Lake House Quail Farm is a family-run micro-farm in Lake County, California. Here is our story of how a few pet quail became our backyard obsession and taught us how to live more sustainably.
Lake County is a quiet corner of Northern California — volcanic soil, clean air, and more shoreline than traffic lights. It's the kind of place that makes you want to slow down and grow something. For us, that something turned out to be coturnix quail: small, quick to mature, easygoing to raise, and generous with beautiful, richly-flavored eggs.
What began as a handful of quail in the backyard, kept mostly out of curiosity, grew into Lake House Quail Farm — a small operation built around daily chores, fresh air off the water, and cartons of speckled eggs we're genuinely proud to sell.
This is obviously not our farm. We have a micro-farm of essentially pet quail in the tradition of backyard chickens. However, we are fully licensed to sell our wonderful bounty of tiny eggs. We take safety and compliance as seriously as we take the health and well-being of our feathered workers.
Wholesome isn't a buzzword to us — it's the daily checklist.
Thankfully, we have boring jobs that pay the bills. We aren't into this for the money. In fact, we spoil the birds so much that we may not break even until 2050! But in all seriousness, because we just have a small flock, we have the privilege to get to know our birds and the ability to keep them as pets rather than livestock in tiny cages. We also don't usually cull for meat, so our birds live out their full little lives, male or female. This always-interesting hobby produces more than enough eggs for us, our friends, and a few left over to sell.
We feed our hens a high-quality 30% protein game bird layer feed, as well as daily amounts of dried worms and game bird scratch. They also get fresh vegetables and scritches. All our food, bedding, dust baths, and other supplies are sourced locally from Tractor Supply in Clearlake.
We gather eggs daily and store them unwashed in the refrigerator. Once we're ready to prepare them for sale, we check, wash, rinse, sanitize, and package them per USDA guidelines. At that point, they're good for two weeks refrigerated. Unwashed eggs are good for up to two months, but we are not legally able to sell unwashed eggs.
We bought four cute day-old coturnix quail chicks from a breeder in Sebastopol. Sadly, only two made it. We raised them up and started incubating their eggs.
After a lot of trial and error, we got really good at incubating and raising quail. We started buying eggs from professional breeders to incubate since they had better genetics, crafted over generations (of quail!) to create heartier birds. We also wanted to avoid the tribulations of inbreeding that using our own eggs would cause.
It took over a year, but now we have more quail and eggs than we know what to do with. After months of pushing eggs on family and friends, we decided to get the proper licensing to legally sell eggs in Lake County. We can also legally donate eggs to food banks and other non-profits now. Please get in touch with requests or orders. As an outgrowth of our love for quail and our love of crafting, we've started making some fun quail-themed items to sell or give away to friends.
We believe good food starts small: a few animals cared for well, eggs gathered by hand, and nothing wasted — even the shells become something you'll want to keep. That's the whole philosophy behind Lake House Quail Farm.
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