My husband also expressed encouragement and interest in me doing meat birds. I may be expanding my operation to 3 flocks. Breeding group with Welsh harlequins, my egger group with no drake, and a new group of Pekins. I am noticing a lot of Vietnamese people asking about fertile duck eggs and I am thinking there is a good market for balut around here. Balut, fertile eggs, meat birds. Here we go!
With that pedigree I’m not too surprised. That’s pretty awesome, I’d be out there squeezing those ducks for more! Sounds like you have an ideal population to market to. I’d definitely take advantage of that. When I had way more laying hens a lot of people I know didn’t want to pay $3.50-$4.00 per dozen, preferring the .99 grocery store eggs. Now I have them asking me all the time if I have eggs available. “No, sorry, I don’t.” I have a small handful of regular buyers, that’s it. I’m not spreading myself thin or increasing production again.
@walt I finally figured out how to post my eggs on Facebook without having my add pulled and got about 40 people asking about eggs. (You might be surprised, if you could find a good way to announce what you have, but it sounds like you are satisfied with your current arrangement. ) People were wanting to travel from the next town to get eggs. It was ridiculous. I noticed a handful of folks asking about fertility or if a drake was around, did some Tetris in the duck area, and voila! Fertile eggs from the pretty ladies. I was nervous to pitch $5 an egg but they agreed! I'm sure the pictures help. The WHs are just beautiful birds. I'm gathering up my next dozen and will be reaching out to potential buyers. My plan right now is to sell fertile eggs and when we get back from our May trip, I'll incubate a batch to do a small expansion and to sell a few birds.
Silly question from a city boy but not all eggs are fertile? I just assumed we ate them before they started to incubate
A duck or hen mated by a male will be fertile for some period of time.... A couple weeks or so. Commercial eggers are focused on maximizing feed and other costs to produce an egg. Ain't no freeloading roosters allowed.
In my particular case, my drake was focusing his amory on my smallest black duck, Mango. Her neck is plucked, she's looking bedraggled , she's lost weight, and of course, she wasn't laying an egg. After I fixed the pond with proper filtration, the drake hangs out in there half the day and jumps all the ladies who enter the water. His 2 bottom bitches that always follow him around will get in there and do mating rituals together. The three of them swim to face each other and duck their heads flirtily for a few minutes before he picks one, then the other. Then he gets the zoomies. Before it was just endless chasing and raping that one small black duck. I think she was easiest for him to catch. As a result, I had terrible fertility rates. I tried incubating a month ago or so and it was a bust. I fixed my shit, and everybody is happy. Even Mango is back to laying an egg a day.
Well, it could be a cult situation... "Our God, @bewildered , spoke unto me, and told me I must take multiple wives."
Maybe I can train them to commit mass suicide when I'm ready to slaughter. It's like the cow in the restaurant at the end of the universe. #NewEthicalMeat
You’re not alone. I once worked with a doctor, a vegetarian or whatever, m who wouldn’t eat eggs because they could possibly “be life a living animal.” When I explained there’s aren’t fertile he was genuinely surprised and said he thought they needed a rooster to produce eggs. I asked if his wife needed him around to have her period, explaining that’s all an egg is really, a chicken’s period. Apparently that only strengthened his refusal to eat eggs. “You’re not selling it very well,” he told me.