

Like I said, I order from them every year, and I've had fantastic birds from them every batch. This was the first batch where there were problems.

I hope this helps!

 

[OF65]

I ordered 100 got 102 bantams. I do not know all the breeds. This hatch was breeds they do not list! Once the 14 died in the first 4 days I have lost no more. Healthy yes but show lack of careful breeding.

 

[joydix]

Hello, I'm having a shipment of bantam chicks coming in tomorrow from Ideal Poultry, and I am curious about anyone's experience with the hatchery. Have it been a positive or negative experience? What was the quality of the chicks once they grew up? I want to know what to expect.

i have ordered several times from IDEAL....the regular standard breeds do well. depends where you are maybe but anytime i have ordered bantam or specialty breeds MANY die. a credit does not help right? my spitz? i have gotten sometimes 1 or 2 that live out of 10ish....i have given up on bantam via the mail. since they aren't sexed anyway i may as well just hatch them myself....i will say the death rate is not worse than other hatcheries...shipping is just too hard on those little peeps....

 

[BlueChai]

Shipment came early and I have to say it isn't great. I ordered 2 lavender d'uccles, 2 mille fleur d'uccles, 2 porcelain d'uccles, 2 red silkie, 1 sultan, 1 white silkie, 1 blue silkie, 2 partridge silkies, 1 ameracauna, 2 blue laced wyandottes, and 2 lemon blue old englishes. My order was missing 1 red silkie, all the blue milles, and all old englishes. Sultan is very poor quality, they have 13 toes. Instead of giving me part of my order, they gave me a bunch of random chicks as replacement, I don't even know the breeds. One filler chick and one of my lavender d'uccle chicks in on it's way out. The only chicks I'm actually pleased about are the porcelain chicks. I emailed them and I am waited for a response, never ordering from Ideal again.

 

[shearches]

So I've gotten 2 shipments from them. The first one had quite a few deaths. Like 8 of 20! But we got 2 SUPER nice looking birds. A partridge silkie and a polish. The others that survived are really sweet and look pretty good. Just got the second batch today and I think they messed up my order?!
Side note-they did refund my money for the 8

 

[BlueChai]

So we are on the same boat regarding the messed up order. Do you know if Ideal fixes orders?

 

[shearches]

So we are on the same boat regarding the messed up order. Do you know if Ideal fixes orders?

Not sure. The first order all they wanted to do was give me a refund which was fine at the time, but with this order I’d really like the chickens I ordered!! We’ll see. Let me know how yours turns out. I’m calling them tomorrow

 

[OF65]

You HAVE to call them within 4 days of arrival period or they will ignore you!! In my order 5 were dead on arrival 5 died the next day, 2 each the next 2 days and then no more. The five dead on arrival were rotten. They must have been in high heat to decompose. Then they chilled , with my infra red heat lamp behind my wood stove it was days before they seemingly got warm. I had the temp at 92. I was told that once chicks chill that badly they will not live. I don’t know, as I said no more have died but... at 5 weeks I am still monitoring their bodies and I still provide heat. I do not like how thin some of them are...they have feed before them all the time starting out with game bird feed 31 %protein! They are now on Kent which is 21% protein. They have scratch grain which they love to scratch for in the shavings. I give them yogurt most days, they love boiled eggs crushed with oatmeal. But Ideal did refund me for the 14 dead. The Japanese are good quality but the you have to work/ breed carefully with them because of the lethal gene.

 

[BlueChai]

They are reshipping on Wednesday. They agreed they messed up my order. They are sending me the chicks that didn't arrive and replacing two dead ones. I had a dead filler chick and one of my self blue d'uccles died. My other self blue d'uccle acts strange. It isn't sickly and eats, but it always sits on its heels with it's toes curled. Does anyone know why it might be doing that?