Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

I'm a city girl, so living in rural Utah has sometimes come as a shock.  I have raised rabbits, goats, chickens, ducks, dogs and cats.  I have even given a goat a rectal exam (don't ask).  We have chickens right now.  We got them as part of our emergency preparedness plan.  The problem with this plan is that we just can't eat eggs as part of the plan.  We also have to raise them for meat too.  Jim is a farm boy from Arizona and knows all about animals, but it has been all new to me.

Last year we let one of the chickens brood.  Her name is Josephine and she is an excellent brooder and mother.  The problem we had last year is that she was not in a separate cage so she could be away from the other chickens.  They kept trying to get in the nest box with her and lay new eggs, stepping on and breaking the eggs she was brooding.  Once we separated her from the other chickens she was able to hatch out two chicks.  She was sitting on 12 eggs.  That's not very good odds.  We kept the two chicks who both turned out to be roosters and got rid of our other rooster.  He was mean and we didn't want him around Adam.

This year we are experimenting.  Josephine is brooding again.  We let her sit on some duck eggs until we had gathered enough eggs from all the other chickens.  We only have female ducks so it didn't matter.  She is now sitting on six eggs in her own special little pen.  She wasn't happy with me for coming into her space so she puffed herself up and made threatening chicken noises at me. 

We have also purchased an incubator with an automatic turner.  Who knew that you had to turn them all the time?  And keep the pointy end down?  And keep them at exactly 99.5 degrees?  And add water to the bottom of the incubator to keep them moist?  I don't think Josephine thinks about all of that. 

Here is our new technological "Josephine".  There are 15 eggs we are brooding in the incubator.  We should have some chicks around May 27th, from both brooders.  We are hoping that any chicks that we get from the incubator can then be transferred to Josephine to raise.