A REAL THANKSGIVING BIRD
(Page 2 of 7)
October/November 1998
By the Mother Earth News editors
Day-old poults may be so infantile and so distracted by being shipped from the hatchery to you that they need help finding and learning how to use the feed and water. For this reason, avoid day-old poults. The usual sequence is for a goodly number of poults to be shipped from the hatchery to a local feed store or similar retail outlet, whence they are sold in smaller quantities to someone like you. This makes good sense. From the feed store, buy a few poults that are at least several days old. The weaklings will have been weeded out and the poults should already be eating well. Or do as I do and buy the three- to four-week-old started birds mentioned earlier. They cost a little more-about $4 apiece as opposed to $2 apiece for day-old poults, but with started birds you avoid the hassle of having to worry about a brooder and you avoid the sensitivities inherent in very young birds.
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The three dominant commercial strains of turkey are the broad-breasted bronze, the broad-breasted white, and the Beltsville small white. Toms (male turkeys) of the first two strains can easily reach 25 pounds in five months; the Beltsville variety is similar in conformation but achieves, on average, only one-third the size. And for all turkeys, the hens are about one-third smaller than the toms.
I have never tried the Beltsville small white strain, but I have raised both the large bronze and large white birds. The main difference that I can see between the two is in the color of the feathers. However, we did raise one large white tom who got so breast-heavy he couldn't walk. We had to dress him out a month before the other birds.
Housing and Fencing
You can raise turkeys one of three ways: confined, free-roam, or free-range. Confined birds are raised to slaughter in some sort of cage or other small enclosure. I say, "Why bother?" You might just as well go down the road to the supermarket and buy a commercial bird raised the same way. Freeroam is a fairly new poultry term used to describe birds raised indoors but within a large enclosure like a barn or warehouse, where they can roam around. These birds get some exercise, one key component to a savory roaster, but they get no sunshine. Nor do they have the opportunity to forage like a wild bird. Free-range produces the best turkeys and it is the way to go for the small-scale turkey raiser. These birds have a pasture or yard to range over, they get exercise, fresh air, and sunshine, can scratch around for bugs, worms, weed seeds, and the like, and are generally healthier, happier, more savory birds.
Even the free-range bird, however, needs shelter and fencing to keep him out of the garden and safe from predators. Standard woven-wire six-foot-high poultry fencing makes the cheapest, most effective enclosure. For lots of turkeys, you'll want to fence in several acres; for just a few, you can get by with something the size of a backyard or city lot-just a piece of natural ground where a turkey can forage around and be a bird.
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