White Holland

Holland White turkeys are heritage turkeys and do not have a fast weight gain like the Broad Breasted hybrids do. You must be confusing the two?

Holland White turkeys are heritage breed and do not have the rapid weight gains that the Broad Breasted hybrids do! Could you be confusing the two breeds?

oops I must have! Very similar in looks.

How long does it take them to be ready to process and how big are the females?

Any recommendations on a Turkey specific coop? We currently have (5) Narragansetts that house with our Java chickens without complaint, but are adding (20) White Hollands this spring and will need to construct a new coop for them.

An endangered very large heritage turkey that gives us a lot of great tasting meat fresh all year and 6-8 nice size turkey roasts for the freezer on days when the weather is dreadful! A lot of meat for the price of a poult and plucking is easy with white breeds. Here in the South, they lay 8 to 9 months a year and selling the poults more than pays for their feed all year, the meat fills a large chest freezer and selling hatching eggs brought in enough $s to build a new barn. These turkeys are fragile until about 3 months old, but after that they are hard as nails, heat and cold doesn't bother them at all, even this last winter when we broke all-time records for cold and a foot of snow for a week, they stayed free range and perched in the rafters of an old open sheep stall at night. They forage for their food, competing with our chickens and ducks, keeping the 2 acres they are fenced in bug-free. They, like the chickens, eat a lot of grass and we throw them bread out the back door. They have very little fat at harvest time, about the same as the meat rabbits we raise. They will eat almost anything and we throw out the food our dogs did not eat the night before and they gobble it up! We keep 10 to 12 turkeys (hens) and 2 gobblers (toms) and harvest 6 to 10 gobblers every year. We easily get $100. for a 3-month-old pair and I am sure we could get more if we lived in an area that had above poverty wages.

KevinC_63559 said:

Any recommendations on a Turkey specific coop? We currently have (5) Narragansetts that house with our Java chickens without complaint, but are adding (20) White Hollands this spring and will need to construct a new coop for them.

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They need a perch broad enough for their big feet, but the heavy 40 # toms need a perch no more than 2 feet off the ground and a roof over their heads at night in bad weather, otherwise, only a fence is needed. The hens need a nestbox that will accommodate her size of 25 #, about three times the size of a chicken nest unless you hatch your eggs in an incubator as we do. When a hen goes too broody to leave the nest, she will use an old clothes dryer sitting in the corner of our yard.

Double breasted turkeys have double breasts, leg and heart problems and cannot free range and have to be fed a rationed amount of food every day. When we tried raising them, we lost about 75% due to these problems and from the summer heat. The ones that did servive, we let forage and raised the toms to 80 pounds before processing. That was at close to 2 years old and no problems. Don't know why? Hens started to lay eggs at about 6 months old and put a Holland White tom over them, offspring turned out to be about 55#toms with close to double breasts, hens about 33#s. Double breasted toms cannot be mated except with artificial insemination. We found 1 1/2 yr. old BB turkeys tasted almost as good as Heritage Turkeys, a lot better than 6 month olds!

dutchbunny83 said:

How long does it take them to be ready to process and how big are the females?

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Females weigh 25#s at maturity, males 40#s. It takes 8-9 mos. to grow out their frames and another 8-9 mos. to build up meat.