2025 Turkey Breeding Experiment Results

Full Disclosure... our turkeys started hitting customer's freezers last week. We had many repeat customers this year! Thank you.  I've also been letting you all know that the birds didn't hit the mark this year on their butcher weight because we changed feeds. So, that made me nervous and drove us to poison test the smallest bird in our kitchen this weekend (it was under 6 lbs.). Here's what we found.

Flavor: Out of this world! Hit the benchmark, just like last year.

Tenderness: Decent. Not as good as last year, but close.

Juiciness: OK, but again, a little less than last year. (We propped this one up with injected marinade).

Dress Weight: This was the biggest disappointment.  We believe it was because we changed feeds (read on to find out the fully story there), but we're not going to rule out that this was a cross of a cross of turkeys either even though they hit all of their growth benchmarks except for filling out in the middle. 

To quote farmer Richard last night, "Now thats a bird I'd want to eat all year!" We hit the mark.

Now... here's what we did different in raising them.

#1. Home bred: These were hatched on our farm from 6 adults we held back last year from last year's Artisan Black turkeys from McMurray Hatchery. We later found out that they weren't supposed to be able to breed... likely because the males are so heavy, they're really hard on the females. But the females held up fine, and everyone was fertile. We had about a 95% hatch rate all season and sold 80 poults and we kept 90. So these were a cross of a cross breed. By hatching and raising them, and selling the extras, we saved $15 per bird on purchase price alone vs buying them from the hatchery AND paid for the feed bill of the 6 adults we held back for the entire year! (It's about $1,000 per year to feed those 6 adults).

#2. Feed order mistake: Last year, we ordered turkey feed from our favorite local mill that was supposed to be corn and soy free. We found out this year when we went to order again that they do not make a soy-free turkey feed... only corn-free turkey feed. So last year, what we advertised as soy-free was not. It was an honest mistake. So this year, we decided to experiment and just feed the turkeys our layer feed which is truly corn and soy-free. It's about 10% less protein and way less fat being soy-free. It kept the farm's soy-free practice honest, but cost us severely in the dress weight of the birds. We averaged 5 lbs. less per bird. That's a lot of money left on the table. (And no, it does not kill your birds like so many gurus and corporations tell you... we had almost a 100% survival rate until late summer heat set in).

We didn't lose money on the turkeys, mostly because we priced them appropriately this year, but any bird under 6 lbs. dress weight meant we broke even on that bird... thus why we ate this really small one last night. It cost $52 per bird for us to produce them including feed, butchering, and fuel to drive the 3 hour round trip to the butcher. So a 5 lb. bird is break even. Our average butcher weight was 8 lbs. this year, so we made approximately $30 per bird in profit.  Compare this to last year when our average butcher weight was 13 lbs. on the same breed of birds.  They grew at an appropriate rate, but they just would not fill out in the mid-section.  In order for the farm to be sustainable, the profit margin needs to be about equal to the input costs. So, we missed the mark, but didn't break the bank on these guys. We did in fact still make a profit, but left about 40% on the table from not feeding soy.

We also lost a lot of the younger poults on pasture in August and September, mostly to heat. The older birds 3 months and older did fine. I got a head count the other day and we have about 6-10 left that were slated as Christmas birds compared to the 40 we started with in that youngest batch. The late summer heat really took a hit on them. In all, those accounted for about a $330 loss in just feed they consumed in that time. If we run with that many again next year, I think we need to rethink their shade structure. The laying hen tractor that is shared by all of the birds is on its final leg and is going to get scrapped and rebuilt this winter. That should help with air flow and overheating. We overbuilt the current iteration for predator protection and it's taking a toll on both the birds and on us being able to move them.

Now add in the ones we lost to heat and the food they consumed in their life, and that brings our profit down to about $20 per bird, just spit-balling it at this point, but it's close enough. Now that's a 60% profit left on the table when added to the soy left out of the feed to fatten them up.

We have one more batch of 30 bigger birds going to the butcher this week, but we can already tell they are smaller than last week's batch. I'll likely make most of these into cuts and ground in order to recover a tiny margin more... but it looks like I'm going to need to buy another freezer this week. It would have been fine if the butcher hadn't moved their butcher date up another full week. 

 It just takes time to move these things into customers' freezers, plus we have a whole hog coming back to the freezers this week. We will be out of room in all 5 freezers, not including our personal freezer.

Overall, even with some set-backs with this year's turkeys, we will still be green on turkeys, just not as much as expected. I'll have some research to do for sure on how to stay soy-free and still get a good dress weight on the birds. I don't think it was the home-grown stock, but I'm not ruling it out either. That will have to be experimented with another time. The good news is we still made good birds, just smaller.