How to Raise Meat Pigeons? Master These Key Breeding Techniques

Meat pigeons are also called squab. Their flesh is tender and nutritious, making them a premium tonic health food with the benefits of calming the heart, nourishing the blood, supplementing qi, preventing disease, relieving fatigue, and stimulating appetite. So how do you raise meat pigeons?

1. How to Raise Meat Pigeons

1. Building a Pigeon House

To raise meat pigeons, you need to build a pigeon house. Choose a site with high terrain that is dry, well-ventilated, and sunny, facing south, or convert an ordinary house or old building for the purpose. Inside the pigeon house, prepare pigeon cages and pigeon equipment. Pigeon equipment includes nesting boxes, feed troughs, health grit cups, waterers, perches, leg bands, and so on.

2. Buying Breeding Pigeons

You can buy breeding pigeons and breed them yourself. Pigeons reach sexual maturity at about 6 months of age. The incubation period is 18 days, and the “nursing” period is 30 days. A pair of breeding pigeons can produce 8 to 12 pairs of squabs per year, and squabs need only 25 to 30 days of feeding before they can be sold, reaching a weight of 500 to 750 grams.

3. Feeding

Plant protein feeds for meat pigeons mainly include peas, broad beans, mung beans, and black beans. Animal protein feeds include fish meal, shrimp meal, blood meal, and meat-and-bone meal. Energy feeds include corn, paddy rice, rice, millet, sorghum, barley, and wheat. Green feeds include cabbage, spinach, carrots, and tender green pasture grass. The feed must be fresh and high quality. Do not feed poor-quality or moldy feed, and provide the pigeons with water every day.

(1) Young pigeons: For daily feeding, give 10% peas (mixed beans), 40% corn, 20% brown rice, and 10% wheat, fed 3 to 4 times a day, that is, once each at 7 a.m., 11 a.m., 3 p.m., and 7 p.m.

(2) Breeding pigeons raising squabs: For daily feeding, give 50% paddy rice, 20% corn, 10% wheat, 20% mung beans (mixed beans), and a small amount of hemp seed, fed 2 to 3 times a day. In summer, feed once each at 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. In other seasons, feed once each at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.

4. Daily Management

(1) Every day, check feeding, drinking, droppings, egg laying, incubation, and squab rearing, and handle any problems promptly.

(2) Clean and disinfect the pigeon house floor, exercise area, water channels, pigeon cages, and waterers once a day, and clean and disinfect the feed troughs once every 2 days.

(3) Increase or decrease bedding according to the season and temperature changes to keep the pigeons from getting cold. Use more dry grass in winter and spring, and less in summer and autumn.

(4) Diseases that pigeons are prone to include pigeon pox, pigeon candidiasis, fowl cholera, feather lice, enteritis, and trichomoniasis. Pay attention to prevention and treatment.

If you want to raise meat pigeons, you must do a good job of daily feeding and management, especially cleaning and disinfection, so as to ensure the pigeons get sick less often or not at all.