On Raising One's Own Meat (and Poultry for Eggs), With Some Discussion of the Attendant Pleasures and Dilemmas

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We had a nor'easter hit us late this past week, and brought a little taste of Real Winter (TM) with it. Temperatures around us hit -16 to -18C, with wind chill (the "feels like") dipping into the -20s (for Americans, the former translates to "almost 0 F," and the latter "0 and below"). 

 

So that was a good test for our newly -revamped and -insulated quail shed. I filled some seams around the door frames with expanding foam, put a draft blocker along the top of the doors where there was a relatively wide gap, and some weather stripping along the edges of the doors where they met each other and the door frame. With a local ambient temperature of -14C according to the thermometer on our deck, the temperature inside our quail cage was just -1 at the level of the top row of cages. Upon further investigation, there was about a 4-5 degree gradient from the top row of cages to the bottom, so I'll probably look around for a little USB fan or something similarly low-powered to push the air around and mitigate that. 

Overall, though, I'll call it a success. Only a couple of waterers on the lower tier froze up, and that was easily fixed by dunking them into a bucket of warm tap water for a few moments. That thaws them enough to twist off the base and knock out the ice, and then I refill them with warm water. The plan going forward is to have a gravity-fed watering system with an insulated bucket, and siphon hoses running to actual clip-on waterers on the front of the cages, which would be protected by the kind of heating wire used to keep plumbing from freezing in cold climates. We have all the fixin's at present except the hose, because the tees that go between the hose and the waterer require a size of flexible tubing that we can't buy locally. Grr. 

 

So yeah, it's on order and hopefully will get here in time to be of some use during the winter. The bucket will have an aquarium heater in it, and despite the insulation will probably lend a little bit of heat to the interior. At present the only source of BTUs is the quails' own body heat, and the LED panels we use to provide supplemental lighting. Those don't throw a lot of heat, by design, so it's mostly the quail themselves. 

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I have a bit of time this morning without formal work on my hands, so I'll drop a brief update here. 

 

A few weeks back, my GF spotted a listing online from someone looking to rehome a whole flock of quail. In keeping with my comments above about being unprepared for the realities of this lifestyle, they'd been thinking in terms of a fresh-egg supply, but hadn't reckoned on the smell, cleaning, or birds' rather brutal social interactions. They also weren't getting any eggs, so they decided it was probably time to just abandon the idea. 

So of course we cheerfully said, "Yes, thank you very much, we'll happily take a flock of already-adult quail off your hands!" I met them a day later and took delivery of the flock, along with two convertible waterer/feeders (turn the base one way up and it's a waterer, other way up and it's a feeder, with the same bottle holding either food or water as needed), and a sack of feed. The sack of feed explained why they hadn't been getting eggs; it was actually chicken grower pellets (??). Those are relatively large, the same size as our rabbits' alfalfa pellets, so I'm actually surprised the poor little birds could choke them down. In any case, it wouldn't have given them enough protein (we feed a turkey/game bird starter, in crumbs, with supplemental calcium). 

 

They told me, visibly still horrified, that they'd had to remove a couple of males from the flock for being far too aggressive (that brutality thing I'd spoken of). It happens when you have surplus males, which is why harvesting them is so important, but these kids weren't at all ready to face that. So they... (I cringed at this part)... "had to release them into the wild." It's not that a couple of males will establish a feral population and compete with local wildlife, but it's not exactly humane for the birds. Aye, well. They're a variety we didn't already have, so my GF was delighted to get them, and they're laying with metronomic regularity now that they're getting proper food and supplemental lighting. 

Since we got our new incubator it's also seen steady use. My GF hatched out a batch 6 weeks ago, which are now mature and beginning to lay, and she's used those to flesh out the flocks we have out in our shed. She'd reloaded the incubator shortly after those ones had hatched, and that second hatching is 2-3 weeks old, so about halfway to maturity (maybe chickadee size?), and now there's a third batch incubating. 

I was worried that this was probably not a good time of year to be filling out our flocks like this, and increasing our number of beaks to feed (so to speak), but it seems to be working out. We sold one of our flocks a couple of weeks ago, just in time to move some of the juveniles out. This morning we sold a (sexed) flock of 10 that had just hit maturity and begun to lay, as well as 25 of our 29 younger hatchlings (unsexed), to the same buyer. On Monday, a third buyer will be coming here to buy a flock of 6 or 7 (one male to 5-6 females is optimal). 

So that'll bring a few hundred $$ into the coffers, which is very welcome right now. Freelancing pretty predictably peters out for the year around mid-December and doesn't start to pick up again until the 2nd week of January, so income from other sources takes on rather more importance. 

We have 14 rabbits in one cage that are well overdue for harvest, and 7 in another cage that are ready now (not to mention a number of young roosters from our second hatch back in the summertime), but we've been hobbled by lack of freezer space. I believe I mentioned that our largest freezer crapped out on us, back in the summer; we managed to rearrange things into our other three freezers, but are still space-constrained (and it didn't help that our big French-door fridge, with its trunk-sized freezer compartment, also died a few weeks ago). 

 

We'd already decided that one day we wanted to have a full-sized freezerless fridge and a full-sized upright freezer to go side by side in the kitchen, so it's just going to happen a little more quickly than we'd originally envisioned. As it happened, through a stroke of luck, we were gifted the freezerless fridge (one of my stepdaughters was the one who made that connection for us). We lost some time trying to buy a used one privately (I'm used to being ghosted by potential buyers, but potential sellers? C'mon, people!), and finally ended up getting one at a promotional price from Home Depot. That'll be delivered on Tuesday, and then I'll finally be able to get the rest of those rabbits harvested. Right now they're eating us out of house and home, so it'll be a relief to return the favor. 

The meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid is no substitute for a proper meat grinder, but I've found I can get through a 5-lb bag of partially-thawed, boneless rabbit in about an hour from start to finish. That's the (relatively quick) coarse first grind, the (slower) fine second grind, and then cleaning up the bits afterwards. Then I package the meat in 1-lb or 500g lots (I really need to just pick one) in Ziplocs, and once the portions are frozen I pack a few at a time into vacuum bags for longer-term storage. We have plenty of rabbit pieces in the freezer already, and a perfectly adequate number of whole rabbits, but my GF really appreciates having the ground rabbit on hand for all the things she used to make with ground beef.