How We Do Turkeys

I am writing today from a coffee shop in Bloomfield, IA. We are marking the end of our poultry production season for 2015. I thought today I would go into some detail about how we raise our turkeys.

We started our turkey pullets (chicks) back in late April by ordering them from the hatchery. We use Schlecht Hatchery out of Miles, IA (North of Clinton, IA). They have always given us good birds and they are a small family business that we want to support. Our pullets arrived in mid-June. Like almost all domestic poultry, they spend their early growth period in the brooder. The brooder is there to protect them from drafts, keep them warm, and keep them safe from predators. Our current brooder is simply a five-foot round metal stock tank that has a few small holes in the bottom and no longer holds water. The round tank is nice because it does not have any corners for the chicks to crowd in and smother each other. It can also be drug out of the building and dumped onto the compost mound and left to sterilize in the sun. We have a lid made of wood and hardware cloth as well as a few heat lamps. We do not use medicated feed. All of our feed is GMO-free. The only supplement we give them is some gatorade in their water for the first day. This helps the chicks get over dehydration from shipping.

Turkeys in The Brooder

The turkeys spend about five to six weeks in the brooder. This gives them time to develop feathers, and become much more durable. This early period is often the most challenging. I am happy to come out of this period with mortality rates of 10% or less. We usually schedule our fall locker run around this time, because the turkeys seldom have significant complications after this period of time. We often supplement their feed with beef liver, and fruit clippings.  From the brooder, the turkeys move outside to the chicken tractors, floor-less pens that get moved frequently. Our pens are ten by twelve foot and are moved every morning. 

Turkeys in the Chicken Tractor

The Turkeys will spend another four to five weeks in the chicken tractor. They will spend enough time in the chicken tractor to get large enough that aerial predators (hawks or owls) are no longer a concern.  We use short raccoon electric fence from Premier One Supplies to keep ground predators (raccoons, opossums, weasels,foxes,  and some dogs and cats) away from the pen.

Turkeys Ranging

From the chicken tractor, the turkeys will move to our ranging system. They will have a sizable area to move around in surrounded by Premier One's electric poultry fence. I am not a huge fan of poultry fence, as it is very saggy and requires a lot of additional posts to hold up. The turkeys will roost at night on a portable wood structure with a tarp strung out over their head. The roost keeps them off the ground (safer from ground predators), and helps to huddle them together so they conserve body heat at night. The tarp primarily keeps them dry, but can also reduce drafts. A cold very wet turkeys no matter how larger it is will struggle with hypothermia and possibly die.
We try to move the whole set-up about every week.

Turkeys Roosting at Night

Turkeys will spend six to eight weeks ranging. When it is all done, we will come by after dark and collect them one or two at a time and load them into the trailer. A piece of advice, always load poultry into trailers at night. They are more docile and much less mobil. From there, it is a very early morning trip out to the locker outside of Drakesville, IA. 

Poultry Locker

Last Days on Pasture

Freeman and Sara own Valley View Poultry Processing. I was beating down the door for them to open  (I think it was 2011) and I have been going there ever since. They are Amish and part of a very active and lovely rural community. Freeman gives me grief because I like to schedule Friday locker trips so I can visit the local Amish run bakeries. For smoked turkeys, we take birds up to Story City Locker. The nice thing about working with Ty and Bobbie in Story City is that I can now sell a smoked turkey that is not cured, so it is free of sodium nitrates and nitrites.

That is our turkeys production in a nutshell. We don't like to sell "fresh" birds for Thanksgiving, because it requires us raise five weeks later into the fall. That is a period of very cold nights, increasingly shorter days, and decreasing grass growth. All of these are conditions that make it harder to raise the turkeys and in my opinion reduce the birds quality.

Starting the last week in October, we will have turkeys available to sell. So please get in touch with us through the website.

Things I Want to Replicate on the New Farm

There are some things I feel like we got right on this farm, other things I feel like we got wrong, and many things we learned from. I wanted to post a bit on each of these thoughts and I figured I would start with something we did right.

When I look back at things we did here that I would like to replicate, I  immediately think of our water system. We fenced out our waterways and put in a well using the NRCS program EQIP. The well feeds into a pressure tank in our existing root cellar (Built September 1910). In the root cellar, all of our water comes together at a junction of valves. We have the capacity to run our livestock on either well water or rural water and the same is true for our house. Should we loose power for some time and the pressure tank become depleted, we can switch the livestock over to rural water. Should be decide we want to save a few dollars a month, we  can use the well water in the house. We have never used the valves, but they present us with options, and in farming, options are very valuable.

Root Celler Water System Junction

From the root cellar, out livestock watering system powers four hydrants and a year-round watering facility. It was not the cheapest option, but I have nothing but praise for our Cobett livestock waterer.
We have a LB model for handling two to three head at a time with a float valve system. When I was shopping around, I liked that these units do not require supplemental power to keep waterers from freezing. They use ground heat to keep the units from freezing and animal interaction to break the thin ice layer up that can form when it is very cold out.

Cobett Waterer (The Cow Calf Pair are for Sale)

Cobett with Large Chunks of Ice in it After Breaking the Layer

There are only two scenarios where I have had trouble with them. If it is very very cold out (say -20) then the cattle bed down for the night and don't touch it until morning. In that instance the thick ice layer might be difficult for them to remove. If it is also windy them sometimes the ice covers more then the opening on top and is a little more difficult to remove as well. The only other scenario I have encountered  difficulty in, is when the cattle break the ice in a small spot and drink the water down, dropping the water level in the Cobett and trapping the float valve in the ice and not letting it refill. Either way, I just make it a practice of checking the unit in the morning to make sure it is working find. It does come with an ice chisel, which I use to fix these situations easily. I would also suggest a small strainer to fish out ice chunks from the tank after the chiseling is done. It is not a big deal, and it is not a frequent concern, but it something to be ready for. Other then those situations, the unit has performed very well for me, needing absolutely no maintenance, except to occasionally clean junk and algae out the tank, as I never get around to putting the cover on it.

I will miss our Orchard. We have already set the gears in motion to replicate much of what we liked about our home here. I will miss our amazing peach tree (we have a pile of saved pits from), our service berries (50 already on order for next spring), and some of our other fruit trees (the smallest ones are coming with. I think we will be OK. Experience with grafting may also come in handy in replicating what we have here. We shall see how that goes.

I will miss much of our chicken building. I do especially like our brooder set-up, although it would have benefited from additional windows to help vent the heat and moisture better. With the new brooder, we use far fewer heat lamps, and the brooder requires many fewer adjustments.
I have already drawn up plans for the new chicken building, that we will aim to build next year at the new place.

Current Brooder (could use more windows)

We did make choices in our pasture seedings, including some native warm-season grasses in places. Some of them worked, and some did not. I can say, that I was very pleased with seeding in chicory and encouraging sweet clover in our pastures. Both of these plants are very deep rooted and can really pull moisture and minerals from great depths, making them great drought plants. Learning to work with our sandy soils has been very hard at times. You expectations are quite a bit lower then neighbors just a mile or two away. I have been very pleased with chicory especially. The cattle and sheep like it and it helps to control internal parasites, an all around win in my book.

Chicory in Bloom on our Scorched Pasture

I do love our Pella customers. Pella was a hard community to get started in, but word of mouth and time prevailed. Right now, Pella represents about 40 to 50% of our annual sales. My only concern about this is simply the limits on the size of the Pella market place for our product. I am sure there might be room to expand there, but the potential for expansion is much more limited then the west-side of Des Moines.  We will still be supplying our Pella customers with product in the future via our drop-off site.

That is much of what we did right around here. I am sure there are things I did not touch on. If you have things I did not hit on and you want me to comment on them, drop me a comment.

Product Review: High Tensile Fence Wire Strainers

For sometime, I have wanted to share what I have learned from my experiences with products that I use or have used on the farm and how they have worked for me. Jim (a local helper) and I have ran just over five miles of wire this year for an EQIP project to fence out our spring fed creeks. We have used a wide variety of products that I have picked up along the way. One of the earliest things I learned is what I like and dislike in a high tensile wire fence strainers.

In line strainers seem easier to use, but it is a myth

When we started building fence, we used the two different types of inline strainers. The advantage these strainers have is that you do not have to cut the fence wire and insert the strainer. Despite this advantage, I would highly recommend avoiding these strainers. They are much harder to actually get onto to the fence and tightened then you might think. They do not tighten as easily as my recommended strainer style because they do not have a stop on them. You have to keep holding the stainer tight wile you inset the pin they come with or a piece of wire to prevent them from loosening, making them much harder to adjust. I have often found that these strainers are even expensive then the ones I prefer as well. The clunky nature of tightening these strainers means that you can not get them as tight as our preferred strainers and I have had considerable trouble keeping sheep in where these strainers have been used so come spring they will all be replaced (luckily there are only around a dozen of them).

I would highly recommend framed or box strainers

Since I started using these strainers, I have not looked back. I put in about 250 of these strainers this year.
To install them, you have to cut the wire and insert it through the loop end (left side of pictured strainer) and either put on a crimp-sleeve on it or learn to bend high tensile and tie it off (it will save you a crimp sleeve which are $13 cents each).   Then you thread the wire through the spindle (right side of pictured strainer) bend it off and cut it so it does not catch. Lastly tighten the stainer to desired rigidity. The strainer tool (blue hand tool) is essential and inexpensive at less then $5. The best price I have found is from Premier One Supplies over in Washington, Iowa.

We also use the box strainer for holding our corner posts together

So when the weather breaks this spring and you find yourself out fencing, stick to the framed or box strainers and you will be much happier in the long run. I hope you enjoyed this review and stay tuned for more thoughts on products we use.