Can turkeys live with chickens?

[jmurno]

I was thinking of getting turkeys to raise for meat birds. I have Alpha Gal Syndrome which makes me deathly allergic to all mammals. I’ve almost died from smelling bacon cooking! So I got chickens to raise for eggs. I’m thinking of raising a few turkeys for our freezer. How far away from my chickens do turkeys need to be kept? Can they share a pasture for free roaming? We have 50 acres.

Mine got along together just fine. They cooped together until the turkeys got too big for the one small coop then I moved the turkeys to a larger coop. I only kept them in coop at night time. They ran around outside together all day long and would sometimes hang out together but mostly would self segregate -- turkeys would go one place and chickens another.

 

[jmurno]

It sounds like it can certainly be done, but I'm not sure I want to risk it.
Were your turkeys raised with chickens, or introduced later?

I got the chicks early may and the poults 2-3 weeks later. They were cooped together until the turkeys got too big (could trample the chicks accidentally) then I put in a partition. The ducks were the ones that really needed to be separated -- they would beat up the chicks and poults all night if cooped together! Never saw any aggressive behavior from the chickens nor turkeys until the males started to reach maturity but even then it was mostly harmless posturing. The male turkeys, once grown up a bit, fought eachother sometimes but never anything serious -- no blood ever drawn or anything like that.