Brooders

Record keeping is essential to making business decisions at MacFarlane Pheasants. In the brooder barns we record key information on a daily basis. There is a mortality sheet in each workroom. The workroom is a special room for sanitation right before the chick barn. Information recorded at the top of the mortality [...]

MacFarlane Pheasants, Inc. hatches over two million birds each year in our hatchery. That means we collect over three million eggs in order to get that many hatches! Obviously, we have our system down to a science. We use the Natureform I-14 machines to incubate our eggs. These machines must [...]

After the other night’s snow, I was reminded it’s not quite spring in Wisconsin! But we are preparing for our spring pheasant and partridge hatches ,because it is almost here!  Our first chicks will be available April 2017. We hatch 500,000 chicks a year so we need to prepare. We [...]

Heidi Welch is currently the Partridge Manager at MacFarlane Pheasants Inc., but she has played many other roles, on our farm, in the three years she has worked here. She started as the Assistant Manager for Hungarian Partridges at the beginning of the chick season in 2014. When that season [...]

Water is needed for all of the organic processes necessary for life. It regulates body temperature, digestion, and elimination of waste. Game birds consume at least twice as much water as feed and it is a big responsibility at MacFarlane Pheasants to keep our water clean and flowing. It is [...]

Is an alarm system needed on our pheasant farm? The answer is yes, if we want to sleep at night! Having consistent temperatures is crucial to the success of raising our chicks. The most important use of an alarm system is to detect temperatures that get outside of our desired range. [...]

Yep, you heard it right! We have 21 brooder rooms in our Brooder Department. We spend quite a bit of time keeping our rooms in perfect condition. The cleaning and sanitizing process takes place 3, 4, or even 5 days a week and each area can take several hours to [...]

MacFarlane Pheasants has 9 barns on our Janesville, Wisconsin farm and 2 barns in Milton, Wisconsin. The barns range in size from roughly 4,000 square feet to 15,000 square feet. These barns are obviously an enormous asset and we have to be sure they are cared for accordingly. About 500,000 [...]

MacFarlane Pheasants, Inc. didn’t get to be so successful without a plan. We began by developing core values, followed by a mission for our business and careful communication with every employee on the farm. We believe our plan can effectively help any business owner get on the right track toward [...]

The Hungarian partridge is also known as a gray partridge, an English partridge, or simply called a "Hun". The Hun is a small bird with a short neck and tail and tends to be a little skittish, but quite beautiful. The juvenile Huns are pale brown with some darker streaks. [...]

You might wonder how we remember what we did last year that worked so well in the brooder barn or how to best take care of the Winter White Pheasant or the Hungarian Partridge. We keep track of details in our employee manuals. These topics and just about every other [...]

One of the more exciting moments on our farm is when baby chicks begin to hatch. However, there are many steps to complete in the brooder barns before hatching begins, to prepare for the 500,000 chicks we hatch each year. Planning Ahead Set up a master schedule of when we [...]

French Partridges are a little smaller than a pigeon, fast and exciting to hunt, and delicious to eat. They can also be finicky to raise. MacFarlane Pheasants brings in French Partridge eggs from France and hatches them in our hatchery. This past year alone we had three hatches with 12,000 chicks [...]

At MacFarlane Farms we believe the best way to have strong healthy birds is to start out with the best brooder barn you can set up. We can't emphasize enough how important it is that the structure you are using is draft -free, clean and that it has the appropriate [...]

Good quality water – outside or in the barns – keeps your pheasants and other gamebirds  healthy. At MacFarlane Pheasant we use the water lines to deliver probiotics or vitamins, but the very thing that makes them healthier, can also linger in the lines and form a build-up that can [...]

We get asked about bedding for the birds in the brooder barn, as well as for the mature birds, before they go outside. For the brooder barn, where chicks stay for about three weeks, we recommend larger dried pine chips. We've found the chips are best, shavings are too small [...]

Air movement in the barns plays an important role in keeping game birds healthy. When the temperature starts to change in the spring and the fall, we have to adjust so the birds can get acclimated enough to go outside without problems. Being able to do this involves getting the [...]

Maintaining equipment at a farm the size of MacFarlane Pheasants is a job that requires attention. If you give it attention, then your equipment will work through its expected lifetime. If you forget, things break down and you have to spend even more time getting them back to working order. [...]

Last year, Brian Klein and Fairah Ramsey took over the MacFarlane Pheasants French Redleg partridge brooding program. Notoriously finicky, something—or a lot of somethings—had to change about how we had raised the birds, which have always had a higher mortality than our other gamebirds. “I just went into it not [...]

Years ago, we found ourselves in a situation of needing more brooder barn space, and lucky for us we were able to rent one within a mile of the main farm. Well, we recently were told the barn had been sold, and not only that, it was going to be [...]