Quail

[GilpinGuy]

Pretty cool way to do it. The great thing about quail though is that you can have them in such a small space. If you live in an urban or suburban area, this makes it practical. Here's an excerpt from the book:

Are quail good egg producers?
You can’t do much better than coturnix quail for producing eggs. Each bird lays about an egg per day but you won’t get every single bird to lay an egg every day. I have found that about 80% of my quail will lay an egg each day.

Let’s crunch some numbers here. Say you have 10 laying hens. That’s 8 eggs per day on average, which is 2920 eggs per year, or 243 dozen eggs.

8 eggs per day X 365 days per year = 2920 eggs
2920 eggs / 12 = 243.3 dozen eggs

If 4 quail eggs equals one chicken egg, that’s the equivalent of about 60 dozen chicken eggs. Most families probably go through about a dozen eggs a week, so just 10 quail hens will provide more than enough eggs for the whole year – and they are the freshest eggs you can get.

Another thing to consider is that quail start laying eggs when they are about 6 to 8 weeks old. It takes chickens 5 or 6 MONTHS to start laying. You get 3 or 4 months of eggs being laid with quail over chickens. With the 10 hens, you would have almost a thousand eggs before a chicken laid one! Add up the feed cost for the chickens for those months and you can see why you just get more value from raising quail for eggs over chickens.

And all of this can be done in the corner of a garage.