How it works

Every spring the same thing happens. You want four sexed pullets of one breed, and you end up with seven tabs open trying to work out who has them, who will ship to you, and whether you will be forced to buy fifteen birds to get them. This puts that on one page.

Where the numbers come from

Ten US hatcheries publish their product catalogue in a public, documented format. We read those listings on a schedule, at the rate each site asks for, and republish only the facts: breed, sex, price, minimum order, and whether something is in stock right now.

Reading a hatchery's catalogue creates no account and touches no checkout, and nothing about you is sent to any hatchery. The site itself is ordinary in the usual way: it uses Google Analytics to count visits and carries advertising, and both set cookies in your browser. Any hatchery whose site asks crawlers to stay out is left out entirely.

About the photographs

Prices and stock levels are facts, so they can be published freely. Photographs are different: they belong to whoever took them. 328 of the 461 catalogue entries here show a photo, and every one is loaded directly from the hatchery that sells that bird, credited to them by name, and linked back to their listing. Nothing is copied onto our servers and nothing is re-hosted.

Any hatchery that would rather we did not show their photographs can say so and they come off the same day. The listing itself stays, because the price and the stock level are facts about the market. The remaining 133 entries show no photo because the hatchery publishes none we can point at.

What this will not tell you

six of the ten hatcheries publish ship dates in a readable format and those are shown. The other four publish none, so a missing date means we do not know, not that nothing is shipping. Minimum order is known for 142 of 461 catalogue entries for the same reason.

Stock moves through the day in season. Always confirm on the hatchery's own site before ordering.

How this keeps itself honest

Nobody watches the four daily reads happen, so every way this site could publish something false is handled on purpose rather than hoped about.

A hatchery that goes quiet is not droppedIt is served from its last good copy and labelled with the date it was actually read. Silently dropping one would rewrite every “sold by 10 hatcheries” count on the site and publish the new number as current fact.

An empty answer counts as a failureA shop that has changed platforms answers cheerfully with nothing at all. Any hatchery returning under half its previous catalogue is treated as broken rather than as having sold out of everything.

Bad data stops the releaseLarge unexplained drops, new duplicate clusters and unreviewed price outliers halt publication and leave the site exactly as it was. Yesterday's accurate page beats today's wrong one.

No number here is typed by handEvery count on every page is computed from the catalogue at build time. A figure written into a sentence goes stale the first time the data moves, and then argues with the table beneath it.

Compare across hatcheries

The catalogue is most useful side by side. Three pages do that across every hatchery at once: what the same bird costs at each one, how few they will ship, and what they promise if it goes wrong.

Corrections

If you run a hatchery listed here and something is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, get in touch and it will be sorted quickly.