The outcome is that, for years, we have seen our March hatch cock birds become quasi aggressive, with their waddles swelling up, wanting to fight etc.  Every 2 or 3 years, we would experience some of the hens dropping their tails (i.e. molting) and then regrowing a new tail.   This year, we are finding that some of our cock birds are dropping their tails (the three king feathers) and new king feathers are in place and growing already to replace the dropped tails. 

We have been in a tailspin here trying to figure out why this is happening.  Our April hatch pheasants (both hens and cocks) are absolutely not going through any of this at all – there are no problems and their tails are superb.  We have tested our feed and there are no issues with the feed. 

We think we have it figured out.  The first component is the day length issue identified above.  The second issue is the heat – our theory is that our March birds entered puberty right when we had a stretch of 90+ degree days.  Of course feed consumption dropped during that period.  Our thought is the birds didn’t get enough protein and therefore some of them have gone into a molt. 

Our plan is to bump up the protein on our March 2011 hatch birds through the summer, and we think that will solve it.

Conveyor belt for loading shipment trucks

Brad Lillie (our in house financial guy) and I have been crunching the numbers for the last two calendar years and though we have made progress financially (after the disastrous 2008 season, we made a reasonable profit in 2009) changes must be made for us to maintain a competitive edge.  Other than bidding out and forward contracting (locking in) our feed, we have limited control of feed cost – our #2 expense.  We also lock in our propane cost.  But our biggest expense in running our operation in labor.For us to be competitive and profitable in a flat demand environment, we must become more labor efficient.   Our plan is to again evaluate our labor efficiency by breaking down all the processes involved in raising a pheasant, from the time it is hatched, through the brooder barn, to the pens til the point the bird is loaded onto the shipment truck.  We know of (and now employed) many innovations from the industry, some of which we have found to help reduce the labor cost per bird. 

 Again, some of our expenses are difficult to control (property taxes, health care costs to name two).   I believe there is a lot of room for improvement in our labor expenditure per bird (i.e. we can become much more labor efficient here).  At the same time, we want to maintain our level of service with our customers and continue to be both accessible and able to answer questions.  It also is of paramount importance that we keep the core value of humane treatment of birds in our minds at all times.  It is my belief that we can become more efficient and still continue our level of customer service and treat our birds with respect.

 I think the challenges we are facing are probably being faced by most small business owners in the current economic climate in our country.  It was easy to hide our inefficiencies while our gross revenue was rising year after year.  It will be more a test of my leadership and my managers effectiveness if we can maintain profitability as our gross revenue curve stays flat.

Bound for Colorado

This truck and trailer left at noon today – bound for Colorado.  We started 237,000 pheasant chicks, recycled 25,000+ pheasant breeders and started 45,000 partridges – whew!!!  It was time for a few of them to leave.  Chick revenue dries up in August – yet our feed and labor bills are at their yearly high right now.  I felt last week like we were hemorrhaging money.  It’s a great week – as we have four full goosenecks (like in the picture) departing the farm this week. 

Dr. Tom Warner, Dori and Micah near Salina, KS

 This past week, Dori, Micah and I traveled to Kansas.  I spoke  on Friday 8/13 about managing a gamebird farm to the attendee’s at the Kansas Sport Hunting Association annual convention.

Dr. Tom Warner also spoke at the convention.  Dr. Warner oversees the new Hunting Preserve Management degree program at Kansas State University in Manhattan, KS.  The new program is a wonderful, much-needed curriculum.  Back in the fall of 2006 I was asked by the then owner of Flint Oak Ranch (Fall River, KS) Ray Walton (who sadly passed away 2 years ago) to travel to Flint Oak and meet with Dr. Warner and others about development of a new degree program for preserve management.  I am proud that I was involved from the outset.

So, it was cool to meet Dr. Warner again – now that 20 students are through their first year in the Preserve Management program.  Dr. Warner was so full of enthusiasm.  One of the things Dr. Warner related in his presentation was that to successful in life one needs to have energy, enthusiasm and commitment.  I agree with that principle.

Friday night Dr. Warner took Dori, Micah and I out to dinner at a restaurant housed in a former small town high school.  The food was all buffet style and so incredibly good!!!   Then Dr. Warner took us up to a spot that supposedly the explorer Coronado visited hundreds of years ago.   Up on top of the biggest hill around (yes there are some hills in Kansas) – there was a fort like structure built as a memorial to Coronado.  I took  the picture above – you can see the fort in the background.

As a side note, look at the massive cumulus anvil topped cloud in the background.  The cloud was perhaps 100 miles across and probably topped out at 50,000 feet.  That night while watching TV we saw that the cloud (which was east of us at the time we took the pic) was a HUGE storm with winds up to 90 mph.  We were looking at the cloud from behind.   The cloud (storm) was absolutely awesome.

Mike Krafjack and Transportation/Maintenance Manager Art Schumacher

Last year we were already actively delivering adult pheasants by today’s date.  This year, with the temperatures near 90 degrees, our early season customers are holding off taking their first delivery for a week or two.  Once we get started next week or the week after that, we will be sending at least 3 full goosenecks (the name of the trailer type in the picture) of pheasants (and some partidges) each week.

We do most of our own maintenance in our shop.  We used to send out our trailers for brake jobs, but Art now carries a full inventory of brake parts and with Mike’s help (and Ryan George’s help too) Art repairs/replaces all our trailer brakes in our own shop.

We have four 26′ gooseneck trailers (like the one in the picture).   The trailers are sandblasted and repainted on a schedule – and we go through a lot of tires (at a cost of about $240 per tire).  The stakes are even higher for us than most in that we are delivering live birds to destinations as far away as Oregon/Washington, to Florida and to eastern Quebec.  We just can’t afford to break down.  So we proactively replace brakes, tires, wheel bearings etc. with the intent to limit breakdowns.

Char has been working on a new mature pheasant brochure – that we will mail out to preserves around the country.  My expectation is that our mailing will generate interest and we will garner more orders for mature pheasants.  With that in mind – we want to have the birds to back up the mailing.

I plan on meeting with Chris and Brad Monday morning (8/2) and arriving at a decision (whether to keep one more “A” room of chicks).  My pattern has been to put pressure on myself to get out there and sell the birds.   If our farm is to continue to move forward – we need to run the facility efficiently.  One important aspect of efficiency is to run at full production.  If we are to be at full production, we need to have that “A” room full on 8/18.  I’ll report back what Chris, Brad and I decided.

Our 2 new Kubota’s

The view from my office window of the just harvested and baled wheat field

The temperature has reached nearly 90 degrees – which for us is hot!  Surprisingly it hasn’t rained here for nearly 3 weeks, so after a much wetter than normal May and June – it is really dry. 

As recently as July 3^rd, our breeder flock was producing over 7,000 eggs a day.   Now just 10 days later our July 13^th collection was just over 3,000 eggs.  The hens are just saying “we’re done”. 

 We have just 5 more weeks of hatching and the regular hatching season will be done.  The chick order calls we have been receiving are for larger quantities – the calls are coming from commercial farms now.  I’m sure the heat has cut into most everyone’s egg production predictions for late June and early July – so we are getting calls from farms that produce most of their own chicks – needing chicks from us to fill up their barns for the last fill.

 We have nearly all the chicks we are going to produce in the next five weeks sold, and I anticipate we’ll be “sold out” for the season in the next few days.  It’s a good feeling to have orders for everything – and not have to struggle to sell.

 A couple of years ago we re-entered the started bird business, and each year we’ve sold more 6 week old pheasants.  This year we’ve sold over 17,000 started pheasants – it’s going well.    We run google analytics on our pheasant.com webpage and we track the path visitors to our webpage travel.  From the homepage there are a myriad of ways to go.  What we find interesting is the 4^th most popular page that people visit from our homepage is the started bird prices page – this shows how much interest there is.

The shift point usually is right before July 4^th – we start getting calls then for July and August chicks.  This past week the phones started ringing again – and though many of the calls were for 50 or 100 chicks, we got a call for 3,000 chicks and then we also received an email from a customer wanting to book 3,000 chicks.

Our egg production is still over 7,000 pheasant eggs collected a day – later this week we’ll set eggs to hatch August 4^th.   So we plan on hatching 25,000+ chicks a week the first week of August.  Our plan at this point is to hatch, in addition to that August 4^th date, on August 11^th and have our final hatch on August 18^th (but that may change).

We think we are where we want to be – i.e. we have some chicks to sell in July and in August – but not more than we feel we can move.  Postal shipping the past two weeks has been much more successful so we have more confidence in that area.

I’m looking forward to the end of the chick season – our last scheduled day of egg collection is planned for Friday July 23^rd – it’s been a good season and all in all we’ve done well.

Our 1 Millionth chick (held by Juan Zamora)

We’ve passed the one million mark in pheasant chicks produced this season.  On June 22^nd the one millionth chick was hatched and shipped!   We still are collecting eggs and it is very busy. 

On another note – we have been working on improving our pheasant.com website – and hoping to encourage people to place orders for pheasant chicks online.  We upgraded our online store – trying to make the store more user friendly.  We also instituted a 5% discount for orders placed online.   This Monday (6/28) when our chick sales coordinator Sarah Pope arrived at work, she found 7 online chick orders had been placed over the weekend with a total invoiced value of over $1400.00.   This is a big deal and I am really pleased. 

We hope to continue to enhance pheasant.com.  Yesterday I listened to a one hour webinar on measuring conversions online – i.e. tracking customers as they arrive at our homepage and follow their path to see how many “convert” their visit into a purchase.   Originally we tracked CTR (click thru rate) – looking at what percentage of people who viewed one of our pay-per-click ads actually “click thru” and went to our homepage.  For me conversions are much more important than CTR.  We are tracking everything we can using google analytics.  I find the whole process absolutely fascinating.