Here is an odd one. I was wondering about the cost and requirements of starting an emu farm. The climite I am in is similar to the panhandle of Florida, where I know that emu farms do decently well. What I do no know is the amount of land needed, cost for emus to start out, what you feed emus, what treatments (if any) they need, and what to do with the animals once they are grown to make money.
Thank you in advance.
Giant Chickens?
Luxury meat market, except luxury goods sales are down.
With fewer and fewer people that are “well off”, there are fewer buyers.
More money + fewer people holding that money = small luxury market.
Raise regular chickens instead.
I was going to launch into a spiel detailing everything I knew about raising chickens, but emus aren’t chickens. They’re red meat! In fact, Google shows “emu” and “red meat” together with several sites touting it as low-cholesterol, 1920’s-style red meat.
Anyhow, since they’re large livestock, they buying of young emus and selling of full-grown emus is probably similar to what you’d do with goats or cows, rather than the tightly-controlled chicken industry.
This site appears to be tailor-made for someone who wants to be an emu rancher. They’ve got contact info.
Of course, since you’re in Alabama, you should also consider dredging for gold in a local river, or beekeeping. Those are apparently pretty profitable down there. John Carter from Mars can tell you all about it in his thread entitled “Mail-Order Brides and Sour Honey”.
p.s. If you substitute “emo” for “emu” in this thread, you can find some great band names. Me, I’m the new lead singer for “The Emo Ranchers”.
I just happened to read an article about this last Sunday. It seems that the price of breeding pairs has fallen through the floor (from around $3k just a few years ago), primarily because nobody developed a market for emu products.
They don’t have much meat on them, relatively speaking, and you probably won’t make your butchering fees back on meat sales.
The only bright spot is the emu oil from the fatty pouch on their back, which several people (the FDA not among them) are convinced makes all sorts of bad things go away. People are making money by selling the oil in vitamin shops, but most of the manufacturers grow their own emus and operate regionally.
So basically, you’d have to discover or create a demand for emu oil products in your region before you could hope to make any money off of this.
-lv
From the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department
*In the late 1980s, emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) farming gained in popularity and large numbers of emu farms sprang up across the United States, including many in Texas. In the mid-1990s, the price of a pair of emus dropped from a high of $50,000 to a low of $20. As a result, emus were released at an alarming rate, particularly in north central Texas. Of particular concern to the Wildlife Division is the recent documentation of production and survival of these free-ranging ratites. The potential of sustaining populations of free-ranging ratites to negatively impact native species of flora and fauna was the stimulus of this study. *
Caveat Emptor
I have never had Emu or Ostrich meat. Is there a difference in taste? Well obviously so, but is it like a Chicken vs Turkey thing?
For instance I love chicken and Turkey but HATE duck and goose.
Caveat Emptor indeed. Emu farming has a bit of a bad reputation. Not the farming itself, but the people promoting it. There may be some decent ones, but I understand much of it is scam city.
TLD, Is there even much of a market for emu in Australia? I lived there for 5 years in my youth and I can’t recall ever seeing it served or on a menu.
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Ok, what does “emo” mean? I have seen it used all over the web recently, and it’s not in any dictionary I own or have looked at, and I can’t seem to find anything defining it when I search google. Someone please explain! It seems to be some kind of music/subculture thing??
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Raising emus is not easy. They are destructive birds. The meat is very tasty, the leather is nice, and the oil is widely touted as being a useful alternative treatment for a variety of conditions, including arthritis, psoriasis, and diabetes, but there doesn’t seem to be much scientific basis to those claims. Still, emus destroy ground vegetation, kick down fences and are generally speaking nasty animals.
I have had both emu and ostrich, and I thought Emu tasted great! It’s hard to describe what it tasted like, but it sort of tasted like chicken in the way that kangaroo sort of tastes like beef. Ostrich was disgusting. I don’t understand why anyone would eat it. I suppose the tastes are similar, but it’s not like chicken and turkey.
Emu does not taste like chicken.
Emu does not taste like beef.
Emu tastes like emu.
Well, I’ve lived here all my life, and i’ve never eaten it. It has a niche market in certain snooty restaurants and specialist butcher shops in the capital cities here. Most of us tend to eat exotic stuff like beef and chicken.
I’m no Emu famer really, but here on our farm we did have two Emus that we kept for a while. I loved having them, they were a lot of fun (yes you heard me, fun), but they were a pain in the ass. It seemed like every other day they would get out and we’d have to find some way to put them back in the field.
Seeing how we weren’t experts on them, it was quite funny seeing me, my dad, my brother, or my mom (or whoever) running those crazy birds down trying to get them put back up. They weren’t mean though, they were very kind gentle animals…at least the ones that we had.
I loved my experiance with Emus, and that’s all I’ve got to add to this topic, lol.
Our neighbors had a pair of Emus, probably about ten years ago. They got out and ran down the street one night. I didn’t have much contact with these animals, but I live in the middle of the city. The Emus probably didn’t have any more than an acre to run on, but I don’t know if that’s enough or not.
-Lil
We had our Emus on a lot of, hmmmm, around 20 or so acres. At times even that didn’t seem like enough for those two dimwits, heh.
The people down the road from us had a couple pair of emus and they used to get out from time to time. The only way to catch them was with men on horseback, using lassos! These huge birds would run free in the almond orchards, generally misbehaving and stinking to high hell, it was quite a sight!
Despite the fact that emu is not exactly like beef, sales of emu, kangaroo and ostrich were remarkably strong during the recent BSE scares in the UK simply because people were looking for a non-beef red meat.
It is similar to beef, IMO, but I’d put it closer to wood pigeon myself.
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“Emo” is short for “emotional” and is often applied to different stlyes of emotionaly charged punk rock - say like a punk rock power ballad. The style kind of developed in the early- to mid-eighties, when bands like Husker Du and Rites Of Spring released albums that had more complexly melodic tunes and sometimes intensely personal lyrics wrapped in the shell of a punk rock style. Later albums that fell into the “emo” category tended to have a much more rock-based tempo, yet still had the trappings of punk rock. Rites of Spring’s album End on End is sometimes considered to be a textbook “emocore” album.
I’ll dig up a link from my database that will list the most influencial “emo” albums. I’ve got a site bookmakrekd that covers different styles of music with examples.
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