I'm showing my age here, but I'm assuming quite a few of you might also remember the game "Oregon Trail" on Windows computers back in the early 90s. At least that's when I was playing it.

You would start out with a wagon full of fresh food, ammunition, and all the provisions you needed to make the cross-country trek. Along the way there would be a storm or two, an ox would likely get swept away crossing the Missouri River, your wife would get hit by a stray bullet and you would almost make it to the finish line - then you would catch malaria or something and die. Each time you learned something, and you played again.

Somedays, farming feels like that. This year is one of those years with turkeys.

At this point, I transition with this sound effect in the background: Sound Effect

Each year I strive to get better with our turkeys. If you have been reading my newsletters for a while, you may remember me writing about how we rotate our birds on pasture, how they eat "gravel" (grit), and the importance of sanitation to prevent a deadly disease called Blackhead.

This year, I was fortunate and had plenty of grass for the beef, so I had an extra parcel I could experiment with. It was an area that was stomped up badly last winter by the beef, but only about 3 acres and often wet. It's too small for hay, too wet for produce, and just big enough to experiment.

So, this spring I wanted to plant a "pecking garden" for the turkeys. I waited for the field to dry off and worked the ground up and smoothed it out. I seeded it thick with an unusual mix - sorghum, millet, rye, and sunflowers. I had two goals. One was to get a lot of vegetative matter that could be worked down into the soil this winter for soil tilth. The other goal was to have seeds for the turkeys to peck at.

Turkeys, more so than any other poultry, really enjoy scratch grains. Scratch grains are grains that are thrown on the ground to encourage them to scratch around and search for them. Each day we take buckets of corn or wheat to the fields and spread them around. The turkeys come running and love it.

With this experiment, I was able to grow the field to full seed, about 10 feet tall with the sorghum and the sunflowers. I had to wait until the sunflowers folded over and were in full seed.

Yesterday, I took the cultipacker through and crushed the stalks to the ground (forgetting to take a before photo). Each day the turkey waters and feeders are moved closer to the gate to this field. By Friday, the turkeys will be in the field pecking away at all the seeds. This will keep them content for the better part of a month before moving to their final field.

This year, our price of feed is up across the board. Our beef prices should remain the same as the cost of sunshine to grow the grass hasn't changed, but for the hogs, chickens, and turkeys, our feed costs have been fluctuating anywhere from 7.7% to 28% higher than last year!

This experiment with the pecking garden is also one to help control feed costs. The more the turkeys can forage for their diet, the less feed I have to buy and the better I can control my production costs. The cost of planting this 3-acre field was about $250 in seeds, which would only buy me about 800# of feed. The flock of approximately 1,500 turkeys is eating over 800# of feed per day. So, if this field can save me at least 1 day worth of feed - which I believe it will - it is a good investment (not considering all the free fertilizer I get from it and the benefits to my soil).

But the real ugly part showed itself this year in the brooder. The brooder is the building where we raise the chicks for the first month. It has in-floor heat and three (3) overhead "brooder stoves." The turkeys like it warm - like 99.5 degrees at the start. The first few weeks are very stressful as you are constantly checking on the birds to make sure the temperature is just right so that they don't crowd and smother each other.

This year, I started a second batch of turkeys in August to meet demand for smaller birds. The first 4 days were awesome. Of the 750, I had lost only 1 in 4 days. That's unusual. There is almost always about 2% that naturally don't make it.

Then, on a Sunday morning (day 5), I went in and found 4 dead. I came back a few hours later and another 5. A few hours later, the same. That day I lost 23. The next day 70. The day after 100 plus, and the trend continued. By Monday morning I was really concerned and acted as fast as I could.

Understanding a turkey poult. All poultry has what's called a yolk sac inside them. It is literally the egg yolk. The yolk allows the chick to survive for about 3 to 4 days before it has to learn to eat and drink on its own. Turkeys are harder to start than chickens, but they are also copycats. I started 1500 meat chickens with the turkeys to help train the turkeys to find the feed and water. It has always worked for me.

The chickens thrived. The turkeys continued to die off. I added different feeders, different waterer, and everything I could think for the facility. I was watching the birds eat and drink, so I was doubtful that they were "starve outs" as one might suspect.

Using Science. I scrambled and started testing everything. I sent in feed to test for nutrition analysis, bacteria, and different toxins. I sent water samples away and checked for coliform, e-coli, and mineral status. All of the results came back clean.

My vet is a great resource and I called him immediately. We talked about what was going on and what we could do quickly. He suggested skipping his office and heading straight for OSU to take turkeys to their lab for necropsy. On Tuesday morning, I headed out to Columbus with a bucket of the freshly dead turkeys (yeah, it sucked).

And the results. By the time the results came back about a week later, I was down to just 40 turkeys or so. The lab traced it back to a yolk sac infection of staphylococcus aureus, something that indicates there was a problem at the hatchery either with their procedure or they received infected eggs.

Today, I'm sad to say only 4 of that second group survive. The first group I started in July is doing good, but my second group is non-existent.

My lesson learned - I'm not sure there was anything I could have done here other than get my chicks elsewhere. I did, however, learn in my research a lot about turkeys, turkey sanitation, and other symptoms to be aware of in the future. I figured out some new cleaning practices in the brooder and found some different watering systems that will improve my production in the future.

Thanksgiving Order Form. Will be going live very soon! We will announce via email.

Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Lisa Sands of Cleveland Foodcast, a podcast focused on local foods and the Cleveland food scene.

We talked about the meat industry and the some of the work I do with Fresh Fork, Wholesome Valley, and Ohio City Provisions.

If you have time, please give it a listen.

For more recipes, visit our archive at https://freshforkmarket.com/recipes/