Poultry Keepers Podcast

Turkey Talk 101: Raising Happy, Healthy Turkeys for Beginners-Part 1

• Rip Stalvey

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Alex:

Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast, where we talk poultry from feathers to function, we cover everything from chickens to ducks—and today it's part one of Turkey Talk 101! Whether you're new to raising turkeys or looking to improve your flock, we’ve got everything you need to know. From brooding delicate poults to choosing between heritage and commercial breeds, setting up the perfect turkey housing, feeding for optimal health, and even processing your own birds—we’ve got expert tips to help you raise happy, healthy turkeys. Stick around, because we’re about to talk turkey!"

John Gunterman:

So where do you start with turkeys?

Normally, it's pretty easy to get started

Mandelyn Royal:

with poults, the little babies, and they are very different from raising out baby chickens or other species of poultry because they have to learn by doing, and someone is going to have to parent those babies. and it's gonna be you. And that learning process can take up to two weeks to really get them going well with eating and drinking. And I personally love turkeys. I keep a flock of white holland turkeys. For growth rate and size more than anything, cause they were bigger than some of the other types that we had, but they still need that hands on brooding and I'm in there from the moment they hatch and get to the breeder, I'm showing them the food, I'm showing them the water, I go back two hours later and repeat the process and they'll end up bonding to you and some of them, they're like a golden retriever, I have one little male already Who is trying to follow me everywhere I go. So raising them is a fun experience. The only downside is when people start with commercial turkeys for their first turkeys

and they

Mandelyn Royal:

raise them with the intention to eat them. And then they realize. This turkey turned into a puppy. Now I can't eat it. So knowing your ability to set boundaries on processing,

John Gunterman:

you

Mandelyn Royal:

may find yourself with pet turkeys down the line.

John Gunterman:

So something that I found that bonding there's a very fine line between having a well adjusted turkey and having a trip hazard every time you try to move out in the barnyard.

Or if you're, I like to

John Gunterman:

have my bolts bond and learn from chicks if I could have chicks hatching at the same time, the poults are hatching to me, that's ideal because they have something and somebody to watch and learn from.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah. And it also creates separation.

John Gunterman:

And when they're out in the yard, they could be buddies out in the yard and leave me alone. So I don't trip over them.

Rip Stalvey:

When I was raising turkeys, I would take when the turkeys would hatch, I'd get about a week old baby chicken. and put in there with them. They were far enough advanced they could teach them all that kind of stuff without too much trouble. Y'all were talking about bonding and Jeff Maddox at Portrayal did a study one time. They had a Yes. An intern there and her main focus of her job was to spend about at least 30 minutes a day just going down there and interacting with those turkeys, the baby turkeys, and just said they'd be sitting on her head and on her shoulders. And he said, surprisingly, they divided them into two groups. One got human interaction, one We're just hands off the birds when they processed them, the group that received human interaction, weighed a full one pound more than the birds that got no human interaction.

Mandelyn Royal:

Interesting.

Rip Stalvey:

So there's a lot to be said for that. They can have a financial benefit to interacting with your turkeys.

John Gunterman:

If you think chickens are wonderfully therapeutic, oh, turkeys are really amazing. They're like something, Mandy, you said between like a poultry puppy?

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah. Poultry puppies.

John Gunterman:

Poultry puppies. They really are. Now I have

Mandelyn Royal:

encountered a mean tom before.

John Gunterman:

Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

I have seen aggression. Early on, and that was with a group of bourbon reds I had, and the first tom that was with my group, he decided with his spring hormones, because just every other bird, once spring rolls around, those hormones, they start coming in strong. And he was adamant that I was an adversary. And I couldn't break him of it. There was no fixing it. Once he picked me as a focus, I was done for because once a turkey finds a focus, they won't let it go. So we had fried turkey in July. Once I had a group of babies on the ground and I grew those babies out and I picked out a new one who had a way better temperament. So they can be aggressive, but in my experience with all the different ones we've tried, it only happened the one time. Everything else was sane and level and as intelligent as a turkey can be.

John Gunterman:

So in all your experience, have you found that there's anything different in the incubation or the brooding process with turkeys besides having to constantly, show them where everything is for the first couple of days? Yes.

Mandelyn Royal:

Keeping that humidity right where it needs to be is very important because the egg size is larger than that of a chicken egg. And they take 28 days to hatch instead of 21. So over those 28 days, you really want to monitor the air sac to make sure it's losing enough moisture without it being too much moisture. So it's the same thing of finding your incubation balance with humidity. erring on the side of less humidity, because if it's too high, it's not going to lose the moisture and they're not going to perform well in that last week. And I prefer 40 to 45 percent humidity for the first 21 days of incubation. Anything less dried them out too quick. Anything more drowned them, but it depends on your ambient conditions and your incubator

John Gunterman:

and the brooding process,

Mandelyn Royal:

pretty much the same as a chicken, but you're going to need more space really quick. Cause they're going to grow tall, very fast.

Rip Stalvey:

Yes. Okay. They can outgrow their brooder before you can turn around.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh yeah.

John Gunterman:

I'm thinking about people who already have all this equipment and are thinking about, Hey, maybe I'll get a couple of eggs. So the first thing is a single turkey is going to be miserable.

Mandelyn Royal:

Correct. They love to have friends.

John Gunterman:

Don't do that. Set at least six to hope to get two or three. I wouldn't try to raise just a single turkey.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, talk about an in your pocket puppy dog. That turkey will never know it's a bird, even if you did raise it with chicks. Cause they like, they have a lot of vocalizations. And they have a high rate of communication. Yeah.

John Gunterman:

And the other, and if they're lonely they're going to express that in their vocalizations. And that could call in every predator within a while. They have a very carrying call.

Mandelyn Royal:

As well as wildlife. It may not be

John Gunterman:

the type of attention that you want. Now, if you have a hen that you want to Inseminated by a wild Tom. I've heard that will produce one of the tastiest birds imaginable.

Mandelyn Royal:

Which is true, but you might also never see her again.

John Gunterman:

I definitely, it's something we've talked about in the podcast in the early days, I definitely want to do that someday because we do have a wild turkeys everywhere around here to the point where, again, we don't hit the brakes for them when they run out into the road. And that's actually pretty important. When these are hatching natively is they need to learn a respect for the road traffic because in town or in cities, they can cause problems if they don't learn this early on because people think they're cute and they hit their brakes and they cause traffic problems and, it's just not good.

Rip Stalvey:

Let's talk a little bit about. Excuse me, why people raised turkeys and getting started and to me the first decision comes down to, are you in it just for meat or do you want to show, or do you want something a little more along the lines of a heritage bird? The meat turkeys are modern hybrids much like modern broilers and they grow extremely fast.

Mandelyn Royal:

Boy do they, they can be ready for the freezer in as little as four months. And it's important when you make that choice for meat, you don't necessarily want to bring the double breasted commercial type to your farm to grow too early in the season. unless you're going to process it when it's at the size you want it to be. So if you think about when Thanksgiving is, and then you backdate that four to five months, that's a good time to get commercial birds. Cause if you go out and get them now, that bird is going to be 45, 50 pounds or more by the time we get to November.

John Gunterman:

Yes. They have an amazing feed conversion ratio. Turkeys are like top of the heap. When it comes to, how much you put in them versus how much you get back out.

Mandelyn Royal:

And there's a tipping point of when they're no longer efficient. So you want to time it right for your harvest window. If you're doing the commercial birds. Yes,

Rip Stalvey:

I think heritage breeds are much more forgiving. Yes, they are. They're, they grow much slower. It'll take

Mandelyn Royal:

naturally too.

Rip Stalvey:

They breed naturally. You're probably looking at six, seven months to get one ready to process. They breed naturally. They come in a variety of color varieties. And we were talking about this before we went on the air, but if I were to ask y'all, how many breeds are there? How many turkey breeds are there?

One.

Rip Stalvey:

There you go. Winner, winner, turkey dinner. Almost said winner, chicken dinner.

John Gunterman:

I'm thinking Tyson, Butterball.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, there's brands, not breeds.

John Gunterman:

Brands, not breeds. So what is the, when we hear broad breasted bronze, to me, that's the most prominent one that I think of. And I just think of the domestic or wild turkeys,

Rip Stalvey:

the broad breasted bronze colored like a wild turkey would be basically. And that was one of the early ancestors of the modern hybrid turkeys we have today. And most of the hybrids you get are white. And that's simply because when they're processed, they don't leave those little dark pin feathers and little flecks of color all over the carcass. It comes out. Perfectly clean. But like we said, they get big. I have seen 70, 75 pound Tom. That's, they have hard problems getting around.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah. I've seen him when they're a year old tumbling around, trying to walk like. Yeah. A graceful elephant, maybe.

Rip Stalvey:

But the heritage breeds, heritage breed comes in many different color varieties and some of them are pretty striking, but they, all of them, all the color varieties in Turkey as we have descended from mutations of. The bronze Turkey, and I was at back one of my good old days when I worked for the game and fish commission, I was at the wildlife research lab and was talking with our statewide Turkey biologist, and he had a drawer open. He had study skins, which basically when he would kill a bird, he'd skin it out and make a study skin out of it. And. He said, pull up in that next door down. And I did, and there was beautifully colored bourbon red Turkey. And a beautifully colored black and a Royal Palm. And he said, all of those were wild turkeys that he got. He collected out into the wild. They're all the color mutation of the bronze turkey.

Mandelyn Royal:

When I first got into turkeys, I fell in with bourbon red after I fell in with Narragansett black turkeys and some others. And I noticed there was some variation to size based on their genetics. And the bourbon reds I have were pretty great, but then I got bred into a corner and it was too tight and I couldn't find that depth of color I had and everything else was washed out. So I was like let's go ahead and try some other colors. So I did a order through Porter's Heritage turkeys and that program produces So many color variations. And I knew I wanted to try the white Holland and then I had to pick some other colors to offset my order in case he didn't have enough to send. So I picked pencil turkeys, sweetgrass turkeys and something else. And then when I had them and I was raising them out and I was looking at those white turkeys and I was like I wonder if that's recessive white or dominant white. So that next season I let the white Holland's breed with the other colors. And it opened up this massive can of worms. And I saw chocolate turkeys, pencil turkeys. Like it was the rainbow colors of turkeys. Now, when you breed the same color to the same color, you usually get that same color again. So if you want chocolate, you breed chocolate to chocolate. If you want pencil, you breed pencil to pencil. If you want Narragansett, you breed that color together and you get more. But once you let those colors mix up, man, it opens up a bunch of. Opportunity because a turkey is a turkey. That was a good spring.

John Gunterman:

It's a good lesson in how important selection has been and how important it is to keep up with. Yes.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, for sure. And then since I never saw a white turkey from that, I knew right off the bat, they were recessive white because they didn't throw white when they were bred with any other color. So that was neat.

Rip Stalvey:

One thing I like about I have a love hate relationship with it was heritage breeds. Is they can fly just as good as a wild turkey.

Mandelyn Royal:

The girls can, yeah.

Rip Stalvey:

And they want to roost just as high up in the tree as they can get. And, I've seen them up in the tip tops of some of the oak trees around here. I just marvel at how a bird that size can fly like they do. It's pretty incredible.

Mandelyn Royal:

My turkey pen is covered.

Rip Stalvey:

Good idea.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now I have noticed that if I raise them undercover for their first year, and then I start letting them range, they don't try to fly much at all because they never learned the skill. So my turkey pen opens up into my apple orchard and now I can open up their gate and they could go range in there and they don't leave that pen because I've trained them not to maybe. I don't know, but if I let them in the apple orchard, I find them there later in the day. And not elsewhere.

Rip Stalvey:

Another thing about raising baby turkeys, it's almost and I was talking with Frank Reese about this. I said, Frank, it's like baby turkeys have a death wish. And he said, yeah. He said, when you hatch them, they start looking for ways to kill ourselves. They're curious

Mandelyn Royal:

and nosy.

Rip Stalvey:

They are so curious, they get into everything. And at that age, they're not really afraid of anything. They haven't gained a healthy respect of things they ought not to be messing with. And

Mandelyn Royal:

they like to approach things as a group and then circle around it. There's a couple videos circulating online that show a ring of wild turkeys walking around something weird. Maybe it's a predator. Maybe it's a car. Maybe it is. A weird looking fence post.

Rip Stalvey:

I've seen them do that with a rattlesnake one time out in the woods. And they, it was just like head to tail. Going around and around that darn snake. Until they saw me and then they were like rockets taking off.

Mandelyn Royal:

When they're being curious, they have this whole series of vocalizations of clicks and chirps and what's that? I don't know. Do you know what it is? Someone go look. It's pretty funny.

John Gunterman:

You could spend hours just sitting on the porch with a iced tea in your hand, observing.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now, nutritionally, the babies do need better than Chick Starter. Nutritionally, they're a lot different than chickens.

Their growth

John Gunterman:

rate is so fast. They need more, but not too much protein.

Rip Stalvey:

They need a touch more protein. More amino acids and vitamins and minerals. Because to keep up with that growth rate, it takes putting a lot of nutrition in them.

Mandelyn Royal:

Most of the starters are 26 percent all the way up to 30 percent for the first couple of weeks. And then you can start backing that protein down as their growth starts to level off. But those starters. They need to be potent for the first couple of weeks.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. And honestly, those real high protein starters up in the high twenties and thirties, I never used that kind of starter simply because my birds were performing well. Probably 25, 26 percent

John Gunterman:

as long as you get the proper amino acid profile, which usually a commercial feeds, not going to have it off the shelf unless it's just not,

Rip Stalvey:

There's a few

John Gunterman:

brands that may have a really great nutritional profile, but often you need to supplement it yourself and. In doing so you're naturally going to be boosting your protein levels up anyways, slightly.

Rip Stalvey:

The other problem with those high protein feeds is that they're jacked up that high because with high protein content, because they have so many fillers. And the feeds that the birds have to eat much more of it to get the nourishment they need

John Gunterman:

just to be able to form the pellet. They're sitting there for no other reason than to be able to form that pellet. And turkeys, it's even more important is and as they grow, keeping the grit appropriately sized, they're going to need a lot bigger grit. Later on in life, you would not think that they could swallow golf ball sized rocks, but they do.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh, they do. And it might not even be a rock at all. It might be some other dumb thing they found and swallowed.

John Gunterman:

Lighters 22 shells. You'd be amazed at the things I found inside turkeys on harvesting day.

Mandelyn Royal:

I, turkeys are one of the reasons why I always check the gizzard when we're processing, just to see what in the world they found. And their gizzards are three times the size of a chicken

gizzard. Their crops, when they're 10, 12, 14 weeks old, their crops are like a bottomless pit.

Rip Stalvey:

And if you've given them appropriate size grit, those gizzards will get really big.

Mandelyn Royal:

Because that muscle's working.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah, it's working. Proper gizzard action.

John Gunterman:

You betcha. And it's extracting more protein and more nutrients, and that's how it's supposed to work.

Rip Stalvey:

Let's talk a little bit about space requirements. Mandalin, what works well for you with your turkey flock for space?

Mandelyn Royal:

It depends on if you want them to have forage forever in their pen, because you're going to need 60 to 80 square foot per bird if you want to have any shot at keeping grass around. So my biggest run coming off that barn for my little group of five turkeys, it's huge, and I still have to let them out to find more forage elsewhere. Cause they are very busy birds,

Rip Stalvey:

a perpetual motion machine, they don't really just stand around a lot and if they're up in a wake, they're doing something checking something to

Mandelyn Royal:

each other the whole time.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

So it takes a lot of space. Now when I'm doing my Thanksgiving birds, I'll put them in a tractor to prevent the distance cause they'll cover a lot of distance if you let them. Normally right about June, July, I start getting a significant amount of requests asking for just a female turkey. Cause if they are free range and they start feeling broody, they're going to head off into the woods and find a spot right on that coyote trail to lay their nest. And I've had people who they've had the same Tom for five, six, seven, eight years. And he might be on his, fifth or sixth or seventh wife because they can take off and try to nest. So I do keep them penned in the biggest pen I could give them and they still get supplemental range space. There's no such thing as too much space for a turkey, but the one thing you don't want to do is put them in tight confinement and expect them to be happy. It's three to four times as much space for a turkey than a chicken.

Rip Stalvey:

Easily,

Mandelyn Royal:

and the roost space, you want three foot of roost space per bird and you want to keep your roost pretty low down because if you're coming down off of height, they may injure themselves because they'll crash land or, so I have my roost only three foot off the ground and it's a flat two by four roost. So they have plenty of foot room.

Rip Stalvey:

Let's talk a little bit about. They're disease resistant,

Mandelyn Royal:

but they do have some concerns, especially if you are raising them with chickens. Chickens can carry blackhead disease, which is terminally bad for turkeys. Thankfully, I don't have it, but it can be out there. And fowlpox is another one. They can be very sensitive to coccidia. So when you're at the feed store, checking out the game bird or turkey fees, most of them are probably going to be medicated because of how sensitive they are the first couple of weeks,

Rip Stalvey:

And another thing, they are really successful, susceptible to respiratory infections.

Mandelyn Royal:

That I've not had an issue with, but I bet they would be because they're sensitive. If

John Gunterman:

they're kept in confinement in tight quarters it's going to be bad. Yeah.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. And the key to that, to helping them not have those issues, and when you've got them in confinement, is to make sure they have really good ventilation and make sure that the bedding is dry. Yeah, they don't

Mandelyn Royal:

tolerate dampness very well.

Rip Stalvey:

No if they're in there in damp conditions and poor ventilation, they're going to get sick on you and they can get sick and go, they can die at the drop of a hat sometimes.

John Gunterman:

If we look at, this is a good segue into this topic basically the indigenous communities who originally semi domesticated wild turkeys. And they were, allowed to roam freely during the day and only brought in at night into simple, bush like shelters to keep predators out. But they always had plenty of ventilation. They always had access to pasture. And turkeys kept in confinement is just, it's a recipe that I don't want to share with my fellow culinarians.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, for sure. Plus they're, because of the size of the bird, it makes their poops a lot bigger too.

John Gunterman:

And what works around here, everybody who does pastured poultry also does a run of pastured turkey per year and they time it, so they're processing their Thanksgiving orders in time.

Mandelyn Royal:

That flavor difference between what turkeys you raised and what turkeys you can buy from the store. It's such a big difference in the depth of flavor, the color even, because a lot of the store bought turkeys have been injected with brine tenderizers. I think it was up to 10 percent

John Gunterman:

usually. Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah. And that can change the color of the meat

John Gunterman:

and the flavor and it's brine. So you're adding extra salts to the equation. So if you're on a sodium restricted diet, you probably should avoid that.

Rip Stalvey:

And another thing

Mandelyn Royal:

that wasn't messed with, man, that's good.

Rip Stalvey:

Another thing that really contributes to the flavor is how much they move around.

John Gunterman:

Yes.

Rip Stalvey:

The muscles are being used. We talked a little bit about this last Thursday night on our Poultry Keepers 360 live stream and how birds that are allowed to exercise and live. Out in an area where they can move around and be chickens or be turkeys or they're going to develop more flavor in their muscles and the muscles particularly the thighs. The leg meat and thighs is going to be a little bit darker than birds you buy, the commercial birds, because they're raised in confinement. They can't move around.

John Gunterman:

And I like that because they dry out less during the cooking process and retain more flavor to be used for soups and stocks and, all that wonderful stuff.

Rip Stalvey:

Now I'm getting hungry. I know.

Mandelyn Royal:

I was just thinking about the bone broth potential off of a. Pasture raised heritage bird. Oh man, save your bones after Thanksgiving and do a giant pot of broth that next day.

John Gunterman:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

Talk about some dense nutrition.

Rip Stalvey:

Let's talk about processing turkey's mandolin.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh, that's a job.

Rip Stalvey:

But and a lot of people really underestimate how big a job it is. If you were to compare processing A turkey to a chicken, and any age, how does that compare? There's a

Mandelyn Royal:

reason that our local processor charges 20 per turkey versus 4 per chicken. And once we saw that prize and then we started doing the math on raising them and all of that, we're like, you know what? We can do this. How tricky is it? So they're huge. These are big birds.

John Gunterman:

Getting a bird upside down into a cone.

Mandelyn Royal:

We don't use cones. Exactly. We have this fancy contraption to keep it peaceful for the bird. Cause the one thing I always aim to avoid is stressing them out. I don't want them to even, No, we're up to anything. I want that to just be quick, easy, painless for them to where they don't even know but you do have to eventually get them upside down and do that final part as fast as you can, but we have leg restraints that hold them upside down and then we have a adapted bucket cone that we made to accommodate their bigger size. And we prefer to have it as a two person job just to make sure that we don't botch it because it's really important that it's safe for them the whole way through and safe for us as well because those wings, if those wings get out of your restrainer,

Rip Stalvey:

They're going to

Mandelyn Royal:

beat you up. And I took a wing to the face. once before I learned how they go down. And then after that, your skull tank needs to be a lot bigger than what you'd use for a chicken. And when I was trying to figure out our skull tank, I was trying to envision how big of a pot, 100 quarts is 140 quarts. So I have a 160 quart. Stainless steel pot, which in hindsight, that's big enough for two turkeys.

John Gunterman:

It also retains more heat. So you have a quicker recovery.

Alex:

That wraps up this episode of Turkey Talk 101! Thanks for tuning in to the Poultry Keepers Podcast—we’re so glad you joined us. But don’t go too far! We’ve got more turkey tips coming your way in next week’s episode as we conclude Turkey Talk 101. Until then, happy poultry keeping!

People on this episode

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John Gunterman

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Mandelyn Royal

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Rip Stalvey

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