The quail business

This past week I hatched 12 quail from 24 eggs that I placed in the incubator. Of the 12 eggs that hatched two were stillborn and one died within 5 days of hatching. He had a neurological defect that prevented him from getting up, keeping his balance, or standing. As much as I helped him in those 5 days he could not develop and collapsed.

I don't know why that happens, but in the litter two months another quail was born with balance problems, and within a week he overcame that imbalance. Today she is a very good quail egg layer.

So today I have and keep 24 quail birds in apparent good condition. The 9 quail that have been left alive from this new litter hatched within 5 days. The first 5 are now grown and have just turned 2 weeks old and I removed them from the quail nursery and placed them in the developing quail cage.

In the quail nursery, there are still 4 quails that were born on Saturday and are still very small, but strong. By Saturday they will be two weeks old and I will place them with their older sisters in the other cage with the 5 older quail.

When they are 30 days old, thanks to the food I put in them, they will have the opportunity to develop their bodies for oviposition. It is then when they move to the cage where the adults are in several 15 quails.

In my incubator, a total of 17 quails have hatched. For this weekend I will put new eggs in the incubator. As many eggs as I can get during this week. I estimate that I can collect 20 to 30 eggs in total.

There is the possibility of collecting 6 eggs daily, and I hope to increase this to 10 since there are 11 female quail and all are not laying frequently. The technique to get them to lay daily is not yet mastered but I am still learning.

I will soon have more egg production when the females in the batch of 9 quail that are two weeks old start laying.

I think there are 7 females and 2 males among these 9 quails. If so, the number of laying quails will soon increase. Within 35 days they can lay eggs for consumption. So they have approximately 20 days left to become adults and layers.

Now they consume more of the prepared feed and I have to be ready to buy more of it. More layers, more feed consumption, more expenses. I still have a long way to go to make a profit from marketing the eggs but my project is going from 6 quail bought at one time to having 24 quail so far, over the year.

When I started I thought to buy them all little by little and now when I bought the incubator I decided to have the opportunity to learn how to incubate and everything is going well. I didn't buy 50 quail all at once because I wanted to learn as I got more quail with each incubation.

By this year I have calculated to have 50 laying quail to start selling to retailers and then move on.

I am on my way to marketing and breeding quail on a larger scale. Thank you all for reading and your support.

The images are taken with the Redmi Note 9.