A Complete Analysis of Quail Farming Methods and Technical Key Points
Quail are birds belonging to the genus Coturnix, and the quail eggs everyone usually eats are the eggs laid by quail. Not only are quail eggs popular in our market in China, but quail meat is also a very delicious game meat. There is currently relatively little quail farming area in China, but it is also a fairly promising type of specialty farming. However, many people want to raise them but do not know how. Today, the editor brings you the farming techniques for quail, so let's take a look!
1. Site Selection and Coop Construction
Quail like to live in quiet places, so when choosing a site we should choose a place far from noisy areas such as urban districts and factories, but with convenient transportation. There should be no pollution around the quail coop and no other poultry farms, and there should be sufficient water sources. A sunny, wind-sheltered place is most suitable for quail growth. When building the coop, it can be built using the flat-ground style, ensuring the quail coop is warm in winter and cool in summer with strong ventilation. The height of the quail coop must not be less than two meters, and the top should have crossbeams laid in an “” shape. Take good measures to protect the quail coop from natural enemies, preventing rats, snakes and other quail natural enemies from invading and harming quail growth.
2. Breed Selection
The selection of quail breeds is the key to determining whether your farming succeeds. When selecting breeds, observe the growth of the young quail. Choose young stock with good growth, bright and spirited eyes, no size differences, round and long heads and necks, smooth and glossy feathers, and moderate body size. Also determine the breeding breed according to your own farming direction. For example, breeds for egg production include Baiyu, Longcheng and others, and it is best to choose male and female breeding stock around half a year old. After selecting the stock, raise them together in a female-to-male ratio of 3:1 to promote mating, fertilization and egg laying in quail.
3. Incubation Management
After female quail are fertilized and lay eggs, they naturally enter the incubation period, which is a relatively important stage. At this time, farmers should do a good job in incubation management to ensure the quail chicks are robust and the incubation is successful. About one week after the female quail lays eggs, select eggs with clean shells free of impurities, reasonably and clearly distributed speckles, nearly identical specifications, and normal shape as breeding eggs. Store the breeding eggs in an environment with a temperature of about 15°C and a relative air humidity of about 78%. During storage, prevent the breeding eggs from direct sunlight and wind. After about one week, the hatch rate can reach 4/5. When artificially assisted incubation is used, machine incubation is mainly used, and electric blankets and various poultry surrogate incubation can also be used.
4. Timely Updating
Timely updating refers to timely selling off old quail that can no longer reproduce or have reached a certain age. This is the key means of ensuring quail can always maintain efficient farming. Because quail have a relatively short lifespan, generally about one year after quail lay eggs, their natural mortality rate will increase greatly. Therefore, we should promptly cull old quail with declining reproductive capacity and sell them as meat quail for dishes. This not only provides an additional source of economic income, but also prevents raising farming costs, reducing farming benefits, or even causing losses.
The above is the editor's brief introduction to quail farming techniques. Quail have a relatively short lifespan, so we should not keep old quail all the time. Keeping old quail not only increases farming feed costs, but the old quail also cannot provide enough farming benefits for oneself. That is all for today's introduction. This article is for reference only. Thank you everyone for reading and supporting.