The store-bought quail meat is often expensive and low quality, until you get lucky, so raising quail can be great for sustainable food.
They also create a prepper-style meat source that can live in a basement.
In my homestead, I cull the grow-outs once every quarter. I have separate cages for roosters and a freezer for preserving meat. Let’s explore what I have learnt so far about quails and their meat.
Don’t Hesitate to Process
The roosters are loud, aggressive, and don’t fall behind to harm flockmates, so keepers need to cull quails when they are crowded and trouble hens and layers.
For meat, mainly roosters are processed. But hens also don’t pay off every time, and in such a situation, you need not hesitate to take them out of the cage.
If you want to hatch your quail eggs and breed your own flocks, culling is a part of it.
I often harvest with the good stock and keep a bachelor pad as I sometimes ned to buy quail chicks from breeders or hatcheries that cull heavily.
I find they are easy to process as they are too small and don’t need much time to pluck. So, you need to split them open with skin. It’s okay to do it for a small stock manually.
But if you need to harvest a large number of birds, you may need something like a tiny Whizbang feather plucker. But then, you need to remove the bird skin anyway if you don’t like it.
Quails cook really well and retain rich moisture when you spatchcock and cook them whole.
If you want to preserve it for later use, remove the feathers, gut them out, rinse them well, and store them in the vacuum bag. Let them lie flat in the freezer.
When I process after a hatch grows out, I tend to end up with 10-20 lbs of birds’ breasts and legs, and carcasses, which is great for broth. This yield can last long for flexitarians.
Let’s do Some Quail Maths
You may be thinking about how many quails you should raise or need for a meal per person, right?
If you don’t eat much meat, half a quail per meal per person is enough. So, if you have a family of 4 and eat 2 quails per meal every week, you may need 8 quails per month.
But if you’re a meat lover, you may need 1 quail for an appetizer and 2 quails for the main course. This calculates 3 quails per week and 12 quails per person per month.
After this, you may also need to do some maths regarding the raising of quails.
To sustain meat production on your own, you must continually breed the stock and hatch eggs for new ones.
Suppose you have a rolling setup with a 75% hatching rate and harvest every 8 weeks, you need to begin with around 16 eggs in the incubator.
When they hatch out and enter the brooder, you need another clutch of 16 eggs so they can hatch out a month later. They are a bird weighing 4-6 ounces of meat, and if you are doing 16 at a time, it’s enough food for a month.
This way, they go through the incubator into the brooder and then grow out. And you are finally going to start harvesting the grow-out birds in the third iteration.
Quails mature early and get ready to process around 10 weeks, so you need to hatch their eggs regularly. For this, you require multiple cages to house different groups of hatches if you focus on meat.
What About Other Small Meat Animals
When it comes to small homestead or domestic animals, chickens, quails, ducks, and rabbits come to the top. I have quite a long experience of raising them all, and for raising for meat, I mostly find it easy with bunnies.
They are excellent foragers in the backyard and can live on the garden crops. You can prune your vegetable garden and feed your pen animals for a week. Also, their feed is cheap, and they’re less messy.
Rabbits don’t make any fuss about space and don’t require a large house like birds. Only, they need some holes or furrows. So, they’re less maintenance animals, which is great for busy homeowners.
Also, they are easy to process for meat and provide high protein. Don’t forget that they multiply their population in a really short time.
Next, I prefer quails, especially Coturnix, for ease of processing. Sometimes, I skin them, but you will also find it easy to scald and pluck the birds. But if you’ve a large family, raising quail for meat is impractical. They’re 3 to 20 times smaller than chickens.
Then, you need to move to the chickens. Meat chickens require lots of feed to achieve popular weight gain, and Cornish Cross can be an ideal choice for fast growth. But heritage and some hybrid chickens can take longer to process.
Though chickens give more overall meat, their turnaround time is slower. Also, I find processing chickens somewhat tedious and unpleasant.
In comparison, broilers are messy and have lousy health traits, and their is not as good.
Quail Meat
I often find my friend complaining about the adult quails having inedible bones. You must be asking about even tiny rib bones, right?
But that’s true! So, you need to take out the bird’s breast and pull off the legs. This way, you can get 90% of their muscle mass from meat. You can put them in anything for a meal.
The average adult stripped-down quails, especially large quail breeds, or jumbo quails, are still around 1/2 lbs.
They also have a good feed conversion ratio, and you can make homemade feed for quail.
Final Thoughts
If you’re going to raise as few as 10 or 15 quails per season, it’s not going to help you with food needs for homesteaders who need a good amount of protein for the garden work and animal care.
Also, quails are excellent at laying eggs, which can help you make a handsome profit. So, many keep quails mainly for eggs (not for meat).
Quails for meat are not bad, but if you’re serious about raising meat on a homestead or farm, you need to switch to keeping meat chickens and rabbits.
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