I got started with a few hens so we could have our own eggs. Pretty soon we had 50 hens. Then we started raising meat chickens for ourselves, and pretty soon we were raising 100 to 150 of them. We sold extras to our neighbors and friends, and do a little bartering for vegetables.
Anyway, whenever I looked through poultry catalogs, I was always attracted to the heritage turkeys. So for fun one year, I ordered about 20. I made a large fenced in range for them, and loved them immensely (I'm pretty sure I spelled immensely wrong). I had royal palms, bourbon red, standard bronzes, and narragansetts. I really thought I wanted golden phoenix, which is not a recognized breed (breed, color, variety....whatever). To get golden phoenix, I had to learn a little about turkey genetics, which is not that complicated. So I developed a plan and started breeding turkeys.
I found that I cannot make any money raising heritage turkeys for food because it cost me over $5 per butchered pound, and I can't get people to pay more than $4.50. So I am raising BB bronze to subsidize my heritage addiction. Addiction is never pretty.
Anyway, starting with a royal palm tom and a bourbon red hen, I have produced narragansett, golden narragansett, red bronze, standard bronze, royal palm, calico, and sweetgrass turkeys (all with some hidden recessive genes), but have yet to get a for-sure golden phoenix. I have one golden narragansett tom whose wings aren't really barred, but they aren't really black either. I'm hoping as it gets older, its wings will become less ambiguous. (A golden phoenix is basically a black-winged golden narragansett with a grey gene). If I could get a black-winged narragansett and a red palm, I would be in business because all of their offspring would be golden phoenix. But I'm a pretty small hobby farm and can only keep two toms and two to four hens for breeding, so I don't hatch a lot of birds every year.
That's my turkey story, and I'm sticking to it.
About the breed vs variey thing. Some people (maybe most) argue that turkey varieties are like colors in labrador retrievers. All labs are the same breed, but some are yellow, some are black, amd some are chocolate. You can predict ratios of different colored offspring if you know the background of the parents. This is true of turkey colors as well. However, different turkey colors also have different secondary characteristics. Some are larger (st bronze), some have differently shaped breast meat (royal palm), some have heavier breasts and shorter legs (white holland). These secondary traits seem to be closely linked to colors, because they are heritable like colors. For example, a standard bronze turkey is larger than most other colors, whether its parents were standard bronze or if it was the result of crossing other colors, even royal palms (You can get a st. bronze colored bird by crossing a RP tom to a BR hen, and crossing the resulting red bronze tom to a royal palm hen. Even though this st bronze bird is "3/4 royal palm," it's still a large turkey.) My point is that these secondary charactertics can make the different colors seem to be different breeds of a single species...turkey. I think the differences in turkeys is more complicated than color of a dog breed, but turkeys aren't as different from each other as say, labradors and chihuahuas. So, while "varieties" is probably a better descriptor than "breeds", it doesn't bother me a bit to hear people talk about turkey breeds.
The more I think about, the more I think that the fact that these secondary characteristics can be restored by continued cross-varietizing probably supports the variety argument over the breed argument. But it still doesn't bother me to talk about heritage breeds rather than heritage varieties.
