At a month old, they eat more or less two-and-a-half kilos of duck feed a day. “Duck feed” is a mixture of very coarsely ground corn, wheat, soybeans, vegetable oil, vitamins and minerals. It’s ground to about the coarseness of bird feed. Conveniently, ducks self-regulate their food intake, otherwise you’d have to measure out exactly 135 grams of duck feed and feed each duck individually. Instead you can measure out 135 grams times twenty ducks (two-and-a-half or three kilos) and dump that amount of feed into the feeder. They eat, and, when their body tells them they’ve ingested a day’s worth of protein, they stop eating. I can think of quite a few people who could benefit greatly from a duck-metabolism transplant. Ducks don’t drink beer, either. At least not much.
I’m beginning to believe that my students might continue to raise ducks whether or not they win the business-plan competition. (In August we present our business plan to a panel of judges comprised of Peace Corps and other business experts and the winners of the competition receive start-up funds for their businesses.) This is very satisfying for me. It means that they have not only a lot of faith in but also a lot of enthusiasm for the work we’ve done.
We’re getting into the duck-raising business at a difficult time. As you’ve probably read on the MSNews page while you’re trying to log into your e-mail account, the price of food worldwide is rising at a rather alarming rate. That means duck food as well. Eventually the price of duck meat, the product we’re selling, will rise along with the price of what ducks eat. But there will be resistance to that price hike. So we’re hoping that someone else fights that battle for us before we begin our business in earnest. We’ll be raising and feeding our 20 ducks for eight more weeks before we slaughter them and sell the meat. The price of duck meat as we speak is 14 soles a kilo (about $2.25 a pound) but we’re hoping it will rise to 15 soles or more by the time our ducks are due to meet their maker.
There’s a formidable market for duck in Callanca. Every Sunday the restaurants here feed several thousand tourists from nearby Chiclayo. Arroz con Pato, duck with rice, is the dish of choice. The restaurants need 350 kilos of duck every week. Your average duck yields about 2.5 kilos of meat. That means that to satisfy the restaurants’ weekly demand for duck we’d need to be slaughtering nearly 150 ducks a week. Since it takes three months to raise and fatten up a duck, that means that to have 150 ducks available for slaughter every week, we’d need to be raising 150 ducklings times 4 weeks in a month times 3 months, or 1800 ducks at a time, all the time. That’s some serious duck management, my friend. So we’re planning to start out small, slaughtering and selling maybe 35 ducks a week, raising 420 at any given time.
The particular duck that’s highly sought-after in these parts is pato criollo, which means a duck raised in rustic conditions, in corrals, rather than in a Purina-style factory fashion. A pato criollo is one that eats not only commercial feed but also bugs, table scraps, chopped alfalfa, sweet potatoes and the like. This diet gives the meat a better flavor and it’s that flavor that the restaurants are paying for when they pay 14 or 15 soles a kilo for their duck. The local species of duck is a species we call in the States Muscovy but its genetics are purely Peruvian, it’s not a descendent of the ducks that the Spaniards brought to Perú. It looks nothing like the white Donald Duck ducks we’re used to in the U.S. Instead it looks something like the Peking duck that’s sold in Chinese markets in New York City. In granola-speak we’d call it a “free-range” duck.
A mere 135–200 grams of food a day may not sound like much. But think of it this way, if I ate a comparable amount of food per day as a percentage of my body weight, I’d be eating nine pounds of food a day. I have to admit that I don’t weigh my food but I seriously doubt that I eat nine pounds of it a day. A fully grown duck drinks 600 mililiters of water a day. As a percentage of body weight, for me that would equal 12 liters or over three gallons. It’s no wonder that ducks grow at an impressive rate, maturing in 12 weeks, while a turkey, for example, raised under the same conditions, takes nearly a year to mature. This growth rate, plus its exceptional flavor and high nutritional value, makes duck not only a profitable but also an environmentally friendly food source. It’s been raised in Perú since before the time of the Incas as a staple of the campesino diet.
I’ll post some more pictures of our ducks as they enter adolescence and waddle into adulthood. And of course I’ll let you know how we do in the business-plan competition. Wish us luck, us and our ducks.
Posts
