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Choosing Your Quail "Lane"/Where do you want to go with YOUR Quail?
- featheredknechtions
- Mar 6
- 5 min read
By Kelli Knecht
This post is going to be like one of those choose your own adventure books that I'm reading to my kiddos right now so let's start with this question:
Where do you want to go with your quail?
1) I only want quail for the eggs. I do not want to butcher or I only will butcher if I have to but am not planning on raising them for meat.
2) I would like quail for meat and eggs. I plan to keep quail for a dual purpose with intent to hatch my own for meat and egg production.
3) I want this to eventually develop into a means to cover feed costs or even develop this into a full business.
*You chose:
1) I only want quail for the eggs and I do not want to butcher or I only will butcher if I have to, but I am not planning on raising them for meat.
First let me say the eggs are delicious and there's nothing wrong with raising something just for eggs (we do this with our chickens and yes, our chickens have names haha). If you want coturnix quail just for eggs it is going to be much easier to search out a local breeder who has adult or teenage hens or in the rarer cases sexed chicks (we do this here at my place in Utah, but sex-linked chicks are not very common typically).
If you cannot find someone who will sell you females you can get unsexed chicks and raise them to adulthood and then just keep the females. The problem with this will be if you want to sell the extra males or process them yourself for meat or see if the breeder will take them back or butcher them for you. Or if you want to keep the males, you can try and find adult females to add to the pens to even out your ratio of hens and roosters. We keep 4-5 hens for every 1 rooster. You DO NOT need a rooster for the hens to lay eggs, but you DO need a rooster if you'd like the eggs fertilized for hatching later. (If you want to hatch the eggs then your choice actually needs to be #2 so you can find an ethical solution to hatching out roosters.) Other than fertility, the roosters in coturnix do not serve much other purpose. Coturnix roosters do not keep the hens safe or necessarily minimize fighting like chicken roosters will.
If you decided to keep the males for fertility you can get an incubator in the future to plan to hatch more egg layers but if you plan to hatch you need to be willing to butcher birds (this again is choice #2). Being willing to process them for meat, in my opinion, is crucial if you plan on hatching because you cannot control what you hatch and you will end up with extra males.
**A tip I tell ALL my beginners is to taste the meat and eggs before starting with quail and then learn to butcher on SOMEONE ELSES birds first. You will not have a good experience if you're first experience is butchering a bird you raised from a chick and may or may not have given a name... if you cannot learn on someone else's birds then I suggest not naming unsexed birds until you know gender.
If you do not want to go this route at all then find someone who will sell you females only and then you can enjoy the girls and their eggs without the extra burden too many boys could bring.
Now for some bonus info here is a YouTube video (it's an oldie but a goodie) that I send to everyone about how to know how many birds to start with to provide eggs for your family. This is if you started with hatching eggs but skip that step and just go with how many chicks you have or skip to how many females you started with and go from there :)
and here is a graphic I made with this info so you can see it written out as well (I'm a visual learner). Again, this is if you started with hatching eggs but skip that step and just go with how many chicks you have or skip to how many females you started with and go from there :)
If you chose #2 start here:
*You chose:
2) I would like quail for meat and eggs. I plan to keep quail for a dual purpose with intent to hatch my own for meat and egg production.
Alright you are ready to fully start with meat and eggs! Great! I can help with that too! First I'm gonna show you how to determine how many you think you need to provide meat for you and your family with part 2 of the video from the above section. This video is if you started with hatching eggs but if you started with chicks skip that step and just go with how many chicks you have and go from there :)
Ok I know that seems like a lot to digest but keep in mind it's a cycle so you can start at any point and once you get in the swing of things you can add more birds if you want. This is just a timeline to give you an idea how to do things to constantly supply your plates with meat.
Now that you might have an idea of what number to start with, I ask you, have you ever tried quail eggs or meat before??? If not, (PAUSE and CONTEMPLATE) I think you need to go try them both before you dive in. You should know if you like the taste before you start stocking your freezer right? (Answer: yes, yes you should because it's not exactly the same as chicken.) That being said the meat isn't far off from the taste of chicken. I think it's like a hybrid of dark turkey meat and chicken meat combined and it's really easy to cook and use the same way you would chicken or turkey.
Now if you decided after doing choice #2 for awhile that you have extra eggs and you'd like to start selling the extra or grow your bird population so that you can sell extra you will want to read on to choice #3 but alas, we will have to cover that in another post but before you go here is some information I share on my YouTube channel about how to go about starting your own quail business. I strongly suggest you get a hang of raising the birds and the little tips and tricks of working with them before you go all in. Do you have a market? Do you know your costs? Do you know your local state regulations? Do you have a business license? These are all just some of the things to consider before you go blow your savings on a quail barn and thousands of eggs or birds (sounds crazy but I know personally of this happening multiple times and it's a big hole to dig out of) All that isn't to discourage you at all but make sure you have a base knowledge and a passion before you go hog wild, k? Here is one video I did a few years ago (with a not great computer camera) but it's just some things to consider before jumping into something without much prior experience. I'll catch you guys in the next post if you chose #3 for your quail lane.
Until next time,
Kelli
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