Pheasant.com Blog

We started raising Red-Legged Partridges in 2009. Our owner Bill MacFarlane had a customer request for these partridges and that started the ball rolling. Since the Red-Legged Partridge has been raised at game farms in France and Italy for centuries, we began exploring how to import eggs. We started importing eggs from France and became the only commercial producer of Red-Legged Partridges in the United States. Read More »

MacFarlane Pheasants Inc. raises nearly two million chicks each year. We produce a wide range of chicks, including Hungarian Partridges, Red Leg Partridges, Kansas Ringneck, Manchurian Redneck Cross, Melanistic Mutants, Chinese Rednecks, the Extra Large Ringneck, and our White Meat Pheasants. Many of our chicks stay on the farm and are raised to maturity by the brooder department, but many other day-old chicks are shipped to our customers. Our hatchery employees pride themselves on providing high quality chicks through meticulous care of our eggs and facility. There are consistent guidelines in place for cleanliness and efficacy at the hatchery. The policies guarantee that healthy chicks are shipped to customers on time and in good health. We sanitize the entire hatchery weekly. Culture plates from each hatcher are incubated to check for bacteria. Since we do not vaccinate our chicks, it is of utmost importance that the chicks are not exposed to bacteria or diseases before they start their lives! Read More »

Hatching pheasant eggs requires an incubation time of 23-25 days. The incubation time is affected by temperature, genetics, and management; these factors are considered the most important part of hatching in our hatchery department. There are two different processes to hatch poultry eggs – single-stage and multi-stage incubation. We use multi-stage incubation at MacFarlane, but both processes are effective. Read More »

Troy Cisewski, our Production Manager, oversees the three MacFarlane Pheasants’ farms in Missouri. They are all located within a 30-minute driving distance of each other. The primary purpose for having the Missouri farms is biosecurity. Multiple egg sources protect us if a disease occurs and other farms would need to be quarantined. Another safety measure we employ at the Missouri sites is to have designated employees at each location to eliminate cross-traffic contamination. The Missouri sites also free pen space in Janesville for our famous flight birds. Read More »

MacFarlane Pheasants raises breeder hens in Missouri at three sites. Troy Cisewski, our Director of Production, is responsible for overseeing the three sites we have there. They are all located within a 30-minute driving distance of each other, and there are four production barns at each site. The Missouri breeder barns offer an added level of security to our egg production, in case we would ever have a bio-security concern at our Wisconsin facility. Troy travels between Wisconsin and Missouri and has daily contact with the Missouri farms when he is in Wisconsin. Read More »

It is essential to order your chicks for spring and summer delivery soon to be sure that you get them for the 2022 season. Early ordering also makes it possible to get the specific breed and sex you want. Read More »

MacFarlane Pheasants wants to thank all of our customers who purchased chicks during the 2020 chick season. We hatched 1.9 million chicks this year and shipped 1.2 million along with 101,000 eggs. Read More »

Recently I promised our readers that I would share a baked custard recipe made with MacFarlane Pheasant’s pheasant eggs. I decided to use a recipe I learned from my mother many years ago. Read More »