Lessons Learned - Raising Turkeys
This year as part of our year one projects on our new homestead we decided to raise heritage breed turkeys. We wanted to share the lessons learned and results by the numbers.
Part of our motivation in raising heritage turkeys beyond producing high-quality meat for our holiday table was our desire to support the ongoing effort to maintain these breeds that have been listed by Slow Food USA as endangered foods. 99.9% of the over 250 million turkeys produced in the United States annually are of a single variety the Broad Breasted White. In recent years, through efforts to ensure that heritage breeds are not lost forever, some believe the population of these breeds to have risen to 30,000 up from an estimated low in 1997 of just 1,300.
For our first attempt at raising turkeys, we selected Bourbon Red and were able to order poults through our local feed store. We chose Bourbon Reds based on good foraging traits and decent meat yields.
Lessons Learned - We planned to create a dedicated space within our barn to house our turkeys and allow them access to a shared large pasture that is used by our dozen laying hens. Our first critical error was in allowing the young turkeys access outdoors too early at approximately seven weeks old. The turkeys were about 75% the size of our hens, and we thought they would enjoy the beautiful June sunshine. We are still not entirely sure what killed three of our five young turkeys within an hour of being outside. The attack was most likely the work of a hawk as the fishing line we had strung back and forth across the pasture to deter hawks was ripped down. In conjunction with the attack from above, our laying hens quickly identified these young turkeys as potential lunch. As we tried to assess what killed the turkeys we had to separate swiftly the remaining turkeys that were being attacked by the hens.
We replaced the lost turkeys with five additional-month-old poults we were able to source locally from Craig's list. Once we grew the flock of turkeys to size to ensure that all were larger than our laying hens we reintroduced them to the shared pasture. Our second error was a continuation of our first. While the turkeys were now large enough that the chickens no longer attacked them directly what we found occurring was that our chickens would take over the turkey's barn enclosure and limit the turkey's access to food and water. We managed this as best we could and were able to mitigate this by limiting shared pasture time and opening the pasture allowing both chickens and turkeys to free range much of the day.
While we loved watching our turkeys free range on our property and help as part of our tick control free ranging them for long periods presented other problems. Our turkeys seemed to explore much further distances than our chickens. It was quite a sight to see us trying to coax the 7 turkeys back across a busy road as cars sped by. On another occasion, an angry neighbor thought a pellet gun was the right approach to getting the turkeys out of his yard. Luckily we were able to get the turkeys back onto our property before he was able to take aim. We offered a very sincere apology and ensured the birds never ventured onto his property again. Free-ranging also caused an additional loss of a turkey we were never able to find.
In the end, we learned a lot in the process. However, we don't believe we will reintroduce turkeys on our property until we can create a dedicated secure pasture for them that addresses the challenges previously described. Some online caution against co-mingling turkeys and chickens due to fear of disease (this is not a concern of ours but worth noting.
By the numbers - In the end, we ended up with six turkeys, we were able to get processed locally.
Our original purchase price for the first five poulets (5 @ $10.95) plus the second batch of five (5 @ $15.00) totaled $129.75
Our supplemental feed costs (400lbs at avg $.37 per lb) totaled $149.65Our processing costs were $36 ($.50 a lb.
For a total project cost of $315.40 that yielded 62 lbs of fresh turkey at a total cost of $5.08 per lb.
1 - 16 lb turkey
1- 12 lb turkey
4 - 8.5 lb turkey