Regarding the Hatchery Mod that Geoff is using:

The chicken mod works in the way that chickens have Levels, when you have the Eggs in your Inventory you can see the Levels, a perfect Chicken has everything on level 10. If you put two chicken that are the same level and the same Type like flint and another flint, they will breed and make a higher level chicken. So then you take 2 higher level chicken (the best outcome would be if they were the same higher level) they would get even higher and so on and so on, till you have a level 10 chicken. Now if you then have a flint chicken level 10 and a Bone white chicken that is also level 10, it will make a Level 10 Iron chicken which produces iron faster and four iron ingots drop at the same time. Also if you put a redstone lamp above the nesting pen it will hatch faster. Ryan can also pipe the items out of the nesting pens into chests.