hen or chicks

[abhaya]

I have a breeder close to me with nice palms. my ? is what to do I could by a her who has been bread or chicks. are turkeys good moms? should i bye the hen and let her hatch a clutch or buy babies?

 

[PatS]

If you buy a hen who has been bred, there is no guarantee that the first eggs she lays will be fertile, OR that she will decide to go broody and hatch out a clutch herself, OR that she will be a good mom the first time around. If it were me just starting out, I'd go with getting the day old poults.

It might help if you do a search here on raising turkey poults so you know all the ins and outs. They are harder to start than chicken chicks, so you will want to do some reading before you bring them home. For myself, I found that including a day-old chicken chick in with my turkey poults made all the difference in them making it through their first few days.

Many folks here have lots of experience. Look for posts from Steve of Sand's Poultry, he breeds turkeys.

 

[farmerlor]

Yeah, if you want to insure fertility of the eggs you really need to have a Tom on site with the hen and even then if she's young I'd make sure I had an incubator on stand by to hatch the eggs although they only lay a few eggs a week so you're going to be running that incubator for four or five eggs if you only have one hen.
I too would opt for the babies, put your plans off for a year and hope to get about three hens and a good tom to breed your flock for next year.

 

[bigdawg]

i have a nice year and a half old royal palm tom i would sell for 50.00 or trade for a mature red bourbon turkey hen.

 

[abhaya]

thanks he also has started poults thate are a month old or so. I think I will just go with some of those to avoid mistakes with the littleones.