Eggs

We’ve got a month or two left of our international shipping window for chicks and eggs. Space has to be booked with the airlines three to four weeks in advance to guarantee room and to make airlines aware we are shipping live cargo. Live cargo – eggs or chicks – [...]

A pheasant farm looks before it leaps. At MacFarlane Pheasants, our season’s full-grown birds hopefully are sold before they’re even a twinkle in their mother hens’ eyes. And like Match.com, we arrange the meeting—the senior prom, if you will—for a large variety of pheasant bloodlines based on what you the [...]

The fact that egg production begins in spring is not a coincidence. This instinctive process is in response to the longer daylight hours. As a farm that hatches more than 1.5 million chicks, we have put an enormous amount of time and energy into finding successful ways to increase egg production. [...]

Hatching pheasant eggs is a very delicate process, especially when you consider the quantity that our farm handles on a regular basis. Our Hatchery Building is sectioned off according to stages. Not only do we hatch our pheasants here, but we also provide eggs for sale. Eggs take anywhere from 23 [...]

Here at MacFarlane Pheasants we attempt to make our jobs as streamlined, cost effective, and often simple as possible when dealing with our birds. This means treating each kind of bird different and being willing to employ different processes for raising pheasants when necessary. Specifically, some birds are easier to [...]

A Process For Knowing Where to Spend My Management Time Our computer technology today provides wonderful opportunities to collect, manipulate, and process data including financial analysis data.  Sure, it gives a manager lots of numbers, but what do they mean in terms of where to spend my creative management time [...]

It is agreed among poultry embryologists that the effect of humidity levels during incubation is much less drastic than that of temperature levels. The humidity level needed to have a large effect on the embryo during incubation is 5-6± %. This does not minimize the importance of humidity during incubation [...]

Proper egg collection and sanitation procedures are key components of early chick health. Cleaning eggs in an effective manner reduces the prevalence of diseases such as E-coli and yolk sac infection in day old chicks. The egg begins to cool as soon as laid. The cooling process pulls any contamination [...]

Large hatcheries have realized for a long time that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the incubator have important effects on freshly set eggs. The standard belief is that bird embryos just beginning to develop need a higher CO2 level to get a better start. What the exact reason and mechanism behind this [...]

Presented by: Vern L. Christensen Department of Poultry Science North Carolina State University See full PowerPoint presentation here The final destination of the properly managed fertilized pheasant egg is the incubator within the hatchery.  Modern-day hatcheries generally have egg-setting capacities of thousands of eggs.  Fertilized pheasant eggs have a 24-day developmental period [...]