Raising Turkeys on Pasture
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Since 2015, Stacy Benjamin of 5R Farm, located in St. Helens, Oregon, has been raising turkeys on pasture. She usually maintains a flock of a dozen or so Narragansett and Blue Slate turkeys, with two clutches of poults bringing the total to 20. Benjamin started with three chickens in 2010, and then the poultry math got out of hand. Within a year, they had bought rural land with plans to move out, and the turkeys came soon after.
As she approaches 10 years of raising turkeys on pasture, Benjamin has a lot of advice to share.
“Heritage turkeys are so well adapted to their environments; it’s fascinating to watch them throughout the seasons, interacting and doing so well on pasture.”
Benjamin says it’s healthier to have them out on grass and not just in a confined space where it’s harder to keep up with manure management and keeping the feeding and watering stations clean.
“I personally feel better about the health and happiness of my flock when they’re out on pasture, and I can rotate the fence and always be sure they have fresh areas,” Benjamin says.
Raising turkeys on pasture means you have to be more careful about predators. For the safety of the birds, they are confined within a large area with 4-foot-high electric poultry netting. The fencing can help protect them from daytime predators, and a covered roosting structure can help protect them from nighttime ones.
“At times, I’ve had game cameras up on the turkey yard at night, and I’ve gotten images of coyotes coming up to the electric fence and touching their nose to it. And then the next shot was them running away. So I feel very comfortable that it’s been a really protective system for our flock,” Benjamin says. “I feel the poultry netting is really a flexible way to keep them safe.”
At 4 feet high, the turkeys can easily fly over the electric fence, but typically choose not to. She adds that when given a large enough area with a variety of habitats, structures, roosts, and places to lay eggs, they are content inside the fence. She doesn’t clip wings, and the only time their escape is a problem is when too many males reach maturity, all trying to court the females.
“There tends to be more excitement that time of year, and that’s when I experienced more flying over, but then once everyone matures, and they have a pecking order, or maybe you’ve sold a few, they settle down.”
Benjamin says that they enjoy an open view of their surroundings, so while a barn or four-sided structure may seem ideal to you, the turkeys may not choose to use it. Her structures usually start off at 4 feet and go up to 7 feet high for the roost. And while the idea is for them to sleep under the structure, she occasionally has birds sleep on top of it.
Photo credit: Stacy Benjamin.
“Turkeys will roost in trees, but it’s safer for them if you have an area closer to home, inside a fence, with a nice high roost,” Benjamin explains. “Raccoons can take them easily in trees, so I have a variety of covered roosting structures. They don’t need a big barn or coop or to be inside a building, but they do need to be offered some kind of protection from the elements. I tell people to expect the unexpected and be prepared to revise the setup as they observe their behavior what they like, and what’s working for them.”
Photo credit: Stacy Benjamin.
Heritage breeds and, to some extent, broad-breasted turkeys enjoy and do well exploring and foraging, Benjamin says. Her heritage breeds are very capable of finding a good portion of their food. She provides them with nutritionally balanced feed to make sure they get their proper nutrition, as well as high-protein treats like black oil sunflower seeds.
“During spring, summer, and fall, when there’s decent vegetation growing, a heritage bird could get maybe half of their daily intake from foraging,” Benjamin says. “It could be potentially more, but it’s important that they get that nutritional feed as well.”
While she doesn’t have direct experience with raising broad-breasted turkeys on pasture, she has chatted with friends who say they also exhibit a lot of wild instincts and behaviors as well and could benefit from being raised on pasture.
“As a broad-breasted bird gets larger and heavier, that can affect their mobility and their ability to forage, but I think if people are raising a broad-breasted just for the season, they should be able to do fine on pasture.”
Heritage turkeys make excellent and protective mothers. To ensure the poults’ safety, Benjamin takes some precautions. The mothers want to take their babies outside right away, even if it’s going to be cold or rainy. So she keeps the portable fence small, and if the weather turns nasty, she can usher them back inside their coop.
“By the time they’re a couple weeks old they’re getting a little more immunity gradually built up.”
For those starting with poults, Benjamin recommends not putting them on pasture until they are six or eight weeks old. Raising them in a confined sun porch or brooder would be best since young poults have very sensitive immune systems and they’re more delicate than chicken chicks and susceptible to picking up soil borne parasites.
“For some reason, if the mama turkey is raising the poults, that’s not an issue. There’s something about the mama raising them that helps their immunity,” Benjamin says. “But if people are raising them, it’s really important to just keep them off the ground until they have time to build up their immunity.”
For those who want to raise turkeys in an area where chickens have been living for the past few years, it’s important to ensure that blackhead disease is not an issue in the area. Blackhead disease is a protozoan infection that chickens can carry as vectors, but they are asymptomatic. Contact your local agricultural extension office and ask whether Blackhead disease (histomoniasis or infectious enterohepatitis) is a problem in your area.
KENNY COOGAN earned a master’s degree in Global Sustainability and co-hosts the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast, which can be enjoyed at MotherEarth-News.com/podcast. He also hosts and created the television show Florida’s Flora and Fauna with Conservationist Kenny Coogan. To learn more about that program, visit www.FloridasFloraAndFauna.com.
Originally published in the June/July 2024 issue of Backyard Poultry magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.
