The Turkey Evolution at Bull City Farm Continues

The Turkey Evolution at Bull City Farm Continues

As with most things at Bull City Farm, and in the Gasson/Stirrup household, our turkey journey is ever evolving. My first post about how we ended up raising the Bronze Broad Breasted rather than the Standard Bronze can be found here. It chronicles how a heritage only farm happily ended up with multiple non-heritage breeds.

The biggest, and really only problem, we have with the Bronze Broads is that they are large, and I mean large! We’re constantly adjusting their feed after 12 weeks to make sure we don’t end up with an average weight of 18lbs. Even with this careful caloric oversight we rarely have an average of less than 15lbs.

You might suggest that we process them earlier so as to end up with a smaller bird but the last few weeks of growth the birds are building fat, that last touch that makes our birds oh so tasty! The only way to get a smaller bird is to raise one that is naturally smaller at age.

This dilemma isn’t a new one, you have to balanced the pros and cons. It’s hard to find a heritage bird locally and as we found out from our Black Spanish experiment the hatcheries don’t tend to carry birds true to breed. We absolutely loved raising this beautiful, black, impressive bird but they ended up being about the same size as their broad breasted cousins. What we needed were chicks from a local breeder who focused on breeding the best examples of their chosen breed rather than selecting ever larger birds.   

Right in the middle of the 2024 turkey season we had the opportunity to acquire a flock of Standard Bronze Turkeys, the forefathers of our beloved Bronze Broad Breasted birds. We hemmed and hawed, not sure we wanted the responsibility, or cost, of raising birds year-round. After another year of customers clambering for the smallest birds on our size spectrum we made the plunge into turkey breeding.

 It has been an eventful experience. Since turkeys only breed in the spring we had to replace our 60 yr old wooden case incubator with a larger one so we'd have plenty of space to set as many eggs as we could in the time we had available. The old incubator is an oldie but a goody...it has seen the inside of multiple kids’ classrooms (thank you Ms. Ray and Ms. Conner) has hatched out thousands of chickens, plus a few emu and geese. After almost a year in the works we now have our first flock of home-grown birds.

We are very hopeful that these beautiful bronze beauties will offer a wider range of sizes for your holiday table along with the knowledge that these are of true Durham County stock.