Trying Turkeys

Christmas is coming and Liz Shankland feels there is something missing on her new smallholding.

- Liz Shankland

There were times I used to swear I hated turkeys. Dirty, smelly, noisy, greedy, cruel, dim-witted, and time-consuming – those were some of the politer adjectives I used to describe them.

For more than 15 years at my last smallholding, I subjected myself to raising them for Christmas. Even though I knew the profits were good, I still dreaded the work involved. The poults arrived in late July as tiny, stripy day-olds – all of which came with a built-in determination to die for no apparently reason, or to suffocate one another as they crowded together in a big fluffy, stupid pile.

One batch came with a secret murderer in the group and, when I opened the barn the following morning, the rearing pen looked like a scene from Saving Private Ryan, with blood and bodies strewn all over the place. I still have no idea what might have sparked the massacre, but I suspect one of the poults might have had a deformity, such as rectal prolapse, which quickly attracted unwanted attention and got pecked. With poultry, once blood has been drawn, it turns into a free-for-all, with everyone fighting for a piece of the action.

As well as having to re-stock and accommodate a separate group, at great expense, I had to find a way of managing the survivors of the first lot, to stop them killing one another. The solution was to provide numerous distractions – dangling CDs above the pen, throwing in branches of various trees, and providing a regular supply of different types of fruit. Trial and error meant the ultimate winner was Iceberg lettuce – it kept them occupied for hours; after a lifetime of hating the bland, boring stuff, I developed a real respect for it.