Raising turkeys for Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving y'all:)

Here's timely advice from North Carolina Cooperative Extension if you're thinking of starting a small turkey operation for next year: Raising Standard Turkeys for the Holiday Market.

The first two points sound like the voice of experience:

"a. Identify processing plant before obtaining poults
...
"b. Identify feed source before obtaining poults"
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And here's a report about a somewhat larger operation: In This Town, Turkey Picks Up Bill for Dinner, concluding with this:
"“You look at it every day, and you get to where you don’t really care for turkey,” Mrs. Farmer said. “That’s why I get a ham.”"

The market for fresh turkeys

Frozen turkeys can be produced year round, but fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving all need to be brought to maturity at around the same time. This column from last year's Slate puts the picture into focus: The Turkey-Industrial Complex--How do farmers produce so many birds for Thanksgiving?

"Producing fresh turkeys takes more planning. Market leader Butterball, for example—which grows about one fresh bird for every nine frozen ones—has already begun the production cycle for next year's holiday season. Eggs for breeder birds have been purchased from one of the world's two major genetic suppliers, Hybrid and Nicholas. Those eggs will then be hatched and placed in turkey farms so that they can grow and become sexually mature during the winter. (Butterball needs roughly 28,000 laying hens and 1,700 "stud" toms each year to produce the right amount of fresh turkeys.) Come springtime, these birds will produce the eggs that are destined to become the turkeys we actually eat. Hens produce eggs in 25-weeklong cycles: The first five weeks' worth go toward fresh turkey production, the rest toward the frozen turkey market. Breeder hens are normally used for a single cycle before being slaughtered and processed themselves."