Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

One of the joys of rearing your own livestock is that you can get to choose which individual animals to keep. Sometimes you might not keep any, as with the lambs: we have our two ewes and due to the size of our land we will never want to keep more so each year when we breed from them we know that their lambs will always be destined for meat (or sometimes we may sell the ewe lambs)!
There are times however when one loses breeding stock due to illness, old age or in the case of our turkeys, to Mr Fox!! This year we have lost two out of our three breeding female turkeys as well as our breeding male and so as this year's poults have been growing up, we have been looking to see which ones 'won't' be ending up on the Christmas dinner table! The 'lucky' male in the first photo is one of them.
This chap is going to be our new Napoleon and we very much hope he will be as gentle and tame as the old Napoleon. We have chosen him as he has proved to be the most inquisitive and tame, he has the most beautiful green sheen to his feathers and he is a fabulous shape. We still have some choosing to do amongst the females but we have another month or so before firm decisions need to be made!! The right hand photo shows the turkeys at just six weeks old. It's hard to believe they were once so small...