₦airaland Forum

zinaunreal:
As far as i am concerned we have arrived at a level playing field where no trade occupation should be underestimated anymore.

Degrees are no longer what we will expect from it. That time is gone

yinkeys:
Maybe we should scrap our elementary and high school model and copy the Chinese totally
How can we have civil engineering professors and all the construction jobs are outsourced
Federal government can’t even put our professors to work

Laple0541:
When they die, the kids of their brothers and sisters will help them spend all the money they saved. Even the government will have their share.

Procashtips:
Selfishness and self centredness on a new high.

When you care only about yourself, decisions like this are easy to make.

Franzinni:
Dink haha these Genz can come up with acronym for everything

lebete3000:
So that children would be sleeping in class from post prandial stupor abi?

Ayoefa:
What kind of horrible things happen in Dubai?

Ayoefa:
Dubai is way safer than almost all places in the world.

There were no significant changes in the human rights situation in the United Arab Emirates during the year.

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killing; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government...arbitrary detention...punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative

Observers continue to report the UAE serves as a trafficking hub where recruiters sell migrants to families who afterwards illegally transport them to other countries in the Gulf.

In 2023, a rights group reported recruitment agencies and employers exploited migrant workers employed to support the UN Climate Change Conference, hosted by the Government of the UAE in Dubai, in conditions of labor trafficking, including being charged recruitment fees, nonpayment or delayed payment of wages, passport confiscation, restriction of movement, debt bondage and other abuses, including racial discrimination.

Ayoefa:
So they should ignore their laws just because they might have other problems.

Electorate:
They are both UK citizens on holiday in Dubai, read well before you comment... After all, School is not scam.

Quail Need Special Attention. Baby quail are tiny, but grow fast. For the first couple of weeks, you’ll want to help them survive. Baby quail often fall in and drown in a regular chicken waterer. You can either put marbles or rocks in the waterer, or buy a waterer for quail. The drinking area is very small. You can also buy just the base, which fits quart size plastic bottles or mason jars. Also, since quail have difficulty walking on wood chip bedding, use blue shop towels in the brooder for the first 2 weeks, or paper towels in a pinch. After 2 weeks, the chicks will be fully feathered, won’t need a heat lamp or special waterer, and can be transferred to a grow out cage.

How Many Quail Will You Need?

Eggs. Five quail eggs equals one chicken egg. If you eat a dozen eggs per week, then count on needing 5 dozen quail eggs. Plus you probably want more to incubate. Quail lay nearly every day, so a dozen layers will give you about 7 dozen per week.

Meat. Let’s assume you will eat quail once per week. An adult serving is 2 quail. And let’s assume you will incubate eggs every 3 weeks. Once the quail are ready for processing, you would eat 6 quail every 3 weeks. You can expect a 70% hatch rate, so to get 6 quail, you’ll need to incubate 9 eggs. For a family of four, you’ll want to incubate 36 eggs every 3 weeks. You’ll probably want extra so you can entertain and stock the freezer for winter.

Here are few tips to help you get started.

Feed. Because quail grow so quickly, they benefit from high protein feed initially. You can use regular chicken layer feed, but we recommend a higher protein. Layer feed is 16-18% protein. We use a turkey starter feed with 28% protein. Once the birds reach maturity, you can switch them to a lower protein feed.

Incubate Regularly. Whatever you decide for housing, you’ll want quail in 3 groups: babies (up to 2 weeks old), layers, and grow outs. Quail hatch in only 18 days. Our newborns spend the first two weeks indoors under a heat lamp in a brooder. We’ve used a plastic tub, a premade rabbit cage, and a homemade chick cage. After 2 weeks, transfer them outdoors. You could keep them in the house, but quail poop is a special kind of stinky, and they make so much of it! Your nose will tell you when it’s time for them to go out. Your first quail will become layers. However, about ½ of them will be males. Keep a couple for future fertilized eggs, and eat the rest. Once you start getting eggs, incubate on a regular basis. Those will become your grow outs.

Want to kickstart your quail program? Buy fertilized eggs from someone who raises quail, and refill the incubator as soon as hatching is over. You’ll have 3 hatches before your first ones begin to lay!

With one incubator, you could incubate a group every 3 weeks. In a steady state, you would have 1 brooder, 1 cage for layers, and 2 cages for grow outs. The grow outs spend 2 weeks indoors, and 5 weeks outdoors. By the time the third group is ready to go outside, the first group is ready for processing, so you’ll have an open cage. And you’ll have more fresh meat every 3 weeks.

Incubation doesn’t have to be expensive. If you don’t have one, there are small incubators that hold about 35 quail eggs for around $55. Here is a review we made of one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Ve5uAmzQE.

Get Started Inexpensively. If you search out hatching eggs, you’ll probably pay a lot. But if you can find a source of quail eggs from a local homesteader, chances are they keep males with the females so they can incubate frequently. Ask them. If you buy eggs for eating, they’re probably fertilized and ready for the incubator! They might not be purebred show quality quail, but you want eggs and meat.

You’ll find several YouTube videos about how to process quail. Watch them to find a technique you are comfortable with. Or visit someone who will let you observe in person. Here is a video we made about processing quail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDH6ay4f3sE.

Pro #7 – No Extra Freezer Required. Large animals like a cow or pig might require an extra freezer to store the meat you’ll get once each year. But quail are small and you’re processing them throughout the summer, so there’s little impact on the freezer you already have.

Pro #8 – Efficient to Grow. Animal growth efficiency is measured in something called the Feed Conversion Ratio, or FCR. FCR is a ratio of how many pounds of feed it takes to make a pound of the animal you’re growing. The FCR for quail is similar to layer chickens at around 3.5 pounds of feed to produce a pound of animal. To produce a ¾ pound live quail, you’ll need about 2.6 pounds of feed.

Pro #9 – Quail are Sustainable. As a homesteader, you want to be able to make more out of what you have. Remember those 66 quail eggs the Happy Wife came home with? We had a terrible hatch rate with only 11 babies. But they grew up and we incubated more. By the end of that year, we hatched over 340 quail. We don’t incubate in the winter, but in spring we started incubating again, and after those eggs hatched and matured, we processed all the old quail to maximize egg production and keep the flock young. The point is that all the quail we have today came from those original 11.

There are a few Cons. I think they’re all minor, but you should be aware.

Con #1 – Cost of Housing. This is true no matter what you raise. Even with chickens, your first egg will cost you about $800. You could have just a few quail for eggs, and raise them in an inexpensive rabbit cage, but if you plan on raising quail as a regular meat source, count on at least 3 cages and a brooder plus an incubator.

Con #2 – They Poop a LOT! Because quail grow so fast, they eat and poop a lot. You’ll notice it because they stay in a cage and don’t roam. Just get used to it!

Con #3 – Variety is Limited. Different breeds of chickens can happily live together, but not quail. Quail that look different often attack each other. If you want a variety of breeds, count on more cages. But if you just want eggs and meat, who cares?

Pro #4 –Quail Don’t Take Much Space. Because quail are small and raised in cages, you won’t need much room. Cages are often stacked, so several groups can be raised with the same floor space. You’ll read that quail should have 1 square foot of space per bird, but you could easily push that to 3 birds per 2 square feet, especially for grow outs that you intend to eat.

We first built two 2’ x 6’ cages that stack, and later bought a Chick Tower from Tractor Supply. The Chick Tower has 5 levels, each with about 9 square feet. Each level comes with a waterer, feeder, radiant heater, and slide-out poop tray. We made some modifications to the doors to allow more airflow and the floor to allow poop to easily fall. You can see the video about replacing the floor at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdk1UpKlIz8.

The tower retails for $1300, but is sometimes on sale for $900. Quail cages shouldn’t be higher than 12-15 inches, since quail tend to jump straight up when startled. If they have too much room to jump, they’ll jump and break their neck. The Chick Tower levels are short, so they’re perfect for quail.

We also built a small quail cage for tabletop use. It’s 2’ x 3’, and could hold 6-10 quail. It took a couple of days to build and the final cost was around $60. You can find the video and list of materials at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKZCSQWAV9U.

Pro #5 – Easy to Process Emotionally. If you eat meat, something had to die. If you have trouble with death, you’re not alone. However, quail are about the easiest to dispatch from an emotional perspective. It’s not friendly, it doesn’t sit on your shoulder, it doesn’t look at you with longing eyes. It’s a bird. And the older they get, the bigger jerks they become, sometimes scalping and pecking out the eyes of the weaker ones. Compared to dispatching a rabbit, quail are about as emotionally easy as it gets.

Pro #6 – Easy to Process Physically. When we process chickens, it takes about 45 minutes to set us the cones, scalder, plucker, table, and buckets. For quail, you probably already have the equipment: a pair of scissors, 3 buckets, and a garden hose. The entire process takes about 4 minutes. And cleanup is just as easy.