Breeding?????

[misfitfarm]

I have a tom and hen white broad breasted turkeys and the tom tried to mate two days ago and my hen just laid an egg. Is it possible for them to breed?

 

[Celie]

Hi,
I started out raising BB white turkeys!
They were from a hatchery where I had bought some chicks. They sent me an e-mail that they had large BB Turkey poults, on sale, as day old straight run poults, very cheap. I had seen them in my local feed store, too and was thinking about getting some, when I got the email. I bought the min. which was 15. They did great and grew very very fast. I lost a couple to over eating, my first mistake in feeding. As they grew, I found out how much a Turkey could eat and how big these birds could get. We had to harvest them with the tractor to pick up their tremendous bodies for bleeding out . The last Toms we harvested were 80+ pounds on foot. I weighted one of the breasts that I deboned to grind for ground turkey and there was 35 # of breast meat alone. I also made a lot of sausage, too. The problem with them was that half of them died of a heart attack or went lame from the tremendous weight. My bad, before I learned they would eat themselves to death, like Cornish rock broiler chickens! You can feed them all they want for about 10 to 12 hours a day, but can't leave them to eat all they want from a feeder. I kept a couple of females and a male to see it I could mate them the next spring. The first dozen eggs or so I gathered were fertile, before the toms grew too large to mount the females and I discovered that they needed to be AL. That would have been OK, and I would have raised each year's fertile eggs, restricting feed and only keeping the hens and using younger males for mating, but most of the poults, I hatched out, were not double breasted and some had sunken inn breasts! In reading further about the BB White hybrids, I found out that they were bred from Holland Whites which originated in Mexico, and that the HW's were the commercial meat Turkeys of choice until 1935, when they developed the BBW's. I also looked at the size of other Turkeys mentioned in catalogs and decided these were the biggest that were natural pure bred, except for the standard bronze, so I went with them, being white feathers make a cleaner looking bird when plucked.
Thanks for your post,