The turkey on your table: made with love, corn and whole lot of protein
Above: Northfield turkey farmer John Zimmerman
Written by Jonathan Eisenthal
Minnesota-raised turkey is among the state’s most economically important food products, sold far beyond the state’s borders, and creating an important market for other Minnesota farm goods, especially corn. For decades, Minnesota has been the number one producer of turkeys in the nation.
“We raise 1.2 billion pounds of turkey in Minnesota each year,” John Zimmerman, a second-generation turkey farmer in Northfield, reports with pride. (He also raises corn and soybeans.) “That comes out to almost 30 million bushels of corn fed to turkeys, for Minnesota alone.”
With Thanksgiving fast approaching, MCGA checks in with a turkey grower and a poultry-nutrition expert about corn’s role turkey production.
We heard from Zimmerman and a poultry-nutrition expert about the ration fed to the turkeys to grow them big and tasty. The first thing to know is that it is not one ration, but a series of formulations geared to the growth stage of the bird. Its most important feature is protein, coming in the form of soybean meal or corn that has been processed at an ethanol plant and turned into a high-protein feed called distillers grains.
“We start the young poults off with a 28% protein, and week by week we reduce that amount down to about 14% by the time they are 18 weeks old,” Scott Waldner said. He is a poultry production specialist with Purina Animal Nutrition, a company owned by Land O’ Lakes. He explained the rest of the ration: “Corn is fed for carbohydrates and energy. … Other ingredients include vitamins, minerals, fats and oils.”
Waldner said the turkeys “love their corn. It could be crumbles, it could be pellets, or it could be a ground meal form, with the corn being ground fairly coarse.”
Corn makes up 60% of the ration. It’s pure energy for the birds.
“They are hungry critters. They have no trouble eating,” Waldner said.
Amino acid supplements, lysine and methionine, help the birds grow fast and add muscle.
For Zimmerman and other turkey farmers, corn isn’t just another feed ingredient, but rather, it’s part of a larger cycle in which farmers make use of everything and let nothing go to waste. It’s a point Zimmerman has been teaching to his 7-year-old son Grant. “Here on our farm we raise turkeys, and then we sell the manure to farmers to raise corn, and that corn is then fed to turkeys,” Zimmerman said. “It was fun to see the light bulb come on in Grant’s head about cyclical things in nature and how we farmers work together with each other, and with nature, and so the waste from one product becomes a resource for another.”
