Expansion

In the last few years, 2012 and 2013, MacFarlane Pheasant’s has gone through a lot of changes. As this year is beginning to come to a close, I thought I’d share some of them with you.

Hun Expansion
In the fall of 2012 our supplier decided to retire so we made the decision to produce the birds in-house for the next year. Huns require special facilities that we then had to add in late winter/early spring 2013, sometimes barely finishing a building before the birds were moved in. In addition to new barns we also needed new pens, which were placed in our new center farm. Ryan George and Brian Check had a huge hand in making this happen; Ryan coordinated the building and Brian coordinated the pens.

New Pheasant Pen
After we finished the new Hun pen, we made new pheasant pens as well. Brian Check also designed this pen, which has a much larger and longer design than what we were accustomed to. These were finished and had birds in them by early summer. (see 10/28 post for more)

Hen Barn Additions
We recently expanded our Hen barn in the fall of 2012. The Hen barn houses our breeding program for the white pheasants as well as all the hatchling eggs that become our food product pheasants. This recent expansion is great, but we plan to do more. The newest expansion will nearly double our breeding capacity and we expect it to be completed in December 2013.

Hen Barn Expansion Starting on the side of the Present Hen Barn

People
With all our additions and opportunities to grow, the success of our future will depend on our human resources. In these years of expansion we’ve been fortunate to hire very talent people and hope to continue that trend in our future recruitment. The ingenuity and development of our employees will help us to stay ahead of the curve as our farm continues to grow.

Our growth and the new experiences we’ve had from our changes have been wonderful, but challenging. We’ve learned to work and look through a different scope for the farm. What was once a stretch or seemingly out of reach has now become “business as usual”. We’ve seen the volume of birds increase as well as the resources we use to care for and transport our birds. We look forward to the challenges and growth potential of the coming years.
(Information from Brad Lillie)