A cornfield near our farm
The severe drought that is gripping the U.S. affects the gamebird industry in a number of ways. The biggest impact is of course on the price of feed. As corn as shot up in price to nearly $8/bushel and soybeans to $17/bushel, the price of a ton of 20% pheasant grower has increased over $100 a ton in the past 2 months. That $100/ton price increase translates into an additional $1.00 per bird additional cost to feed pheasants. My guess is many pheasant producers margins are $1.00 per bird (or less), so the droughts impact is to take the entire profit away for those producers who did not book (forward contract) their feed.
Another impact of the drought is on the vegetative cover that gamebird producers “grow” in their pens. This cover is not only necessary to shelter the birds from the elements, but the cover provides the birds something to pick at and keep them occupied. The best location for pheasant pens is on well drained, sandy soil which is the very type of soil that dries out the quickest during times of drought. So the impact is that the drought is making it difficult for producers to provide adequate cover in their pens for their birds.
An impact that isn’t being felt yet, but most likely will occur is that hunting preserves are struggling to get their cover to grow in their hunting fields. Without adequate cover on preserves, released birds have limited places to hide and hold. Hunting preserves without adequate cover in their fields won’t be able to provide the same hunting opportunities to their members. So the impact here is there is some fear among producers that demand for gamebirds from preserves might be decreased this fall due to the reduced cover in the hunting fields.
There will also be longer term impacts from the drought as the true costs of the drought filter into many aspects of all of our everyday lives. Those impacts will be on the cost of food and the price of fuel (not much money to be made producing ethanol out of $8 corn)
Last week we had three days over 100 degrees
The heat (and the accompanying drought) has dramatically affected our farm. One of the biggest effects is on our employees as most of our work here is outdoors. The heat makes many normal tasks much more difficult.
Our breeder flock was laying well up until about 10 days ago. We were getting over 10,000 eggs a day when the heat wave hit. During hot periods (especially when it does not cool off in the evenings) our pheasant hens eat less, and subsequently lay less. Our production dropped from the 10,000 eggs/day to 2,000 eggs/day within a week.
Our birds in the pens can handle the heat quite well, primarily because there is adequate vegetative cover in the pens for the birds to get out of the direct sunlight. But our cover in our pens really suffers with the combination of high heat and no rain. Thank goodness we can irrigate – but we are only set up to irrigate about 1/2 of our pens.
Shipping day old chicks in oppressive heat is difficult. We put less chicks in each box and put Styrofoam under the chick pads and but a Gatorade type jell in the boxes for the chicks to eat, but the high temperatures are still a stressor. For the chicks we ship via the USPS, we arrive at the Minneapolis Air Mail Facility a few hours before dawn with the hope that the chicks depart on the first flights of the day (when the temperatures on the tarmac are still reasonable). The flights take the chicks to the airport nearest to their destination and the chicks are then transported by truck to the local post office. We had surprising good luck shipping chicks even in the heat, but 90′s are more doable than temperatures in the 100′s. With the extra steps we took to help the chicks on the journey we did O.K. with our shipments last week.
Mainly because of the drought, but compounded by the record heat, commodity prices are spiking. We booked 85% of our seasons feed needs, and thank goodness as feed prices have increased $40/ton in the past month. The effect here is that eventually these increased costs have to be passed on to our customers. We’ve got this year covered, by contracting the feed at lower prices.
- The radar image of the storm as it appears to bear down on our farm
- The sky over our office building
- The view over our just harvested wheat field
Yesterday the sky turned black and rain seemed imminent. We looked online for the radar images and we found a storm heading right towards our farm. We haven’t had a significant rainfall in about six weeks, so we were praying for rain. Then the sky started churning and I saw clouds like I’ve never seen before. But it all fizzled and we didn’t get any rain at all.
- Downtown Shanghai
- Our welcoming reception
- Co-op owners and government officials
- Map of the main breeding farm
- Bio-security precautions
- One of the breeding setups we saw
Our March seminar was attended by two representatives from the Shanghai Hongyan Pheasant Farm. One of the two attendees, Miss Yuan then invited us to visit their farm in China. This past week my wife Dori and I flew to Shanghai and spent several days visiting Miss Yuan’s farm. Dori and I were also then able to spend two days visiting the city of Shanghai. Shanghai has a population of 22 million and has the largest number of skyscrapers in the world.
The Hongyan farm is located with 45 minutes of downtown Shanghai and is a cooperative with 68 locations. We were warmly welcomed at a reception held at the main breeding farm and hatchery. After some initial comments and introductions we then visited several close by co-op farms. Notice the footgear and disposable uniforms utilized as a biosecurity precaution.
Pheasants are raised strictly for food (vs. being raised to be released and hunted). They breed their pheasants in at least three different systems. One of the systems housing both hens and a cock in a cage system is similar to what I’ve observed in the U.K.
I will be writing about our visit in upcoming blog posts discussing various aspects of what we toured and what we saw.
This road has been here for 60 years.
We have roads to our pens and around our pens. We wish we didn’t have to have roads on our farm, but we need to be able to get the birds to the pens, and we have to feed the birds and our delivery trucks need to get to the pens to haul the birds to our customers. So we have roads.
For years we received this giant cheese box at Christmas from our local gravel supplier. That’s when I knew we bought a lot of gravel. Year after year we put down more and more gravel and I wondered where does the gravel go? 20 years ago our roads didn’t have a base under them, we had just put gravel on top of the soil. So we redid all the roads here by digging down and putting down a base of 3” gravel, topped off by ¾” gravel. Now we don’t have to add gravel to the roads nearly as often. But we still buy a lot of gravel each year just to maintain the roads.
Because we have such good roads around our pens, we have been able to convince our feed supplier to have the contracted feed delivery trucks directly fill our bulk feeders in our pens.
I asked Art Schumacher, our maintenance manager to drive all the roads and get us an odometer reading and he got back to me to say that we have just over 10 miles of roads on our farms. That’s a lot of road.
- Irrigating this morning at sunup
- 200 gallons a minute
It’s been nearly a month since we’ve had any significant rainfall here. Our pheasant pens are built on quite sandy soil which means that our ground dries out more quickly than heavier soil. In the big picture, having sandy soil is a good thing for raising pheasants. But during time of drought, we can lose our cover if we didn’t irrigate.
Our pen crew is irrigating 18 hours a day, and the pen manager Brian Klein sent me the pic’s above just before 6 am this morning. Having an irrigation system is a big advantage for us. Some years we have hardly used the irrigator. We bought the irrigator in 1989, right after we had a significant drought. This year we have started up the irrigator earlier in the season than ever before.
Hope for rain.
Everyone even remotely associated with the pheasant business knows that there was a severe shortage of adult pheasants on the market this past season (the fall of 2011 and spring of 2012). I hear a lot of speculation regarding bird supply for this upcoming season (the fall of 2012 into the spring of 2013).
One argument goes that because of the shortage, producers are increasing production. This same argument continues by stating that the belief is the primary cause of the shortage in the past year was the demand created by the warm winter.
I speak to many producers and what I repeatedly hear from them is that the number of pheasants they are raising is based on what they have for orders. With feed prices being significantly higher than even just a few years ago, it’s risky for producers to raise additional birds (above and beyond what they have orders for) on speculation. If a producer does raise on speculation, and then can’t readily sell the additional production the holding costs (primarily feed) quickly erode any potential profit and in fact can result in a significant financial loss on those “extra” birds.
Also, as I have written in previous posts, the warm winter was just one of several factors leading to the short supply of birds. I am not saying that I believe there will be a shortage again in this upcoming season. But I do not foresee a glut of birds either.
The best situation is for preserves and producers to work together. Hopefully preserves will order what they need and supply and demand will match up.
The setup of the pens for our 1st hatches
Our first hatch (March 5th) ringneck pheasants of the year were moved out to the pens last week. The birds were just over eight weeks old. The birds were in the pens a few days before we got a substantial rainfall, but by then the birds knew to use the huts. After our record warmth in March, April here was quite cool and our crews have a backup of about 20,000 pheasants in the barns that need to be moved outside. From what I hear, all the pheasants ready to go will be moved to the pens in the next few days.
The shipment of eggs on the loading dock ready to depart
This morning one of our trucks left for Chicago O’Hare with a shipment of 120 cases of ringneck pheasant hatching eggs. Each case holds 420 eggs, so the shipment was over 50,000 eggs. This is the largest shipment of hatching pheasant eggs ever shipped by us. Our egg production this year has been outstanding (much better than projected). We needed to move some eggs and then we received an email from a large French gamebird producer looking for eggs. We quickly put the deal together and the eggs are on their way!!
There is a 330′ X 30′ poultry shed within a mile of our farm. For years the building was used as a flea market. Over the past few years, the building has sat idle. We could always use more brooder space, so Ryan George took on the task of negotiating a lease and then renovating the barn. Our farm has invested a lot of time and equipment in this facility and the first chicks went into the barn this week.
The lighting is all dimmable LED’s. We went away from nipple waterers and went with small automatic satellite drinkers. We put in a new ventilation system and lined the walls with new steel. We can put groups of 11,000 pheasants chicks into the barn every 4 weeks (using the “A” room and “B” room system. so the barn can handle over 50,000 chicks per summer and we can use the barn for white bird (meat) production in the winter.
Thanks to Ryan and to Chris Theisen and to Troy Cisewski for their efforts to get the barn ready in a timely manner.
