I sometimes raise turkeys for Christmas. I raise black turkeys, which are smaller but tastier than bronze or white. Last year's grew to between 4 and 12 kilos! For a small scale, organic, free-range producer here is how much it costs:
Eggs - £2.50 each. Turkeys are not birds that are naturally, ahem, successful in their lovemaking and they only lay a small number of them a year, so the eggs are more expensive than hen or duck eggs. Not all of them will be fertile or will hatch. I generally get an 80-95% success rate though.
Incubation and brooding - it costs me £15/month to run the incubator and brooder, regardless of how many eggs/chicks are in there. I usually have about 12 in there, so that's £2.50 per bird.
Feed - they get through about 2 bags in their lifetime (mine are usually 6 months old when killed, compared to about 3-4 months for commercial turkeys.) So that comes in at about £15 a bird. Obviously commercial producers will buy feed in bulk and save costs here.
Slaughter and preparation - this is very labour intensive, and though there are machines that can do a lot of it, the best (and least distressing for the turkey) result is done by a skilled person by hand. I send my turkeys off these days after a very stressful Christmas Eve a couple of years back trying to gut 5 turkeys and deliver them down snowy back lanes after my dad let me down and didn't turn up on time to help me with them. I pay £10 a bird to get them humanely slaughtered, plucked, gutted, dressed and boxed.
So before I factor in anything for the fact I have had to build housing and fencing, petrol and my time I have spent £30. I do it because I like to eat well raised, tasty meat and it's either very hard to find this or very expensive to buy. I only started raising them in larger numbers because I had so many people asking me to do one for them too, but when I got up to over a dozen requests last year I gave up. People expected 'mates rates' and were shocked when I told them how much it had cost me to produce a turkey for them, and the stress of worrying about our local fox and how many people's Christmas dinners would be ruined if it got in wasn't worth it. (I work away from home about 6 nights a month, and was relying on sturdy fencing and an electric door opener for the nights I wasn't there, but it was nerve-shredding to come back and find where the fox had been trying to dig under the fence!)
It annoys me no end when my dad says 'you can get a frozen turkey in Lidl for a tenner - I don't know why you do it.' Cheap and nasty all the way, it is!