Raising Turkeys

Atop the workbench in the barn is this quote: "It is hard to soar with eagles when you work with turkeys".  I hope to better explain what goes into raising turkeys.

Preparing the Barn

Pinewood shavings are spread on the floor.  Waters are lowered and adjusted, and feeders are placed around the outskirts of the pen.

Finished Ring

A finished ring is pictured on the left.   The red things are waters, the long metallic things are feeders.









Poult Delivery

Poults from the truck

Baby turkeys, poults, are shipped to us from various hatcheries (Jensen, Cuddy Farms are the ones we purchase from).  They come in a heated truck (kept about 83F), and come in convient little boxes of 100.

These boxes are then hand trucked into the pen, and dumped into the ring.  During this process it is important to make as little noise as possible - poults are stupid and will go toward the noise, smothering each other.  The picture on the left hopefully gives some idea of the amount of turkeys.  In general, a flock will be between 8,000 to 11,500 birds.

Father dumping turkeys

Dumping the turkeys in is done a systematic manner, working from the farthest point from the boxes stacked by the ring to the boxes.  It is also important to try and dump the turkeys near a water (red things), because they haven't had anything to eat or drink since birth.  Also, as more turkeys are it becomes much harder to avoid stepping on them.






Poult Care

Flipped poult (alive, 3 days old)

 The turkey on the left is not dead, it is flipped over.  Sometimes (about 5 poults every 4 hrs) poults fall over, and cannot get themselves upright.  This necessitates what we call "walking through" - you walk through looking for problems (broken waters, smothering) and flip over turkeys that cannot get back up.  It is actually quite funny to watch flipped over birds walk away; they remind me of a drunk person staggering about, except they always lean to a particular side.

5 day old poults

In addition to walking through, the feeders needed to be refilled each day and moved, and the waters need to be kicked and dumped.  In the picture on the right you can see how the turkeys make a little well around the water; if you don't kick the shavings to fill in this ditch than the turkeys won't be able to drink.  At this point, filling the feeders is done by hand.  It takes two people about 2 hours to feed and kick and dump the waters.