Your flock size

[West ky tim]

Hello all. I have a question for you that i've been pondering. Of the quail folks here, how many of you are really at a true "production" level? is that for egg sales, or meat? if egg, whats your flock size, 100?500? meat bird?? how many dozen eggs do you sell?

thx

 

[Darkestcon]

I will throw out what we WERE at and what we are now getting back to. We had to start over due to a 3 month break because of some life things we had occur. I dont know if this is what you would consider "production level". Our projection is that the numbers below will be what we are at in 2 months. It is fairly accurate as these are the numbers from our previous operation and all customers are waiting for us to get back up to resume business.

:


120 quail 30 male 90 female, and growing. we averaged close to 2700 eggs a month. We sold over 150 dozen a month to restaurants. and private buyers. We use a middleman for various reasons. We have a few deals for meat birds and will be ramping up the system for meat as our line of birds are a meat/egg line. We sold eggs at 1.50 - 2.00 a dozen depending on who we were selling to (middle man or private person). Our live birds sell for 3$ a bird live weight to the shops for meat.

To be honest we are just starting up our operation again and will be back up to full speed shortly with plans to expand rapidly. The meat shops, and restaurants are only part of who we sold to. we sold baby chicks at 1 dollar each to a regular buyer for feed purposes. and they buy a few hundred a month. at a day or 2 old. We also sold to hunters, and dog owners for training and food. all in all we got close to 1100 a month. By we i mean my 12 year old whose operation this is. We simply guide her. She was doing it for around 6 months before we stopped and now are resuming.

 

[West ky tim]

Yes, If your producing some volume of eggs and meat that is being sold regularly, I'd really like to hear about it. It'll all help me make better choices in my plan!

Anyone else????

 

[Darkestcon]

Depends on the information you are looking for. We sell eggs meat and chicks. We sell eggs to a produce store as they have their own certs so we need none. We sell our meat to butcher shops on a repeating order. We do this because they have certs and we dont. In this way we need none. We sell chicks to a few reptile shops for snake food. Hunters for training. people for dog food. A bit of everything. There are a lot of avenues to persue. Some we will stick with as we get larger we may drop a few outlets just because time/money the value may not be there. At a later point in time we will go for all our certs but currently we do this out of a Shed in our back yard on around a 1/4 acre. We have plans to move to a larger building and property but thats down the road. When my daughter decided she would take this over from me she dropped some serious coin for a 12 year old on her setup. she has 2500 in commercial grade pens and incubator. Getting started was fairly simple we literally walked in to every place we thought might be interested and even offered to bring some sample product by. For the meat side of things we the first butcher shop is the last one we talked to for now. The order is large enough that we felt we needed to just do the one place for a bit to get down the system of producing a large number of birds for delivery every month at adult age.

if there is some info you specifically are looking for let me know

 

[JiminyChristmas]

Darkestcon, are you in the US? You're operation is intriguing. Does the butcher shop take your birds live? And how do you prepare the eggs for sale to the commercial markets?

 

[Darkestcon]

Darkestcon, are you in the US? You're operation is intriguing. Does the butcher shop take your birds live? And how do you prepare the eggs for sale to the commercial markets?

Yes im in the US. Im in Oregon.

The butcher buys our birds live. I dont have licensing to butcher my own birds and wont attempt it out of my shed no matter how nice my shed is. So a way around this is that the butcher shop having a license can buy live animals (no license required) and butcher themselves. In this way all is legal.

As for Eggs I dont have to package them either. I do use cartons the bulk size cartons for eggs and bring them to a local produce store who has a dealers license. Im not sure about every state but in oregon quail eggs dont count for sales since its a game bird no grading is required etc. I cant be sure if the produce store washes etc (im betting they do something). In oregon Egg producers selling only ungraded eggs to a dealer are exempt from licensing same with selling to private people and farmers market.