About ready to start a turkey flock...need some pointers.

[Lamanite Jim]

I cleared out a section of ''the back 40' for a turkey run and a coop. I built a 12 x 32 foot run 6 1/2 feet tall. It is completely enclosed with 2" x 4" farm fencing. The coop is 4' x 8' and 9' tall. It has four roosts and is covered with tin siding. Now that it is built I have three questions: 1) Is the run tall enough? 2) Will the run and coop support 15 turkeys? If not, how many? 3) Will all breeds of turkeys get along? I plan to harvest about 12 turkeys every 6 months. Am I on track with my plan?

 

[chooks4life]

I cleared out a section of ''the back 40' for a turkey run and a coop. I built a 12 x 32 foot run 6 1/2 feet tall. It is completely enclosed with 2" x 4" farm fencing. The coop is 4' x 8' and 9' tall. It has four roosts and is covered with tin siding.

For what specifically? Flying? I don't quite get the question, sorry. If you can walk in there without bending over, and they can perch off the ground, and they can flap their wings, chances are it's high enough for all normal purposes.

I would suggest having another coop, perhaps, sometimes they just plain hate one another and when this happens the subordinate one will often try to roost elsewhere. If it doesn't have the opportunity to do so, bullying can escalate to levels where you really may as well cull the animal and chuck it in the compost, since under such stress it will lose weight and succumb to disease (if not killed by the other turkeys first), if nothing is done to stop the constant bullying. Never met any species so prone to obsessive 24/7 bullying, except perhaps cats.

3) Will all breeds of turkeys get along? I plan to harvest about 12 turkeys every 6 months. Am I on track with my plan?

Every turkey is an individual, just like every dog/cat/horse/chicken/whatever --- nobody with any commonsense or experience is going to tell you "yeah, all BBW's get along with all Narragansetts" or "all Chihuahuas get along with all Rottweilers" or any nonsense like that.

If the person/s you get them from have aggressive animals they have to isolate to prevent deaths, good luck getting poults from them to be much different from their parents. If the person/s you get them off are able to keep their adult males together, chances are the poults will be fine too. Unsocialized poultry can be as unreasonably aggressive or anxious as unsocialized dogs or any other unsocialized animal, social instincts notwithstanding. Social tolerance is in large part learned. The parents will give you a good clue as to what to expect.

With turkeys, one bad apple rapidly spoils the bunch; one turkey suddenly displaying aggression can and often does provoke a gang mentality in the others, and they are often obsessive, and will sort of get stuck in a mental rut, trying to kill their intended victim like nothing else matters. Once they start they rarely stop. They can go from peaceful to bloodthirsty in a few minutes. This can even happen to chicks a few weeks old. If you do not have a separate cage and run for such a contingency, you may well regret that.
Best wishes.

 

[chooks4life]

Long story shorter, to clarify, if you keep the poults of different breeds together from a very young age onwards, chances are they will get along for a while. But later on family traits will emerge, so if you mixed aggressive ones with non aggressive ones, despite 'nurture' and 'environment' you can still expect 'nature' to assert itself, often beginning quite young.

Best wishes.

 

[Lamanite Jim]

Thanks for the reply. I chose a height tall enough for me to walk under comfortably. I also was 'guess-timating' a height they might be able to fly under for short distances. This may not be a necessary planning consideration.

I read on another website that some breeds of turkeys grow to maturity (for harvest) in as little as 22 weeks. That is how I came up with an estimate of harvesting a dozen turkeys about every 6 months. The number of 15 birds I mentioned in my post was considering mortality and yes, I had planned on keeping a couple for breeding.

In the coop I stair-stepped four roosts made of 2 x 4s. Would that be good enough to accommodate/separate aggressive birds or should I add a second coop?

As you may have deducted by my questions...I obviously need as much advice as you are willing to provide. By the way, I am not raising the turkeys to supplement my income, I just want the sale of the birds to pay for my new found hobby. I can afford to make a couple of mistakes but I don't want to do it at the expense of the turkeys. I want to raise them as humanely as possible. I will probably have my neighbor harvest the birds. I will also try to avoid giving them individual names. I have been told that can be a mistake by getting too attached, which has already happened with our chickens (our girls).

Thanks again.

 

[chooks4life]

Thanks for the reply. I chose a height tall enough for me to walk under comfortably. I also was 'guess-timating' a height they might be able to fly under for short distances. This may not be a necessary planning consideration.

Alright, sounds like it should be sufficient. Good meat birds hardly do any flying anyway, most turkeys don't. One potential risk is if you mix age groups and have perches; big birds often just land wherever they feel like it, sometimes smashing smaller ones that couldn't get out of the way in time.

I read on another website that some breeds of turkeys grow to maturity (for harvest) in as little as 22 weeks. That is how I came up with an estimate of harvesting a dozen turkeys about every 6 months. The number of 15 birds I mentioned in my post was considering mortality and yes, I had planned on keeping a couple for breeding.

Thanks for clarifying. This info combined with the info that you're trying to do this for income for your hobby suggests you should ideally do some in depth reading up on how others make this work, because it's one thing to raise turkeys for your own consumption (as I have) and quite another to try to make it a profitable line of income. You'll have to run a bit of a tight ship there. There's plenty of info on these forums but also you may find industry publications, ebooks, library books etc that may help you more than I can.

It depends what weight you're hoping to harvest them at, too, but from the looks of it I'm thinking not many breeds at all will suit this project. You need real fast growers, probably decent quality commercial lines that will fatten quickly rather than develop skeleton first and flesh later like many breeds tend to.

This can be a problem if you want to breed them, since generally they're bred by artificial insemination and artificial incubation. So that would be a regular further expense of time and finances (unless you find decent chicken mothers for the brooding and rearing, or have a midget white male perhaps). Also, breeding them will necessitate another cage for most turkeys, because the toms can crush poults trying to mate with them, and some female turkeys can become extremely antisocial during breeding season (and outside of it too, some of them are really quite vicious. They may kill others, adult or infant, and attack you as well. Again, checking out the parents should be done to get an idea of what you can expect there).

Your profile doesn't say where you live but it's good to add that info; so much relevant info is very regionally specific. For example in Australia there are broad-breasted whites that can breed naturally, being dwarfs, developed for both free range organic pasture raising and commercial viability, but I don't know of a similar breeding program in any other place --- though I expect surely there would be.

You may also need to look into livestock regulations for numbers, housing, processing, disease control/ biosecurity, selling, etc at your location, or potentially risk being fined. I'd guess you've already looked into this but have to mention just in case.

In the coop I stair-stepped four roosts made of 2 x 4s. Would that be good enough to accommodate/separate aggressive birds or should I add a second coop?

When I first started with chooks and turkeys etc, I figured a good diet and enough space would solve most issues, as most people do; after all that's one of the 'golden rules' every book repeats... But over time I learned that no amount of space is sufficient to dull the drive to attack others that a truly aggressive bird has. Its focus is on its victims, not the rest of the environment. It can live alone, or with its own happy little family, and still decide to travel actual miles to attack another animal of its kind that it can hear on some distant neighbor's place. There's degrees of aggressiveness --- from something limited like always stabbing others in the head if they're within reach, to outright chasing for hour after hour, trying to corner and kill another.

The only solution for such animals is separation and culling, so a separate cage is always best, you will always end up needing it for something, often under emergency circumstances when lives are at stake... Emergency separations are commonly due to fights, or cannibalism, illness and injury. But you'll probably also have to separate for breeding and brooding or just rearing different aged poults, or whatever. Two cages hedges your bets in the event of predator attacks as well.

If you have some perches higher than others, most chickens and turkeys will instinctively climb as high as they possibly can, leading to only the top perch being used.

Stair-stepped perches are still a good idea, generally, but you may want to use them as access points to other perches which are level with the top perch, so subordinates can spread out away from the alphas. It may work for you as it is, or may not, no biggie since it's easy to knock up some extra perches if you find some of yours are always ending up sleeping on the ground.

Importantly, though, if you go with the more heavy duty commercial breeds, they may not retain the instinct to perch at all, or may physically be unable to perch after a certain developmental period... Or, worse, they may keep trying to perch when they are no longer able to support their own weight, and break legs etc. After generations of spending lifetimes with nothing to climb on that's higher than a few inches, they have lost much commonsense, but many grow so fast their brains can't accurately gauge their capacities either, so they'll jump from heights that weren't too high a week ago and find they've broken something because of the sudden weight gain that occurred within that week.

A lot of alphas will go to bed late and force every other turkey off the perch as they move to their habitual spot, rather than just going straight to that spot (no idea why, it's plain obtuse) but plenty of alphas will also just develop the habit of forcing all the rest off the perches anyway, almost like a nasty game, or a neurotic obsession. To prevent this, more perches helps, but running stuff like baling string from the perch to the ceiling at a few intervals will stop them from walking along it smashing the others off.

As you may have deducted by my questions...I obviously need as much advice as you are willing to provide. By the way, I am not raising the turkeys to supplement my income, I just want the sale of the birds to pay for my new found hobby.

Wish you all the best with that. You'll need more advice than I can provide though, but no doubt you already know.

There's not too great a line between raising turkeys to supplement income and raising them to pay for a hobby; it'll take a bit of experimenting and probably run at a loss for a bit, unfortunately.

You may want to look for a niche in a market, to get a better price (like organic, or heritage variety, or perhaps smoked meats or something)... Another possibility is franchising or something like that, where you are contracted to grow birds for someone, but that could be a whole other can of worms.

I can afford to make a couple of mistakes but I don't want to do it at the expense of the turkeys. I want to raise them as humanely as possible. I will probably have my neighbor harvest the birds. I will also try to avoid giving them individual names. I have been told that can be a mistake by getting too attached, which has already happened with our chickens (our girls).

Thanks again.

It's commendable that you have their welfare at priority. It's really the only 'right' way to go about it I reckon. Chances are, if you've gotten attached to your chooks, you'll get attached to some of the turkeys too, though, but good luck with that.

It would take some decent number-crunching to figure out how you can make an income from this to pay for your hobby; have you perhaps considered looking into growing turkeys (or pheasants) for feathers instead? I'm just suggesting potential options, I don't really know how viable that is for your situation though. Quail eggs may be viable for a niche market in your area, there's really a few other options which may be more viable than turkeys; perhaps rabbits, or pigs. It's easier to raise hundreds of turkeys for sale and make a profit than just a few, but it does depend on how you go about it and what the market in your area is like.

Best wishes.