Lessons Learned From Raising Turkeys
I’m doing this a bit backwards but I’ll give you the top 3 lessons we learned from raising our birds this season.
Order more than you think you’ll eat or need.
Turkeys are LARGE! Ensure you have proper space, ample feed, and large waterers.
Ensure you have properly sized processing equipment OR take into account when you’ll need to process to use what you currently have!
If I still have your attention, please read on for details! 😀
Since we’ve been raising our own chickens for meat, this year, we decided to pull the trigger on raising turkeys for our holiday meals! We figured it wouldn’t be terribly different from chickens, and the investment for a tractor, processing equipment, and other miscellaneous items needed to raise birds would be pretty miniscule. We’ve slowly acquired all of these things over the past year anyways.
The initial investment was just $9/turkey! For us, well worth it considering the rising cost of meat and the anticipated turkey shortage this season.
We started with 10 birds in total. Something we’ve learned from raising meat birds is to always order more than you need to account for loss. (Lesson #1) You’ll always have a small percentage of birds that just don’t make it. They die after transport to you, predators, illness, etc. This was no different. We ended up with 6 birds when all was said and done. This turned out perfectly for us for two big reasons:
1. Housing 10 birds would have been difficult and required a larger structure.
2. We cannot eat 10 turkeys! We don’t go through that much of it in a year.
When we initially got our birds, they were tiny, sweet, and just the most adorable little things! We were able to use an existing brooder and graduate them into larger “chicken tractors” over the period of about 6 weeks. Then reality hit that these birds were going to soon outgrow the existing structures we had. I knew turkeys got large but didn’t truly realize how tall they actually get! A fully grown turkey can get anywhere from 3 to 4 feet tall depending on sex. They have extremely long necks and legs. Here’s where Lesson #2 comes in! BE prepared to have not just a large square footage structure if you plan on keeping them contained, but make sure it’s also tall enough so they have ample head space. I ended up having to construct a larger home for them around the 6 week mark. We raise lots of birds so this is something that we’ll get significant use out of.
Moreover, they eat and drink A LOT. Remember, these are large birds so they’re going to eat significantly more than a normal chicken. We probably went through a bag of feed every week to a week and a half just for these 6 birds as they matured. We also had large waterers for them and still found ourselves needing to refill it at least twice a day. I’m very thankful my husband and I both work from home so that we could do this. Admittedly, he and our boys were largely the turkey sitters.
The last and final lesson is to consider how large a bird your equipment can handle. We did one bird the week prior to Thanksgiving and our kill cone was barely large enough to fit our turkey in it.
Our plucker machine was also barely large enough. We had to remove the head and feet to get the whole bird in, and even then, it was a struggle so we removed about 1/5th of the remaining feathers by hand. (We ran it on one side then flipped the bird to do the other to get a majority of feathers off but wanted to prevent bruising and beating our bird too long.) Our scalding pots were also barely big enough. So you get the idea…big birds require larger equipment – larger everything really.
Looking back, we could easily have gotten away with processing our turkeys about 2 or even 3 weeks earlier to make some of the processing easier on our equipment.
We ended up just processing 1 bird and ordering a larger cone to finish the rest a week later. We kept our birds for about 2 and a half months and they were all GREAT sized birds after processing. The one in the picture was a whopping 18 pounds and it was delicious!
We all had a great appreciation for our Thanksgiving meal this year as we celebrated with family and friends! Gobble Gobble!
