Probably....
Turkey weekend is our biggest weekend of the year. I plan for it all year long. It's a great opportunity to meet my customers, for people to see how the farm operates and meet their meat! It's usually a great time - with lots of volunteers, and creating fresh food for peoples' holiday dinners.
I plan for this all year - stocking the freezer with lamb and chicken, canning jams and jellies, getting everything ready for a great weekend.
This year threw me for several loops that tossed me off my game, and are making Turkey Weekend hard.
1) Last year, we had an outbreak of Mycoplasma early in the summer. We treated it, got our birds better, but we put leg bands on any birds that had been symptomatic - and we butchered them to help remove the myco from the farm. That left me with NOT enough breeding hens to hatch my own birds for Thanksgiving this year. I had to rely on buying poults from hatcheries.
2) My hatchery shipments were plagued all year. My first batch was delayed 2 weeks from the hatchery. THEN that shipment got lost by USPS and only 1 of 3 boxes arrived on time. All the birds in the delayed boxes perished. The hatchery replaced them - but they were also mishandled in the mail and they perished as well.
3) Running out of time to have birds large enough for Thanksgiving, I backed them up with a shipment of broad breasted poults. And this is where things went awry - even more
4) This last shipment (which was also delayed from the hatchery by a week) they came - they were vaccinated for Mycoplasma at 1 week, and again at 5 weeks. They still got sick - which means they brought the myco with them from the hatchery. Birds can transmit myco to their poults through the egg. Vaccines prevent birds from getting myco, but it won't do anything if they are already carrying it. We treated them when they were little and they got better. But once you have myco, you always have myco.
5) So in response - when the weather got really cold, we started making the broad breasted birds sleep in the barn, instead of outside, like my turkeys normally do. Back up - I did buy a bunch of birds from the 4H fair - these birds were butcher size in AUGUST, but because we do fresh turkeys, we kept them around - and they are HUMONGOUS. So we started making them sleep in the barn. Birds need to keep their feet warm. Birds that perch keep their feet warm with their belly feathers. They even curl their feet up under their bodies. Their feathers lay in such a way that any snow or rain is meant to slough right off.
But Broad Breasted birds get too big to perch, and they sleep on the ground. Cold, wet ground from a rain or snow can be deadly to birds - so we started making them sleep in the barn where they can stay dry.
6) In the last week, I've lost almost a dozen birds. All broad breasted birds. I'm trying to put the pieces together.
If all the lost birds had been really big ones, I could blame it on me keeping them alive too llong. Like Cornish Rock Cross chickens, if Broad Breasted birds get too big, they can have fatal heart attacks. They can also have problems with their legs being able to hold them up - I did NOT have this issue. ut sudden heart attacks can happen in these big birds.
I also lost some of the smaller broad breasted birds. They actually were perching up on a dog crate that I keep in the barn. So they were not being over crowded by the bigger birds.
Some of the birds definitely had myco again. There was some sneezing from both larger and smaller broad breasted birds. None of the heritage breeds were sick and none of them passed away.
SO - was this being caused by them sleeping in the barn? Was it too crowded? Were they getting trapped in corners? What was going on?
I found some of them passed away in the yard - at the end of the day. That's not over crowding. Most were, actually found in the barn. So I plugged up the gap between the wall and the big brooder tower, so they couldn't get trapped back there. I worked to keep the big barn door closed (Ferrix opens it every day) so that the barn would stay warm. I put down fresh hay to make sure the floor was warm and dry, especially around their water tank. We still were losing a bird or two or three per day.
That's when we decided to butcher some birds. We had to do this after work in the middle of the week, we only got 14 birds done. Larry focused on the biggest ones - the ones at higher risk of maybe heart attack. I focused on ones with swollen sinuses. We found some interesting things while butchering...
Most of the birds did not have damaged lungs. In really tough cases of Mycoplasma, birds will have infected lungs. We weren't seeing this. The ones I grabbed did have swollen sinuses, but their eyes weren't swollen shut. Just puffy.
One of the birds - which we gave to our dogs to eat - had an infection in her body cavity. I am conjecturing here, but that night, when we closed the barn, we saw a HUGE tom mount a hen to breed her. We are talking 50 pounds of turkey standing on 30 pounds of turkey. Usually, broad breasted birds don't start trying to breed - but if these beefy boys were regularly mounting the hens - this particular one, if she had sat on a stick, or rock when the tom mounted her, it could have punctured her skin and gotten infected. Were the toms crushing my hens? Were they trapping them in the barn and sitting on them?
The truth is, all of these things could be true. Maybe some of the toms did crush some hens. Maybe the barn was overcrowded at night. Maybe some had myco. We did a necropsy on two of the dead birds, and did find damaged lungs. But Larry only found one damaged lung per bird - so we think it may have just been how the blood settled after they died.
Anyhow - I PANICKED. I could not keep losing birds and have enough available for all my reservations. I could not allow birds to continue to suffer and die. We decided to process some birds and try to stop the bleeding, stop the suffering. And because I can only be honest and transparent - I sent an email out after a very sleepless night, letting my turkey customers know that some of our birds would be frozen on pick up day.
I got some folks pretty stirred up. I understand myco, and we've had it before. It does not effect the meat, and believe me, we know a good carcass from a bad carcass. You learn a lot about a bird when you open it up. You can see infection, you can see disease - lots of signs from the liver to the gall bladder o the lungs can tell you a lot about the birds. It's possible the ones that died did die from myco, and maybe they were more sick than they appeared. MAYBE the ones with the swollen sinuses and runny beaks were letting it drain, and others had more damage to their lungs with less visible symptoms. Or maybe they were crushed by mating toms!
But I should have waited until after we butchered to send the email. Because the ones we processed look just amazing. My fingers are crossed, but we haven't lost more birds. There is still one big tom our there trying to mount the hens. But it's likely before we processed that there were 4 or 5 toms doing the same. IF the issue was overcrowding in the barn - well, there are 14 less birds in the barn now.
I definitely panicked. I definitely did not have all the data when I sent the email to my customers, but I certainly don't regret being honest and transparent.
Here's to 9 more days until process day. Here's to NOT raising broad breasted birds again (they are just endemic with myco). Here's to hoping we can hatch more of our own birds next year!!
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