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The Challenge Of A Cold, Wet Spring

On April 20, 2013 in General by spope

The cold wet spring certainly has been a challenge.  Our pheasant breeders are in outdoor pens, and not only is egg production depressed from the conditions, but the eggs that are laid often are muddy.  Our egg production hit 24,000 eggs a day this week, and that is a lot of eggs to wash.

It’s rained nearly every day for the past few weeks (over 8 inches now in April) and Rock River is flooded.  Our first hatch of chicks will be 7 weeks old this upcoming Tuesday.  We haven’t even rotovated one single pen yet, the ground is saturated.  We’re not really sure what we are going to do, just hoping for a dry spell, so we can get pens set up.

The entire pen crew is here today (Saturday) pulling and pressure washing feeders and huts.  Once we get that dry stretch we have three rotovators ready to go from first light until dark.  The pen employees all know we will be rotovating non-stop until the job is done.  We now have 157 acres of pens, and the job of tilling those pens is time consuming.

Not only do we have the pheasants nearly ready to go to the pens, but we have a flock of 10,000+ French Redlegs that need to go to the pens in the upcoming weeks, and our first hatch of 6,000+ Hungarian partridge that need to go out too.

We got some posts pounded into the ground for the new Hungarian pen that we are constructing.  Once it quits raining and warms up, that pen will go up quickly.

It is such a dramatic shift to have such wet weather, after last year’s drought.



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