Here we couldn't count on solar unless you had a great storage battery.From a prepper's perspective , someone with an egg incubator and a solar system to operate it , could theoretically hatch off all the chicken they cared to eat as well as have all the eggs they cared to eat . As a google search showed it takes about 21 days to turn a egg into a hatched chicken . Feeding them worms or letting them free range if varmints allow , would potentially eliminate the necessity of depending on a feed store for their food source .--- What are you guys thoughts on hanging unwanted chicken parts or perhaps wild game on a cord above the birds so they could eat the maggots that fell off the rotting meat as a food source ?
Usually you can lose an hour of heat with no problem, but more than that affects hatch rates. A few cloudy days and the chicks would be DIS.
We put a heating pad under our incubator and do a mostly dry hatch. It gives us eggcelent hatch rates.
As far as the carcass, I think it would draw predators. You can, depending on your climate, harvest red wriggler worms and black soldier fly larvae with compost, though. BSF are easy. You create a little bucket system with a pipe and they practically harvest themselves. But if you live in a cooler climate, you have to either put them in a greenhouse or reorder eggs/larvae each spring.
I've never grown out any other larvae types, but I know people who do.
Growing fodder would be ok, too, but it's not sustainable in the long term because those sprouts don't produce their own seed.