Yeah, what did you feed them on Terry? Our biggest one was 10kgs or 22lb dead weight!
I'm going to retire!!! 
When you say dead weight I assume you mean oven ready?
I fed them on Mariages Turkey Crumbs to 6 weeks and added a multivit to their water for about 3 weeks, then turkey growers virtually to slaughter with only the last week and one other on Finishers. I had intended to switch them to Finishers at 14 weeks for the last 5 weeks but due to a misunderstanding with my feed mechants I only fed finishers for one week 14 - 15 weeks and then my order of Finishers hadn't come in so they had a week on Farmgate Turkey Growers. Then when my feed merchant order came in it was Growers instead of Finishers so they had 3 more weeks on Marriages Growers to eighteen weeks and then only the last week on Marriages Finishers before slaughter.
Otherwise all the feed was Marriages except my second bag of feed which was BOCM Paul. The Marriages was organic (not that I'm a religious advocate of organic feed) though the BOCM growers fed for only 2 weeks at an early age (around 8 weeks) was medicated. They had lots of grass grazing but I generally kept them in until 11am as I noticed they didn't eat the pellets so much once out so I kept them in with pellets and water in the morning. Once out they also had pellets available adlib but no corn or scraps. The Stags in particular grew quickly where as the hens weren't unusually large. The main difference between the Marriages Growers & Finishers is the former was high in protein and the later higher in fibre and lower in fat. So they spent about 4 weeks longer on the high protein Growers than I had intended so maybe that was significant.
The only other thng I did was give them a week of Baytril antibiotics at 6 weeks, when they first went out, as I noticed one was sneezing which I believe I mentioned to you. Baytril is known to stimulate appetite. I gave them fresh water each day which had been sanitized with Vanodine V18 to prevent any cross infection and in fact there was none. The turkey which had the respiratory infection didn't grow as well as the others and was my smallest bird though that would have been partly due to it being slaughtered at 18weeks as a "test" slaughter, so we could hone the technique, before we did the remaining 5 birds the following week.
They were interesting birds to keep being highly inquisitive and became very tame as they were handled everyday and weren't at all aggressive to me or each other. They seemed to quite like being stroked. They insisted on roosting on the fence around my oak tree in their run and every evening I picked them off and carried them to their house. No wonder it was tiring and I could almost feel them gaining weight over the weeks, the stags were becoming quite a handful towards the end.
HF
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July 11, 2013, 08:51