How Many Quail Do I need to Keep For Eating & Breeding

today I'm mark from self-sufficiently and I'm down the back in the quail pen today I know it's been a while since I've produced a quail video and some of you have been trolling me in the comments section of other videos saying things like quail question mark when's your next quail video mark and I understand that plenty of you are subscribed to the channel for the coil videos only but can I just say that a lot of my gardening videos and other videos relate back to quail anyway because I use the quail manure and those type of things and even the eggs sometimes in the compost piles and into the garden beds for compost and fertilizer so you know watch those gardening videos because I mentioned quail all the time one of the questions I got the other day from one of you guys was how many quail do I need in order to sustain my family and you know have a meal or so a week of quail if you're keeping them for meat and that's a very good question and it's not something that I've really covered before so without any further ado let's just get stuck into it all right first of all this pen that I'm sitting in here can hold probably around about a hundred quail if we wanted to at the moment we've got about 12 Birds a couple of miles and the rest females let's not get too complicated in this video I've done plenty of other videos on drinkers and feeders and breeding quail those things you can find out through my other videos or of course you can ask questions down below if you're interested in keeping quails just for the eggs like you would keep chickens for eggs well then at the end of this video I'll talk a little bit about keeping quiet just for eggs let's establish a few facts firstly a female quail usually lays one egg a day also when it comes to eating quail you might think they're a small bird but generally if you're talking about meat you can count on one bird per person I know that doesn't sound like much but quail meat in itself is higher in protein than chicken and there are more it's a more dense meat therefore you don't eat as much of it because when you were eating quail you tend to get full quicker personally I'll only eat one quail in a sitting I won't eat any more than that I won't feel like eating any more than that that's for sure so if I can work off that then we can establish how many people quail can feed you can usually collect eggs over a 10 day period before you incubate them all at once but in this example we'll collect them over a seven day period to make it a nice round number of one week hatching out of quail takes around 16 to 18 days so you can say just under three weeks so working off those figures let's see if we can establish how much produce we can make out of a certain number of quail when breeding quail will usually work off a ratio of five females to one male but let's say that male isn't doing a great job I would say we should add another male to that and make it 2 miles per 5 females that ratio is usually fairly good the males might quibble occasionally but if it's in a large pen like this it's not going to matter they'll be able to get out of each other's way but then you'll know for sure that at least those five females are getting serviced so let's say five females and two males let's work with that and see how much food that can produce so let's say those five females lay one egg a day that's five eggs a day seven days a week so we're going to collect those eggs after the seven days seven by five is 35 eggs and we're going to collect them and incubate them but let's say let's use a conservative number out of those 35 eggs ten of them which is quite possible no good they might be broken infertile dirty and no good for incubation so let's get rid of those ten and take it down to 25 eggs in that seven period so we're now going to incubate those 25 eggs when you incubate eggs it's not often that every egg that you put in the incubator turns in to be a live check most of the time you will lose a percentage and the amount of eggs that do hatch out successfully is called a hatch rate a good hatch rate generally is between 62 you would say a hundred percent anything under is a little ordinary but you can work with it and it happens but let's work off a hatch rate blower to be more conservative at around 60% so let's say 60% of those 25 eggs actually hatched out and a hatch rate of 60% you're looking at 15 chicks out of the 25 eggs actually hatching out and making it to the brooder so now you're brooding 15 chicks and that's only after 18 days or just under three weeks of incubation you've got fifteen live chicks out of those 15 live chicks you would expect to lose a few of them so let's say you lose three of those fifteen that leaves you with twelve checks out of the fifteen so you can work with the twelve chicks you raise those twelve chicks it usually takes between six to nine weeks before quail chicks turn into an adult it's around the six to nine week mark usually the nine week mark where they're at their prime and ready to be eaten for a family of four twelve adult quail means three quail eggs so three separate meals having one quallege around the dinner table therefore if you add the incubation time on to the growing time you're looking at say three give or take a week you're looking at three weeks or so for the incubation stage and another nine weeks for the growing stage before they're processed all up you're looking at twelve weeks to get those 12 adult quail to that stage in essence five female claws plus two miles so that's seven Birds altogether just seven Birds could provide a family of four a meal of quail once a month for three months and that's really just a conservative figure so if five female quails can give a family of four one meal a month you can multiply that and say ten quail will give a family of four two mils a month and twenty quail would give a family of four a meal of quail once a week and within this estimate I'm also allowing for the breeder to be able to refresh their stock so not all of those quail that you produce will go on the dinner plate some of them will be there just to refresh your stock once a year or so so that you can keep refreshing that stock over every twelve to two years so that they keep producing well because remember quail don't live that long usually around two to three years and then your breeding stock will stop producing and also start deteriorating or dying off now if you're going to keep quiet just for the egg production which is a pretty good plan quail eggs to me are a little stronger than chicken eggs and I like them as a cocktail or in Asian cooking have the quail egg for a snack or something like that pickled quail eggs are nice but I'm not a big fan of having them every day or couple of times a week like we do chicken eggs I actually prefer the taste of chicken eggs personally but some people really love quail eggs and the beauty of quail is that you can keep more of them in a smaller place you know if people even keep qualen apartments in small cages and they can quite happily live there and produce eggs for them so if you're just going to keep them for eggs you could say five quail for a family of four five quail eggs is usually roughly Rivlin - one chicken egg so if they're laying an egg a day you can say just roughly eating eggs a couple of times a week for four people five to ten quail would be plenty to sustain them in eggs a few times a week quail eggs and bacon or whatever so there you go I hope you enjoyed that video on doing the calculations of how many quail you need to sustain a family of four work on those figures to meet whatever requirement you have size your family or how many birds you'd like to eat or whatever if you have any comments or questions on keeping quail wacom down below and I'll be happy to answer them especially in the first few days after the video is released don't forget to give the video a big thumbs up share it around thanks a lot for watching bye for now [Music] [Music]

Channel: Self Sufficient Me

Views: 488,130

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Id: E_7ZSYKq1Ko

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2017