PIBROCH, Alta. – On paper at least, it looked as though the Hutterite colony here had found its gold mine.
But after three years of raising ostriches, and several disasters, Wally Walter has seen first-hand a downside to raising the giant African birds.
“That’s why we got into it. Everything looked rosy.”
While Walter bought into ostriches because he was sold on the upside of the business, he’s not afraid to discuss its pitfalls.
“That’s one way we can succeed and that’s by sharing our experiences.
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“Right now we know a little bit about ostriches – not very much. We’re still learning through experience what works and what does not work,” said Walter from the colony just north of Westlock, in north-central Alberta.
A little more than three years ago the former dairy herdsman took on the challenge of looking after a new kind of flock.
The colony was already involved in grain, dairy, hogs, chickens, turkeys, ducks and vegetables. When the members held a vote on whether to leap into ostriches, it narrowly passed. Today, members are still split almost 50-50 on whether it was a good decision.
“It’ll still take five years to get our initial investment back. We got in at the top of the market and it’s been downhill all the way,” Walter said.
Despite dropping prices, at $5 a pound for meat, Walter thinks ostriches are still a good investment.
At the beginning, he decided to raise the offspring for meat and not sell the birds for breeding pairs. Unless someone developed a meat market, the industry would flounder.
Originally, Walter bought three pairs of birds. One pair came from Africa, the other two from local sources.
“For the meat and hide you need a big bodied bird. For that you have to be pretty selective.”
There are three kinds of ostriches: Reds, blues and blacks. The reds are the largest birds. Walter likes to cross them with the blues, which are more prolific layers.
The breeding birds are kept in long, narrow pastures with a shed. One male is put with two females during the six-month-long breeding season. Each evening, Walter or his family mark the eggs. At the end of the week the eggs are washed, identified and placed in the incubator.
Because males can be vicious during breeding season, the areas where the hens lay can be closed off to allow Walter’s wife and children to gather eggs and feed the birds safely.
One hen can lay up to 100 eggs a season. But as Walter learned, they don’t lay, or the eggs won’t be fertilized, if the hens or rooster are upset.
“Last year was a bad year because we were doing construction work. It disturbed the birds,” he said. In fact, some hens only laid a dozen eggs all season.
This year a different problem slowed egg production – the cool, wet weather. As the temperature increases so does the number of fertile eggs. The fertility of the colony’s flock is about 68 percent. The ideal is 90 percent.
Then, once the eggs are in the incubator, there are still plenty of things that can go wrong.
Temperature and moisture have to be exact to eliminate moisture from the egg. The eggs are in the incubator for 39 days before being placed in a temperature and humidity controlled hatching machine for a week.
Ideally 15 to 18 percent of the moisture must be eliminated before the egg is hatched to prevent the chicks from getting edema, a condition which makes the chick too wet after it’s hatched.
Once the chicks are hatched, they go into the brooding room until they’re about three months old. Last year, several birds died at this stage. A five degree temperature increase and another change in diet seems to have solved the problem.
“They used up their body fat and didn’t have enough energy to digest their feed,” Walter said.
Despite the problems, Walter isn’t about to give up on the birds. He insists ostriches still have their up side. They seem to have the ability to withstand Canadian winters or African heat.
“If they can stand this past winter they can stand any weather – better than I do.”
And the moment it gets dark they bed down no matter where they are.
“They’re not like humans, running around all night.”
