Can Quail Feed Your Family? Let's Do Nerdy Quail Math!

[Music] let's go let the animals out [Music] we're letting the baby chicks out know during the day but they're still not super motivated to come in the morning they like to stay in they'll come out if it starts to warm up [Music] go check on the quail [Music] these are the youngest ones that I have I'm actually going to be building them a new pen and starting today it's going to be our grow up pen for all of the coil that we're going to be raising I think everybody else is doing fine I love having the automatic water for the quail it makes doing their daily chores so fast a five gallon bucket of water lasts them almost a month [Music] [Music] these guys are always anxious to come out [Music] [Music] the guineas are already noisy they've actually become friends with the Ducks they share a feed bowl in the morning now [Music] [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome back to the homestead my project for today is going to be building a grow out pen for our quail I've started with just a couple quail last summer I've been breeding over the winter and I'm up to about I don't know 25 or so breeders that I'm gonna be keeping now and so today we're gonna get started building a grow out pen so as I start hatching more and more I have a place to grow them out now the nice thing about quail is they only take about 6 to 8 weeks to get to butcher age a couple weeks ago I showed you that we had our first batch that we hatched here that started laying eggs at just 6 weeks old which is just amazing so we're gonna be doing a lot of hatching and breeding and things over the next year and this pen or this cage that we're building today is going to be great for that so this cage is going to be housed indoors in one of our barns so I'm not going to build it to be weather resistant it's going to be completely indoors so the length of the cage is going to be 8 feet long it's gonna be 2 feet deep and the actual cage portion is only going to be a foot tall now the overall structure will be 5 feet tall but the cage part itself is only going to be a foot tall with quail you really want a short cage that's because if they get startled they jump straight up in the air and if you have a tall cage say a two foot tall cage they can actually jump straight up hit the top and break their neck and die or injure themselves or whatever so you really want a short cage quail are pretty short birds they stay on the ground for the most part and so a one-foot tall cage is perfect for them so that's what we're going to make today now today I'm working in the greenhouse it's pretty chilly outside today the high today is only about 40 but here in the greenhouse it's about 75 degrees perfect day this is if you even if you don't like to grow plants you should invest in a greenhouse just because it makes the best winter workshop you could ever ask for I do so much out here we're gonna get started I went to the lumberyard and I picked up a bunch of two-by-fours and I've ripped those in half into two by twos so we're going to be making this today out of two by twos let's get started [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right we have that first side done gives you an idea now of what size the cage will end up being we just need to make another one of these and then attach the two sides together now on this I'm going to be using 1/2 inch by half inch welded wire we have a big problem here in the Ozarks with snakes so I need to make sure that this will be snake proof in the summer so I'm using a 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch wire on the entire thing I have that ordered on Amazon I'm hoping the UPS guy is going to be here some time while I'm building this today because otherwise they can't finish it today but we're hoping to get it all done so I'm gonna get back to work [Music] [Music] alright guys have both sides built we're going to start connecting them together now now like most things that I do around here I don't really have a plan or anything written up of how I'm going to do it I'm just trying to figure it out as I go along I've gotten pretty good at that over time and so I'm pretty confident this is going to turn out good and solid and we'll get this into the barn and hopefully even get the coil moved in yet today [Music] [Applause] [Music] alright so I've attached some braces down at the bottom ran some boards all the way across now the wire will staple straight to this board but you see here on the ends I'm gonna have to put a board across here and at the top because the wire is going to staple to the very top as well so that's what I'm learning to do next and then I think we'll staple the wire on to the floor and that will build the doors well great news the UPS guy just showed up with my roll of wire and so I'm gonna get this cut I just got the frame done except for the doors so I'm going to go ahead and put the floor piece of the wire on now I'm going to cut this to eight feet and I'm gonna use my staple gun to attach it to the floor now my hope is that I won't need any support pieces going across but it I won't know that really until I get all of this wire on and just see how much give there is in it I'm hoping I don't have to because it'll make it easier for the droppings to fall through but at the end of the day we need it to be you know safe and sturdy for the quail as well so we'll see what it looks like after we get the wire attached [Music] all right so I have the floor wire all on I did end up putting some cross pieces three of them across to give it some more stability but I did decide not to staple the wire to those cross pieces they're just there to add some stability I figured if I don't staple it these are gonna get messed up pretty fast you know every few months I might have to change those out and it's kind of a pain to pull staples back out so I'm just gonna leave it it adds the stability I need and that way I can easily take these off and replace them if I need to once they start to get do you know more disgusting so the next thing is going to be building the doors but first I want to talk to you guys about why I chose to make this the size that I did all right are you guys ready for some nerdy quail math I know you guys liked my nerdy chicken math so let's do some nerdy quail man so this cage again is eight foot by two foot which is 16 square feet now for quail they recommend for your breeders you should have a 1 square foot per bird but for a grow out pen you can pull more birds per square foot so for this size they recommend 3 to 4 birds per square foot so this should hold anywhere between 48 and 64 quail and we're gonna be right kind of in the middle of that let me tell you how we got to that okay now our goal is to have 18 hands that will be laying eggs for us out of those 18 hands we're hoping to get 12 eggs per day which will give us 84 eggs that we can put in the incubator because you can save eggs for a week before they need to be incubated we're hoping out of those 84 eggs that we put into the incubator to have about a 70% hatch rate on those eggs and that seems to be about normal from the hatches that we've done so far so that would give us a total of 58 eggs that would hatch now assuming that we'll lose about 5% of those for just random reasons let's say we end up with 55 quail chicks that we can days in the breed in this pan so again this should hold 48 to 64 so our 55 is perfect now for our family when we eat quail we make six quail per meal for the four of us that seems to be about perfect along with side items so that means out of fifty-five quail that we raise we're gonna get nine meals worth of quail now because quail take about eight weeks to raise we can do this six times per year which would give us fifty four meals of quail which is just over one meal of quail per week which is about what we think we would like to consume so that's how we came up with this number it's a pretty easy math I hope that it all works out the way that that we're hoping but if not we'll build more pens and we'll be able to raise more but this I think is gonna be a perfect size for us alright time to get back to work on the cage the next thing I'm going to do is build doors I'm gonna build two doors on this cage it's so long that I really feel like I need two doors in order to be able to get in and out and catch all the quail that I'm gonna need so that's what I'm gonna do now I'm gonna build two doors right here on the front [Music] [Applause] [Music] well I've got both the doors on and I think that's about as far as I'm gonna get today the Sun is starting to go down and there's one thing about this type of greenhouse it might get nice and warm during the day but I get ready to see my breath now when that Sun Goes Down it cools down fast and it's getting cold I need to go in the house and get a fire started this is going to be great for the quail all I have left to do is put the rest of the wire on and then we can move it into the barn so watch for that on some upcoming videos you guys I hope you enjoyed this project today I hope that you will maybe give this this type of cage a try it seems to be something that's going to work out really well hey if you're enjoying our channel and you're not a subscriber yet now is the perfect time to hit the subscribe button before you leave don't forget to share this on all of your social media and don't forget to follow us on Instagram as well until next time you guys thanks for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 223,379

Rating: 4.9147797 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, quail farming, raising quail, raising quails, keeping quail, quail eggs, what to feed quail, jumbo coturnix, coturnix quail

Id: rgkTFHH_2To

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2019