Raising Turkeys Near Chickens?

There's a lot of talk on the Internet and in books about how you cannot raise turkeys anywhere near chickens.  I'm sure that if you live in an area that has a high run of blackhead disease that may be true, but over the years I have never had a case of it.

To start with, I think there are two main things you need to be mindful of - where you got your birds, and how you manage your flocks.

When I was a teenager, my mom raised bronze and white turkeys in with her chickens.  They ate together, drank together, and roosted in trees together.  We had poults hatch and they lived in the same environment with no dreaded blackhead.

Two years ago when I started my own flock, I listened to all the hysteria.  Don't let poults contact the ground until they are three or four months, don't let them around chickens, disinfect all your equipment weekly, blah blah blah.  I listened... and promptly disregarded it all.

I disinfect my brooder and all equipment before the birds arrive, but other than a weekly scrub that equipment doesn't get disinfected again until it's ready to be used by the next batch. 

My turkey poults get moved outside at about six weeks.  Honestly, by the time they hit that age, you'll be surprised at how big of a brooder you'll need! They go out into a mobile pen so that they can be protected but still have access to grasses and bugs.  The mobile pens run the same ground as the chicken mobile pens.  In fact, one of my pens is an 8'x12' divided into two 8'x6' areas.  Right now, one side is chickens and the other is turkeys.  They've been out there for months and everyone is just fine!

Now then, my birds came from hatchery stock, and everyone arrives here as day olds or are farm hatched.  We are careful not to let other people enter our poultry areas (with few exceptions), and we never bring in new adult birds.

We keep our pens clean, and move our mobile pens around often enough that they are always in a clean environment. 

I'm not saying that we'll never have a case, I'm just proposing that maybe a little practical experience might be more in order than complete paranoia.

What To Do With All That Chicken!?!

So yesterday I blogged that we butchered out 17 birds.  Because we choose to raise the slower growing dual purpose breeds, that also means that we don't get the big breasts and such that you find on the Cornish cross birds.  The reason for not growing the Cornish is simple to us; if a bird cannot survive long enough to reproduce itself it's unnatural. 

For those that don't understand that, the Cornish cross is a hybrid bird that is bred specifically for fast growth and meaty frames.  These birds do not live past 12 weeks at best, as their frames are incapable of handling the fast growth and massive weights.  IF you could grow one to sexual maturity it would still not be able to reproduce due to it's large breast size.  To raise Cornish cross for meat you must buy the birds each time you raise them.  To us, this is not a sustainable enterprise.

Hatching our own birds gives us plenty of pullets to grow for replacement hens, and the roosters make excellent meat birds.

I hear all the time about how roosters used as meat are tough or gamey, but I have yet to find that to be true.  I often think that people confuse gamey with tasting like actual chicken!  On the few occasions that we've butchered a hen (egg eating, poor performance, broken leg, etc), we haven't noticed a difference in taste at all.  Certainly a bird butchered after a year old is bound to be tougher than a youngster, but you just need to know how to prepare them.  When it comes to cooking chicken, I have always been the Queen of the Crockpot, so age doesn't really bother me.

For this group of birds I had several grand plans.  The first part involved cutting off the legs for BBQ Drumsticks.  The second required removing wings to make crockpotted buffalo wings.  Next I removed as much meat as possible to grind up for sausage and burgers, and lastly the carcasses got boiled to loosen any left over meat to be stripped and frozen for pulled BBQ Chicken sandwiches, dumplings and soups.

It's a long process, and it took all day.  Tomorrow the two smaller birds that I left intact, as well as all the parts will be divided up into meals, vacuum sealed and frozen.  Burgers and sausage patties will be formed, frozen, packed and vacuum sealed to go back into the freezer. 

Nobody said that working towards self sufficiency was easy, but boy is it rewarding!