Tragedy Strikes Little Sprouts Farm

A very sad week just passed. Unfortunately we live in an imperfect world, and things happen.

This week we had a small tragedy with our baby turkeys. Just when we got close to 100 baby birds in the barn stall brooder, a technical failure happened. For some reason, the breaker in the barn popped off at around 7am. I was actually out of town that day. When Brenda took the last hatching turkey poult out to the barn late that afternoon, something didn't look right. Sure enough, the lights and heaters were off due to the popped breaker. The birds had been without heat all day!

She quickly kicked in to high emergency action with the kids and did their best to get all the turkeys inside the house and under heat lights. There were turkeys all over our kitchen and living room shivering and huddling under read heat lights hung on furniture. The worst looking ones went straight into the incubator hatching chamber for heat and moisture.

Their valiant efforts saved most of the birds, but by late that night when I got home, it appeared that we lost a total of about 30 birds, one third of our new flock. There simply was nothing more we could do to save them after being so cold for so long.

Brenda and hte kids reacted perfectly and saved two thirds of our little flock, and that is very impressive. The kids all pulled together in gather supplies and carrying birds to safety. It was a sad but impressive family moment.

My job now is to figure out how to prevent this in the future. We simply cant rely on electric heat as the only source of heat in the brooder. the birds are too dependent on heat to live. I had everything redundant EXCEPT the electricity itself, and of course that is what went out. The reality is, living in the country in southern Oregon, electricity is not reliable enough for it to be life support. We either need to add a generator to the mix, or move to gas heat. I am undecided which is a better option for us, so stay tuned.

Besides the sadness of loosing a third of hte little birds entrusted to our care, the financial reality is that we will not be able to replace them for Thanksgiving due to the timing, so our thanksgiving turkey offering will be more limited than we had hoped. Fortunately we can recover for Christmas turkeys.