Our crews are busy selecting and placing the 30,000 bird pheasant breeder flocks. Our breeder pens were completely emptied of birds at the end of the 2010 breeding season and all the pens were tilled and planted. We think it’s vitally important to completely depopulate the breeder farm and have it sit idle for a few months.
We have had several significant snowfalls in the past two weeks, and our crew put the pen roofs down. Some of the pens don’t have breeders in them yet – and so the crew has left the netting “down”. You can see the pens that are still down – as there is snowfall accumulation on those pens.
You can see just the corner of one of our two 50′ X 300′ breeder barns at the far left of the attached picture. Both of those barns already are filled with breeders – and lighting has already been initiated. We’ll start getting eggs by the third week of January from the hens in those barns.
For the outside pens, lighting will commence in February (we use a gentler step-up lighting program) and we’ll start getting eggs outside right around the 1st of March. Hopefully the snow will be gone by then.
Hope all of you have a happy New Year!!!
