We are getting ready to take our heritage Narragansett and Royal Palm turkeys to the processors next week in preparation for Thanksgiving. The New York Times has a short article on why it is important to keep these and other heritage breeds around.
The upper picture is our Narragansett Tom, the lower is our hen with her poults right after they hatched last May.
6 comments:
Turkeys are next on the list here. We have friends who are raising the heritage breeds and have offered a pair. Let me know if there is anything out of the norm that ya'll have run into with the turkeys.
peace
Are you selling any of them for Thanksgiving? I found a local source for a heritage turkey for my family.
Woody - Danielle has a special recipe, high protein feed, that she swears lowers the mortality rate of the turkeys greatly. She will have to post her secret ingredients though since I am not sure what goes into it.
Christy - Yes we are selling the Narragansett's for Thanksgiving. I believe we have orders for all of them.
Ahhh, Jim finally broke down and answered. He's been telling me for the past coupla days that I needed to come here and respond for him—out of the realm of his expertise was the reason he cited. ;)
Yes, Woody, I highly recommend giving the poults a yogurt/ hardboiled egg yolk mixture early on, which I feed them off my finger because otherwise they step in it and muck it all up.
Turkey poults have a relatively high rate of mortality and are notoriously difficult to raise compared to chickens. My theory on this is two-fold: a) I don't think their bodies process the protein in the feed very well, and b) I think their guts need strengthening. The yogurt/ protein mix accomplishes both.
I've lost no poults to non-violent cuases since implementing this practice when they're young. I don't do it for very long, just the first few weeks or so. I feed about one egg yolk to one or two tablespoons of plain, probiotic yogurt once a day, depending how many poults there are, tapering off to every other day.
Of course, free-ranging and a mama turkey from day one do even better, but I swear by this mix. Mama has a much better hatch rate, too, but the babies tend to be far more skittish, ime.
Oooh, I should clarify that this is in addition to the free-choice, high protein turkey mash as a supplement.
Ahhh...I knew I could depend on ya'll for some straight stuff...
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