How to use the Flocks section in My Block Hand

📋 Before you start

What Flocks is for, and how it differs from Animals.

Poultry get their own section because they're managed as a group, not as individuals. You don't keep a lifetime record for each hen — you track a flock: how many birds, how many eggs, what the feed cost, what the birds sold for.

That's the whole design difference. Animals gives every sheep or cow its own record and history. Flocks gives you one card per group, with the numbers that actually matter for poultry.

1️⃣ Setting up a flock

One card per group of birds.

From the Flocks card use + then + Flock. The fields:

• Flock name — whatever you call them. "Back coop", "The girls", "Meat birds 2026".
• Purpose — Layers, Meat birds, Breeding flock, Chicks / growers, Ducks or Mixed poultry. This changes what the app shows you: layer flocks get egg and lay-rate stats, meat and grower flocks get age-in-weeks and a Process for meat action instead.
• Breed / type — optional.
• Sex — Mixed, Hens, Roosters, Pullets, Cockerels or Straight run.
• Hens / Roosters / Chicks & growers — the optional breakdown. See below.
• Total birds — fill the breakdown in and this adds itself up.
• Coop / paddock / area, Started / hatch date and Notes.

The hen / rooster / chick breakdown

Optional, and worth doing. Enter 8 hens, 1 rooster and 5 chicks and the total becomes 14 automatically, with the split shown on the flock card. It matters for two things: lay rate is calculated against your bird count, so counting chicks and roosters as layers makes your hens look worse than they are — and when you sell birds, the app asks which ones so the right category comes down.

2️⃣ Logging eggs

The two-tap daily habit.

The fastest route is 🥚 Today's eggs in the quick-log group under the + button at the top of any screen. There's also + Egg record on the Flocks card, and an + Egg button in the quick-capture row on Today's Brief.

You pick the flock, the date and the number laid. That's it. The date defaults to today, so a normal day's logging is a few taps at the back door.

What you get back:

• An eggs tile on Today's Brief once you're recording.
• Eggs this month and total eggs on the flock card — both tappable, opening the full egg history by month and year.
• Lay rate — eggs per bird over the last seven days, which is what turns the card's status into Producing well or Low production.
• Recent egg records — your last ten entries across all flocks, for when you can't remember whether you logged yesterday.

3️⃣ Feed, costs and cost per egg

What a dozen actually costs you.

Use + Feed / cost on the Flocks card to log a feed purchase or any other flock expense — bedding, a new waterer, mite treatment. Pick the flock, the date, the amount and a category.

Once costs and eggs are both going in, the flock card shows a cost per egg figure. Tap it for the monthly breakdown, and tap the net-position figure for the full poultry finance history by month and year.

Flock costs also flow into your main Finances section, so poultry spending shows up in the whole-farm picture rather than sitting in a silo.

4️⃣ Selling birds and eggs

Recording income, and what it teaches you.

+ Sale on the Flocks card records poultry income. Pick the flock, date, amount and category.

For a bird sale specifically, fill in Birds sold and the flock count comes down automatically. If that flock has a hen/rooster/chick breakdown you'll also be asked which birds, so the right category is reduced — and the app won't let you sell more of a category than you have.

There's also an optional age when sold, in weeks. Fill it in and you build up a price vs age picture over time, tappable from the flock card. For anyone selling growers or point-of-lay pullets, that's the number that tells you the sweet spot between feed cost and sale price.

5️⃣ Incubation and hatching

Setting eggs, with the reminders handled.

🐣 Incubation on the Flocks card starts a batch. Pick the bird and the days to hatch fill in for you — chicken 21, quail 18, duck 28, muscovy 35, turkey 28, goose 30, guinea fowl 27 — all editable if you're doing something unusual.

Then set the batch name, eggs set, and the date set or the date she went broody. Two more fields matter:

• Hatching method — 🔌 Incubator or 🐔 Broody hen. Choosing broody reveals a Which hen? field, so a natural hatch is recorded the same way as an incubator one and gets the same reminders.
• Flock — optional, but link it and the chicks can be added to that flock on hatch day.

Saving a batch adds candling and hatch-day reminders to your farm calendar automatically — you don't set them yourself.

When they hatch, press Hatched and enter how many. If the batch is linked to a flock, the app asks before adding the chicks — it won't change your bird numbers without checking. Completed batches then show a success rate: 9 hatched of 12 · 75% success, which is genuinely useful for comparing incubator settings, or one broody hen against another, across seasons.

6️⃣ Meat birds

Processing, and where the yield goes.

Flocks with a meat, mixed, grower, chick or duck purpose get a Process for meat action. It asks for the date, birds processed, total dressed weight and value.

That logs the meat under Production and reduces the flock's bird count in one step, so your bird numbers stay honest and the meat shows up alongside milk and wool in your production totals.

⚠️ Withholding periods

Treating birds you're collecting eggs from.

If you treat your birds with anything that carries an egg withholding period, record it as a treatment with the withholding days set, and the app tracks the cut-off date for you and flags it.

Set your products up once in Products & Chemicals with their label withholding periods, and selecting the product when you record a treatment fills the dates in automatically. It's the same mechanism the Animals section uses — worth reading that part if you haven't.

✅ What the app does vs what you do

The honest split.

My Block Hand handles: flock numbers and the hen/rooster/chick split kept in sync; daily egg counts with monthly and all-time totals; lay rate per bird; cost per egg from your feed and cost records; poultry income and net position by month; bird sales that decrement the right category; age in weeks and price-vs-age; incubation day counts with candling and hatch reminders added to your calendar; hatch success rates; and meat yields posted to Production.

You still have to: log the eggs and the costs — that's the whole input, and the outputs are only as good as it; decide when birds are ready; check your own product labels for egg withholding; and follow whatever the current biosecurity advice is for your area.