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Middle of the Chick Season

On June 5, 2011 in General by spope

We have reached the halfway point of hatching chicks - sales are good and after declining chick sales for the past two years, it's good to see our sales are going to be up from last year. Shipping by mail had become a challenge, but we've made some key changes to how we are handling postal shipments and the results have been tremendous. We are looking forward to expanding our marketing of retail chicks that will be shipped by the U.S. Postal Service.

Our pen crew has got past the tricky part of the moving out process for pheasants (moving out 6 week old pheasants in April into pens with virtually no cover is a skill) and now with good cover growing in all the pens, their job should be come less stressful. We have bumped up the protein level in the feed for the birds that are moved out early in the season to 22%. I think this is a good move, and will hopefully address some of the issues we've had with our earliest birds into the pens the past few years.

Shipping season for mature pheasants is just around the corner, and again - like the chick market, sales are up from last year. With us knowing already we'll be hauling more adult pheasants than before, we have purchased two new trucks to pull our trailers. We've bought a new Kenworth truck and a new Freightliner truck too. Ironically both trucks have the same Cummins engine in them. We had not bought any new big trucks for hauling in a few years, and we had to update or risk serious breakdowns.

In the midst of being relating all this good news, the price of feed hasn't come down a bit - and LP (propane) and gasoline and diesel continue to be at prices well above where they were at a year ago. We haven't passed on a half of our cost increases, and our hope is just to hold on and get through it. Chris and Brad strongly advocated locking in feed - and following their advice we booked about 40% of the years usage at prices that are $20 below today's spot market. That decision has certainly helped ease the blow of the inflated prices.

Ethanol certainly has reduced the price of gasoline (from where gasoline prices would be at without ethanol) but I hope everyone is clear that ethanol has just shifted the expense to food and to pheasants too!

I got the program and agenda nearly completed for our Biannual International Pheasant Management Seminar and I am very optimistic that the event will be well attended. We also are in the final stages of completing our summer issue of our farm's newsletter and hopefully that will be mailed out (and put onto our farm's webpage, within the next week.



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