Pheasant: The Other, Other White Meat

Pheasant meat has long been known for its health benefits, and MacFarlane Pheasants has had a long, healthy business in it. But that doesn’t mean we’re just going to sit around, resting on our laurels. We’re eager to expand our already large pheasant meat business.

As it stands, MacFarlane Pheasants pheasant meat and meat products are distributed nationally. You can also find our whole pheasants in Whole Foods (get it?) across the country. Of course, the full range of our products are available online, and then there’s our retail store in our hometown of Janesville, Wisc. There are numerous ways to find our products, wherever you might be, along with numerous products. Whether it’s tailgaiting or fine dining, pheasant is always appropriate.

In some ways, the pheasant meat business has a natural advantage to raising our hunt birds. The variety of pheasant used for meat are the White Pheasants which we grow year-round. While the numbers may be much lower—we raise around 180,000 white pheasants every year, while our gamebirds are around 1.5 million, with a million of those being day-old chicks—the demand is steady. When the season ends in the gamebird sector, there’s still work to be done with the white pheasants.

But there are some challenges. Part of the job of raising birds for meat involves genetic selection for future generations of birds—a vital role for our future in the meat industry, which has grown consistently every year. Another difference is our staff’s key role in the artificial insemination of the birds. For birds destined for our tasty food products, we take matters into our own hands versus letting nature take its course with the gamebirds. This allows us to make sure inbreeding does not occur.

The biggest obstacle we have now in expanding our business is space. More barns are needed to house the additional birds. We’re actively pursuing both the land as well as planning out the barns that they’ll be housed in. This year is set to be the largest meat-producing year in our company’s history, but our sights are set on the future and where we’re headed to next.