That plump, meaty pheasant breast on your dinner plate at home or at the restaurant actually came from a white pheasant. No, not an albino, but a pheasant with no pigment in its feathers – a genetic variation.
MacFarlane has been raising and selling meat birds for years, and we’ve honed in on that genetic variation that creates a white bird. As you might expect, we started out slowly since a white pheasant is one in a million. Now we raise them on three farms in Southern Wisconsin. They get their own facilities because they are raised a bit differently and because keeping the meat stock and the game stock apart lessens the chance of disease.
We recognized the benefits of a white pheasant right away. When you pluck the feathers off of a regular ringneck, there can be a dot in the meat and it remains there when the meat is cooked. It has no taste, but restaurateurs thought some diners might be put off by the dots of color.
We sell dressed pheasants and pheasant food products at our store on Highway 51 in Janesville, but the majority of the meat birds is sold through distributors to restaurants and retail locations. There are a lot of restaurants that appreciate the natural way we raise the birds.
On one of our websites, www.pheasantfordinner.com, there’s great information about cooking with pheasant, as well as a list of some restaurants that have it on the menu. Our list of restaurants is truly no indication of all of the restaurants that serve our pheasants. We are always pleasantly surprised when we arrive at a restaurant only to find MacFarlane pheasant on the menu. We’d love to be able to list all of the restaurants where you can find our pheasant, but, due to confidentiality, some of our distributors retain their own customer list.
So if you see pheasant on a menu somewhere, do us a favor and take a picture of the menu with the pheasant selection listed and e-mail it to [email protected] and we’ll add it to our restaurant list. If you don’t have your cell phone handy for a picture, just drop us a note and let us know where you found it. And, if you happen to have a restaurant that serves our pheasant, we’d love to list your information, so please drop us a line.
The meat segment of our business continues to grow and we’re proud of being able to produce a fast-growing meaty bird as well as our great game birds.
