Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My mother (in Canada) used to have a quail assembly line...a massive incubator with eggs and 3 different cages with the birds at different ages. Once every month or so she'd process the adults...had 3 massive freezers to store them in and pretty much only ate quail. Her boyfriend could kill and clean a quail in 15-20 seconds using a process described as 'turning them inside out'. They would eat 2 each at a meal. A little fiddly with the bones but a very healthy meat I'm told.
If you don't want to mess with the bones but don't want to just pull off the breast you can boil them until the meat comes off the bone easily to make stew.
Now I'm in Australia, we have normal egg laying chickens but are getting into Plymouth rocks which are a huge chicken (good for meat) that lays alot of eggs so we can have the best of both worlds. In about 4 months I have to teach myself how to kill and clean a chicken...not looking forward to that.

That is the method of growing them I also have in mind. Once I establish a good group of layers it will be on! I know quail as gamebirds are seasonal layers and don't lay when it's cold, but I should get about 9 months of laying where I'm at.
You can clean them quite fast if you pull the skin, feathers and all off but the skin does add flavor to what ever you cook them in and they do flavor up some rice in a good bird jambalaya. Along with doves, redwing blackbirds and a few others.
I got leghorns for layers kind wish I would have gotten the white Plymouth rocks in hindsite. They will be fine but I understand the white rock hen and white cornish male throw off the fast growing hybrid meat chickens.
As far as cleaning them I think I'm going to invest in building one of the whizz bang chicken pluckers. Really makes short,clean work of that task. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNvdWcED ... re=related

There's a another video on youtube of one made from an old washing machine...might be a way of saving a bit of coin if you have an old one around or available. I'd like to know where the feathers go though...it must be a pain to clean afterwards.

Here is one with a feather drain. Should be easier to clean and I understand dried ground chicken feathers are an ingredient to certain fish pellets.

oops thats chicken pellets
http://www.lionsgrip.com/labels.html
Feeding chicken to chicken, I guess we haven't had mad chicken yet!

You are correct Bill. They do use chicken feather "meal" in several fish foods.

I thought I ran across that but when I went to double check myself I couldn't find it.

Hi Monkey Puncher,
Here is a video of Martin Yan deboning chicken. It is amazing and he does it in 26 seconds. He is also very entertaining.
Cheers,
Adrian

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy6P3E84Dqs

That's a funny video alright...bit fast to learn much....except how to relax a chicken.

Here's a question, are you better off raising chickens or quail from an input/output perspective? Our plan is to breed plymouth rock chickens (enormous) sell the hens and eat the roosters before they start crowing too much. They'll take a bit of feeding but will we get more meat per kg of food and input of cleaning time when compared to quail?

um there may be a basic biological flaw in your plans... Unless you have a tiny turkey baster...

The quail are quick but I think the broilers are faster. I would still do both, my quail spill 2/3 of the food down to the chooks so I started feeding them scratch at 4 weeks they will spill a lot as they pick thru it as they prefer the millet, and pass over the wheat and the larger pieces of corn and the chooks don't mind cleaning it up after them.

I know that quail are efficient in growing but by the time you add the value of human time to growing, and harvesting, preparing and cooking would they really be as efficient as chooks? If they are why has there been no real development of commercial industry?

I like the idea of quail, cos a couple of birds will serve 1-2 ppl depending on what goes with them, and there are no laws against keeping the cocks in suburbia, unlike with chicken.

and as has been pointed out on this forum, I'm a tight-ass, I really dislike buying fish, I'd prefer to breed em, it's just impractical where I live

I've got some Scot in me so I know about the tight-ass bit We can have chooks here but the missus would never let me kill em so we only get eggs. I love rabbit but the no kill problem would apply to rabbits and quail

I think chooks are two up on quail. In time and in feed cost. Quail require from me about 10 minutes per day to feed and fill water. They spill most of their food each day and 6 quail will empty a liter jug in about a day in a half. They are also too dumb to work the auto water I set up for them. The chickens never need water as they drink from the auto water cups and will eat just about anything and you can fill their feeders with scratch which they eat when there is nothing else which means they can be left on their own for a week or more, while the quail can't be left for more than 2 days. I like variety, so I have both! I probably won't keep the quail over winter.