Quail Talk

Let's talk quail for a few minutes.

I have friends who tell me they prefer to believe that meat comes from the grocery store in little pink styrofoam containers.  I understand their point, I really do.  If you are one of those people, you might want to just back out of the room because among other things, I am going to write today about having processed quail available for purchase.  Please go grab your favorite book, a cup of coffee, an English Muffin (*ahem*) and come back tomorrow.

NowHere Farms, LLC is a licensed, permitted commercial quail breeder/hatchery business.  We worked hard to jump through all the governmental hoops to reach this point.  We have worked very hard over the past few months to build our quail inventory; a process which has taken more time than I hoped (and I admit my hopes were not realistic).

Currently we have 23 "old girls".  They have done well for us and been fairly productive layers, but they are less and less productive and we will cull them later this month.  These girls will go into our personal freezer.

We have 24 in our breeder set who hatched the end of November.  This is a healthy group (we purchased the eggs to hatch from our folks at Myshire Farms and have been extremely happy with how well they have done!).  They are laying consistently and their eggs are hatching at a satisfactory rate.  We will maintain this group through the summer and will eventually replace them late summer/early fall.

We have a group of 38 in the grow-out area.  This is the first group we hatched from our current breeder set.  This hatch was somewhat disappointing but I freely admit it was because of mistakes we made, not because of any problems with our breeders.  

We separated these out yesterday and have 19 females who will be part of our laying program.  We expect to have a first egg within the next 2 weeks.  We also have 19 males who have been segregated and will be processed for meat.

We have 64 babies in the brooders.  

 

Later next week these will reach the magic 3-week mark and be moved out to a grow-out area.  Once they reach 6 weeks, they will also be segregated.  The females will be added to the layer group and the males will go to a separate hutch where they, too, will eventually be processed. 

We are now at a point where we can begin to offer live birds for sale.  At 3 weeks, a quail is ready to be out from under a heat source and can go to an outdoor cage as long as the ambient temperature is above 50 (not a problem around here!), and as long as they are protected from rain and wind. We can help you with suggestions on how to achieve this and for a fee Cletus will build you a hutch if he is available.  We have an idea at this point if they are males or females, but it is not 100% reliable.  These chicks are available for $4 each.  This will be for local pick-up only; while our licenses/permits allow us to ship them, we will not at this point. 

At 5 weeks the quail are feather-sexable, which means the feather pattern on the bird's chest clearly shows if it is male or female.  We are offering these quail for $5 each.  We are also offering the option of purchasing a breeder set of 5 females and 1 male for $25.  Quail begin laying around 8 weeks and within 1 week of a female laying, her eggs may be considered fertile if she is part of a breeder set.  This means within a few weeks of purchasing these you could begin to incubate your own eggs!

Our business is permitted to offer for sale 1000 birds per year who have been processed by us in a non-USDA inspected facility for meat.  Over the next few weeks, we will start processing.  We are excited about expanding our business to include this along with our quail eggs.  We will be bringing these to our local farmer's market fully processed and packaged for you to take home and cook.  We will also have some cooking tips if you need them (putting them in a brine for several hours makes a big difference!).

Step by step, our business is growing!