If you’ve enjoyed quail or a quail egg in a high-end restaurant, chances are it came from Manchester Farms in Columbia, South Carolina. The family-owned operation got its start when Bill Odom changed from one bird to another–not just once, but twice. In the early 1970s, rather than move to New Jersey to run a chicken farm for his employer, Campbell Soup Company, Odom chose to stay in South Carolina and switch to the bird he’d grown up shooting. “We began raising bobwhites for hunters,” he recalls. “I had a poultry science degree from Clemson and I couldn’t keep the birds alive. I knew if I didn’t find another bird I would go out of business.”

So he switched again, to a bird better suited to large-scale production–Coturnix japonica, also known as Japanese or Pharaoh quail, which has been cultivated since ancient times