Farm Management

MacFarlane Pheasants has over 150 acres of netted covered pens. When you are dealing with this much land, you can expect to have a few furry or feathered visitors! Keeping [...]

We are constantly rotating birds out of barns, and chicks into those barns to then be transitioned to the outdoors. Everything has to be cleaned, washed, dried, disinfected and then [...]

We’re always looking for ways to do our jobs more efficiently on the pheasant farm and maintain the quality of the environment for our birds. It’s not that we shy [...]

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 [...]

Trucking game birds around the country is a balancing act. To get healthy birds across hundreds and hundreds of miles requires attention to detail, as well as attention to weather [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

After the last bird is out of the barns, we have to clean. It’s important because it makes sure bacteria doesn’t spring up. Here’s how we do it. Once the [...]

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 [...]

When it comes to building a better mousetrap, MacFarlane Pheasants is still looking, just like we’re always searching for ways to make our job easier. That’s the reason behind the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]