Reduction of body weight during growing and holding periods and subsequent semen production and fertility in turkeys.

As breeders of large white turkeys have made genetic improvement in body size and conformation, problems in managing breeding males have become accentuated. The main problem is one of obtaining semen from large, broad toms. There are some reports in the literature in which studies have been conducted to determine the effect of reduction in body size of males on subsequent semen production. Voitle et at. (1972) found that feeding turkey males a growing feed lower in protein than normally used definitely had an effect on body weight. In this instance, however, there was no diffe-