Flocks 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 The Flocks screen

What's in front of you, top to bottom.

Flocks opens on the same five things every time, in the order you'd actually use them:

• Today — the day's egg collection, one tap from logging it. If you have an incubation batch running, its day count sits here too.
• Four numbers — 🥚 Eggs this month, 💲 Cost per egg, 💰 Poultry net and 🐤 Total birds. Each one is tappable.
• Poultry tools — 🥚 Egg records, 💲 Cost per egg, 💰 Poultry finance, 🐣 Incubation, 🐓 Bird sales and 🔪 Processing. All six are listed whether or not you've recorded anything yet, so nothing is hiding until you've already used it.
• Your flocks — one card each. Tap one to open its profile.
• Recent egg records — the last ten entries across every flock, for when you can't remember whether you logged yesterday.

Above all of it, + holds the six things you'd add: + Flock, + Egg record, + Sale, 🌾 Fed out, + Cost and 🐣 Incubation.

2️⃣ Setting up a flock

One card per group of birds.

From the Flocks screen 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 — Not specified, Mixed, Hens (female), Roosters (male), 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.

3️⃣ Logging eggs

The two-tap daily habit.

Tap Today at the top of the Flocks screen and you get Today's eggs: a stepper row for every laying flock at once, a collection date that defaults to today, and a running "Adding N eggs" total. Press Save collection and you're done. That's the route to use at the back door with a basket in one hand.

If you'd rather do one flock at a time — or you're fixing yesterday — + Egg record on the Flocks screen and + Egg in the quick-capture row on Today's Brief both open the single egg form, with flock, date and number.

What you get back:

• An eggs tile on Today's Brief once you're recording.
• 🥚 Eggs this month on the Flocks screen, and lifetime eggs on the 🥚 Egg records row.
• A status on each flock card — Producing well, Low production or No eggs recorded — with its eggs over the last 7 and 30 days.
• Eggs / bird on the flock's own Overview — the lay-rate figure, counted against the bird numbers you entered.
• Recent egg records — the last ten entries across all flocks.

4️⃣ The flock profile

One screen per flock, four tabs.

Tap a flock card and it opens its own screen. The card itself stays short — name, purpose, N birds · N hens · N roosters, breed, age, where they live, eggs over 7 and 30 days, and a status chip. Everything else is inside.

• Overview — Record first (🥚 Log eggs, 💰 Record a sale, 🧾 Record a cost, 🔪 Process for meat, 🌾 Feed out), then Performance: birds, eggs over 7 and 30 days, eggs per bird, eggs all time, cost per egg, age, hatched, processed and weight out. Then any running incubation, recent activity and your notes.
• Records — one timeline of everything that's happened to this flock, with filters for All · Eggs · Processing · Money · Feed, each showing its count.
• Money — in, out, net, cost per egg, birds sold and average per bird for this flock, then four reports scoped to it: egg records, cost per egg, poultry finance and bird sales.
• Details — the flock's record as you entered it, with Edit flock details.

The ••• menu carries the same actions and reports, for when you're already part-way down a tab.

5️⃣ Feed, costs and cost per egg

What a dozen actually costs you.

Two different things, and it's worth knowing which is which:

• 🌾 Fed out — you gave feed to a flock. This is also on the flock's own Overview, with the flock already chosen.
• + Cost — money spent on the birds: bedding, a new waterer, mite treatment, a bag of shell grit.

Feed you buy is recorded in Feed, and that form has a Herd or flock selector — point a purchase at a flock and it reaches that flock's cost per egg.

Once costs and eggs are both going in, 💲 Cost per egg and 💰 Poultry finance open full reports with Year, Month and Flock filters. Each one states its own scope and shows the division that produced the figure, so you can see what went into it rather than trusting a number. Cost per egg splits feed from other poultry costs, because for most people feed is nearly all of it.

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.

6️⃣ Selling birds and eggs

Recording income, and what it teaches you.

+ Sale on the Flocks screen records poultry income, or 💰 Record a sale on the flock itself. 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 (weeks). Fill it in and you build up a Bird sales · price vs age picture over time — from 🐓 Bird sales in Poultry tools, or from the flock's Money tab. 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.

7️⃣ Incubation and hatching

Setting eggs, with the reminders handled.

🐣 Incubation on the Flocks screen 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. While a batch is running, its day count sits at the top of the Flocks screen: Day 12 of 21, the hatch date, and a nudge if it's overdue.

When they hatch, press Hatched, type how many hatched and press Save. Nothing changes until you save. If the batch is linked to a flock, the app asks before adding the chicks there — it won't change your bird numbers without checking. If it isn't linked, or you'd rather keep the chicks separate, it offers to start a new flock for them, already filled in with the chick count and hatch date. A finished batch with no count shows Record hatch, so you can add the number later. 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.

8️⃣ Meat birds

Processing, and where the yield goes.

Flocks with a meat, mixed, grower, chick or duck purpose get a 🔪 Process for meat action, on the flock's Overview or in its ••• menu. 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.

9️⃣ When a flock is done

Finish it. Don't delete it.

A batch of meat birds goes to the freezer, a run of layers comes to an end — and the season's records are the useful part. On the flock's Details tab, Finish this flock retires it while keeping everything: egg records, finance records, processing records, feed logs and incubation batches. It tells you how many of each it's keeping before you press it.

Finished flocks come off the list and sit behind Show finished flocks at the bottom. Open one and you can Restore flock if you retired it by mistake.

Delete only appears when there is nothing recorded against a flock — a card you made and never used. Once a flock has history, deleting it isn't offered, because that history is what makes next season's numbers mean anything.

⚠️ Withholding periods

Treating birds you're collecting eggs from.

Treat the whole coop in one go: 💉 Treatment on the flock, in the + menu on the Flocks screen, or from + Treatment anywhere else in the app — the form asks which herd or flock. Put in what you gave them, the date, and the egg withholding days off the label.

From then on the app counts the days for you and says so everywhere it matters:

• On the flock card and at the top of the flock's own screen — Eggs withheld to 18/09/2026, beside the production status rather than instead of it.
• On Today's Brief, with everything else that's counting down.
• 🔑 On the egg log itself — both the quick Today's eggs sheet and the single egg form warn you on the affected coop, on the day, while you're standing there with the basket.

Set your products up once in Products & Chemicals with their label withholding periods, and choosing the product when you record the treatment fills the days in automatically. It's the same register and the same mechanism the Animals section uses.

Want the farming side first, from finding mites and lice to treating them properly? Read our mites and lice guide.

Milk and wool don't appear on a flock treatment — they aren't gaps, they just don't apply to birds. Planning a treatment ahead is livestock-only for now. But if you set Repeat every (or a Due again date) on a flock treatment, the app books the follow-up as a job, so it turns up in Jobs and on the calendar.

✅ 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 in one pass across every flock, with 7-day, 30-day, monthly and all-time totals; eggs per bird; cost per egg from your feed and cost records, split feed vs other; poultry income and net position, filterable by year, month and flock; bird sales that decrement the right category; treatments against a whole coop with the egg stand-down counted and flagged where you log eggs; age in weeks and price-vs-age; incubation day counts with candling and hatch reminders added to your calendar; hatch success rates; meat yields posted to Production; and a season's records kept intact when you finish a flock.

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; read the label and enter the withholding days correctly; and follow whatever the current biosecurity advice is for your area.