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Rearing Turkey Organically

Rearing Turkey Organically - First Things First When Starting to Raise Turkeys

If you have chosen to rear turkeys for yourself, you may want to try rearing turkey organically. It really is not that difficult especially if you have an area that they can free range once they are old enough.

You will want to be careful about diarrhea with your young turkeys as most turkey farms deal with this on a regular basis, they will use antibiotics in the water in order to keep the turkeys from dehydrating. If you're going to do it organically, people have had success by using acidophilus in the water to keep the turkeys from getting diarrhea in the first place. If your turkey has had diarrhea for several days you're going to have to switch to antibiotics, which of course no longer makes them organic, but it's better than losing the turkey. Your babies are going to become important to you, and providing them with the proper housing, food, and herbal medications to keep them healthy is going to be important if you decide to raise them organically.

The other item that rearing turkey requires is a proper heat source for all the baby turkeys. You may want to put a red heat lamp in your turkey facility. This will allow the turkeys to stay warm under the lamp, but make sure you have enough of them for all the turkeys to stay warm. Turkeys naturally will pile on top of each other in order to stay warm, and if you have too many, the bottom turkeys can suffocate. Keeping your loss on your baby turkeys to a minimum is going to be vital if you want healthy adults.

You also may discover that one day your organically grown turkeys are wandering around in a drunken state, this is a natural response to a lack of certain vitamins and minerals. Some organic farmers rearing turkey have found that alfalfa can solve this problem. It usually happens around four weeks of age if it's going to happen, so starting then at about three weeks on a bit of alfalfa can help avoid the problem altogether. Once again, if you're turkeys do not come out of this or show continual signs of drunkenness, you will have to purchase turkey vitamins and minerals to add to their water.

Rearing turkey organically is a lot of fun and really isn't that difficult. If have an area that you can turn them out during the day so that they can free range on their own you'll find that they don't have to eat a lot of extra food. Also, make sure that your turkey pen is secure from predators or at least herd them inside for the night. The profit margin on rearing turkey baby's organically is quite a bit, so when it comes time to market your organic turkeys make sure you explain exactly how you reared them so people will want to pay the higher cost.