If I remember correctly a chicken will lay an egg everyday. If there was a rooster who insisted on sweet sweet poultry loving with her everyday is it conceivable that one chicken could hatch a new chick everyday, 365 new baby chicks a year?
Cool to hear from a real live chicken rancher, part-time / amatuer though you may be. The only animals I can raise successfully are cockroaches.
But, …, we/you haven’t exactly answered the OP’s underlying question.
Given a healthy female chicken in her prime reproductive years and an adequate supply of roostering, how many eggs can she reasonably create in a year and how many will hatch into viable chicks? 50? 100? 200? 400?
Enquiring clueless suburbanite minds want to know.
beowulf forgot to mention one thing
Your Hen would die.
When they decide to go broody, they lose a lot of weight and tend to not want to eat and drink much, if your hen is broody 365 days out of the year she wont live long.
So even if you get a layer and a brooder, it’s not happening.
Now if you want to go get an incubator, You can attempt it yourself.
If you get 100% fertilization and hatch rate, you are doing better than I but you will also lose some of what hatches.
I still would not want to hatch them sequentially, 1 per day, lord it would never end, and all the separating you would have to keep doing, ugh.
This guy used to raise chickens and ducks but now is strictly ducks with a few geese. He grows them for food and every year goes through the process of incubating and hatching as many eggs as he can. His success rate is fairly low but he still winds up with hundreds of ducklings for the next season.
You can get (almost)one egg per day. Some breeds are optimized for laying eggs - Rhode Island Reds, for example. But a hen can’t keep up that rate for very long. If you are interested in Chickens as pets, it’s nice to give them a break.
As for fertility, I had very good luck. I made an incubator for a friend’s Montessori class, and had an 80%+ hatch rate.
They dont lay 1 egg a day year round, in winter when the day is shorter egg laying tapers off.
Dont do like the commercial farms do and light them 24/7 they just burn out and die (the hens not the lights)
Also the eggs, if at reasonable temp, are only viable for like 5 days after laying if you are going to attempt to hatch them.
Also if left alone, the hens will do that for you, they tend to clutch the eggs together and let the broody ones sit on them, at least mine do.
Chicken hens dont care much if they sit on chicken or duck or what ever eggs.
I’ve had a bantam seabright try to sit on a pile of eggs bigger than her and try to hatch them, she hatched 2, but was not eating so broke her of broodyness and put the rest in an incubator.
My ducks, they dont sit on anything, they drop eggs any old place too, including in the pond.
I’m not hatching anything any time soon, i have 50 chickens and 25 ducks and they are enough to contend with
Most breeds will give you in the range of 180 to 240 eggs a year if they are in natural lighting. In Spring and Summer they lay almost 1 a day, in Fall and Winter they slow down and many of them take a month or more break. With around 10 hens, we got a couple of eggs each day in the winter, and 8 to 10 eggs a day in the summer. As they get older the number of eggs tends to go down a bit, and the size tends to go up.
You don’t need 24/7 lighting to keep them laying through the winter. Just a few extra hours in the morning and/or evening is enough. Nor will this make an appreciable difference in the longevity of the hens: They’re only good for a few years no matter what you do, and even given summer lighting, most hens will still miss a day here and there.
That said, while you can’t truly get an egg a day, you can get reasonably close. In fact, the world record is slightly more than 1 a day, 371 eggs laid in 364 days.