Farm Management

Nothing is sure but death and taxes . . . and that costs continue to go up when raising Gamebirds. Although I use pheasants as the focus of this article, the points made are just as true for partridges and quail. It takes about 18 lbs. of feed to raise [...]

A select group of our customers want pheasants that have been raised without peepers. The birds are flightier, and western U.S. hunters love how wild they act. There are some difficulties in raising these pheasants, and it makes the birds more expensive, but it’s doable. Here’s how we raise 20,000 [...]

When you’re running the largest pheasant farm in the U.S., everybody wants a piece—including some of nature’s most wily predators. At MacFarlane Pheasants, raising pheasants also includes protecting them from unwanted visitors, and in our home in Janesville, Wisc., we’ve gotten to know all the local troublemakers. The below animals [...]

Pheasant feed, just like sausages, come a wide range of qualities, and like many things in life, you get what you pay for. But a good feed’s importance can’t be overemphasized: it directly contributes to our birds’ performance in the hunt. That’s why MacFarlane Pheasants, America’s largest pheasant farm, goes [...]

After three weeks in the “A” room and four weeks in the “B” room, the former MacFarlane Pheasant chicks are now juveniles and ready to be transferred to outdoor pens. There’s no gentle transition; the birds are loaded into crates and plopped into the outdoor pens. But before we do [...]

Let’s be honest, the only rat we want to ever want to see on a farm is named Templeton and is friends with a pig named Wilbur. Beyond that, the rat does not have a very welcomed presence, let alone on a pheasant farm. For being relatively small, they are [...]

We’ve talked recently about the huts we use to keep our birds outside as well as how we transition birds in the barns, so let’s talk about moving birds from the barns to the outdoors. Transitioning birds to be outside can be tricky due to the many factors that need [...]

Our March seminar was attended by two representatives from the Shanghai Hongyan Pheasant Farm. One of the two attendees, Miss Yuan then invited us to visit their farm in China. This past week my wife Dori and I flew to Shanghai and spent several days visiting Miss Yuan’s farm. Dori [...]

Back in May we experienced an unprecedented event in my tenure here, a break-in to our flight pens. Something was getting into our pens and randomly killing young pheasants. The first two nights an average of 200 birds were killed. We scratched our heads trying to figure out what to [...]

The main ingredients in feed are corn and soybean meal, thus the price of feed is directly related to the commodity markets. Higher markets mean higher feed prices. Lower markets translate into lower feed prices. These markets can be volatile and unpredictable at best. For this reason, contracting feed (locking in a price for [...]

I’d like to share some of our thoughts and experiences with using different protein levels of feed for our pheasants.  40 years ago, we used three feeds – 30% protein pre-starter for chicks from day old up to  3 weeks, 26% protein starter til the birds reached 6 weeks and [...]

There are lots of medications approved for “major species” of animals like chickens or turkeys or ducks.  There is much negative publicity about the use of drugs in treating animal disease – but in reality most farmers are very conservative about using drugs to treat their animals. At our farm, [...]

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 [...]

Trudy DeRemer, MacFarlane Pheasants, Inc Center Farm Manager, brought these adorable goats to the Center Farm on May 18, 2019. They were born on April 1, 2019. Trudy got these two Nubian bucklings from her friends at Raspberry Hill Farm in Monroe, WI and brought them to MacFarlane Pheasants to [...]

This past December we experienced a blizzard that opened our eyes further, on the possible damage that a flight pen can experience. I feel obligated to pass along some tips that may help you “survive” a winter storm. Check forecasts daily. We knew this storm was coming days before it [...]

Do not hesitate to call any of us here at MacFarlane Pheasants, Inc.; part of our everyday job is making sure our customers are satisfied. It is safe to say that all captive game bird flocks are exposed to one or more species of Mycoplasma. Mycoplasma are bacteria-like organisms that [...]

Proper diet and nutrition are key components of rearing a quality bird. They can affect everything from mortality to flight ability. Just like people, game birds need a balanced diet to grow, live, and survive; for this reason, a complete feed is the best option to feed game birds. A [...]

I’ve got an issue that, at times, really frustrates me.  But I hesitate to write about it because it sounds whiny.  But in today’s game bird market conditions – the issue is confronting me so often – I’m writing about it – here goes. We make it so easy for [...]