Turkeys or the Egg (which comes first)

[Un1ted]

Or you know, you could always just eat them ;p

I do, I do ...them's good eatin'!


I also use a different configuration than others I've seen so far: Top row all Gobblers. 2nd row all Hens, 3rd row empty (for eggs), 4th row all Hens, 5th row empty (for eggs), 6th row empty (for droppings that accumulate, and for Chicks). I've had really good success rate this way - even though people are saying you only NEED one single Gobbler (which is true of course) but it seems to me having that full top row of six Gobblers gets me more eggs. I've experimented with only 3 Gobblers and my egg-rate drops noticeably. When a chick hatches I move it down to the bottom row to make room for more eggs.

[Feedzor]

So you just need 1 gobbler and all the hen's can pretty much gang it for eggs? I murdered all my gobblers now and kept just one, the rest is all hens like on the picture. Ill see tomorrow if there are some eggs.. otherwise there must be something wrong here.

[Un1ted]

Like I said above, I use a full row of SIX Gobblers, and my coop is literally overflowing with eggs and hatchlings. I have more eggs than I can cook into Farmer's Omelettes, and I'm going to build more coops since cooking up my full Plucked turkeys, or butchering them up into cuts or Turkish Delights is still resulting in wasting unused product.

But by all means, continue on with only 1 Gobbler if you want

[Sevenless]

Like I said above, I use a full row of SIX Gobblers, and my coop is literally overflowing with eggs and hatchlings. I have more eggs than I can cook into Farmer's Omelettes, and I'm going to build more coops since cooking up my full Plucked turkeys, or butchering them up into cuts or Turkish Delights is still resulting in wasting unused product.

But by all means, continue on with only 1 Gobbler if you want

Once turkeys are going at full steam you do get a full coop of eggs with 3 rows of hens and a single gobbler. I get between 4-6 eggs per day per coop. I have three coops running and they keep a 4th coop for poults alone stocked at 3.5-4 lines of hatchlings constantly.

I'm not hearing any numbers to back up your claim here, and if you're keeping the poults in the same coop it makes me wonder how that's even possible. There's no way I'd have room for them at the speed they're being churned out in my coops.

What are your results?

[Un1ted]

I haven't been keeping a strict count (up until now) but 4-6 a day sounds about right, if maybe a little on the low side. Seems more like 6-8 a day but now that my interest is piqued I'm going to track it and find out for sure. I built my 2nd coop a few hours ago and I am using the configuration suggested in the Wiki, except I'll make the slight adjustment you mentioned where the 1 Gobbler is in the leftmost spot in the fifth row down, since that's just above where the first dropping appears and wouldn't block an egg. Problem is, every subsequent dropping AFTER that first one WILL block an egg - gotta take that into account. The thing is with the 3-row Hen method you must be much more vigilant with removing droppings or else the bottom hens are blocked from production, where with my 2-row Hen/1-row Gobbler method there is nearly never any blockage, even overnight, because there is an entire row of "buffer".

[Sevenless]

The thing is, it entirely depends how they code egg production as to whether or not it matters. If you do end up proving that more gobblers = more eggs, it's easy to swap out a couple almost 0 productivity hens for more gobblers.

One other suspicion I've had for a while: Do domesticated turkeys lay eggs faster? If so that can *really* mess with our results.

[Un1ted]

One other suspicion I've had for a while: Do domesticated turkeys lay eggs faster? If so that can *really* mess with our results.

Yes I think you're right about that, I suspected the same thing. Also could explain why it seems like you're hardly getting any eggs at first, it really takes a week or two until the domesticated turkeys have grown up and filled in the ranks. We know for sure there is a big difference if you kill a wild turkey you only get a few cuts of meat but a grown Turkey gives a full "plucked" version which can itself be butchered for a ton 'o cuts. So who knows what other differences might be coded into the domestic version...