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The Local Food Report
As we re-imagine our relationships to what we eat, Local Food Report creator Elspeth Hay takes us to the heart of the local food movement to talk with growers, harvesters, processors, cooks, policy makers and visionaries

From Egg to Bird: Raising Chickens on Cape Cod

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Temperature is important, and so is humidity, when incubating eggs. On the Local Food Report, Elspeth Hay speaks with Susan Knieriem of Miss Scarlett's Blue Ribbon Farm in Yarmouthport about raising chickens from egg to bird. Susan does it using an old-fashioned incubator—it looks like an old wooden icebox, and it holds about 100 eggs. She collects the fertile ones—which is most of them since she's got roosters—and dates them and lays them on the trays. After 21 days: peep. Peep. PEEP. PEEP! Babies.

Audio story posted above.

Read more about raising chickens from egg to bird on Elspeth's blog, Diary of a Locavore.

Elspeth Hay is the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on CAI since 2008, and the author of the forthcoming book, Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us. You can learn more about her work at elspethhay.com.