Turkey Day

Turkeys are characters. As poults, their beady eyes look like they might almost be bigger than their heads! Perpetually curious, everything grabs their attention. A grasshopper, your shoe laces, what’s on the other side of the fence.

This curiosity is mixed with no sense of the possible dangers in their exploring activities, so they often get themselves into trouble. This means I find myself in strange and awkward moments, often at a late hour, rescuing a turkey from the roof of the coop or herding a wayward group about the barnyard that bowled the fence over or just plain launched over the top.

Our turkeys have made their way into many a Down on the Farm story. Some of them arrive as day-old chicks in the post office, some we hatch right here in our incubators. Hardly bigger than chicken chicks, it seems almost impossible how fast they grow through the summer season.

Each morning as I pull the turkey tractor pens onto fresh pasture grass, the teenaged turkeys line up at the front, eager to snatch up tasty morsels—clover, grasshoppers, even frogs. As soon as they see me approaching in the morning, their loud “Gop, gop!” calls ring through the air. “She’s coming, she’s coming!”

October changes the story for our turkeys, though, since they are destined for Thanksgiving tables. They’ve grown up big this year, well fledged, with strong legs. If we wait until mid-November, they’ll be too big to fit in anyone’s oven! You might have thought you’d ordered a farm-fresh turkey, well, turns out we raised you a farm-fresh dinosaur!

So it’s time for turkey day on the farm.

Mom and Steve light the propane scalder before breakfast, setting up the buckets, sinks, and tables. The turkeys are too large to go into the drum plucker, so we have to do them all by hand. A dozen birds is a day’s labors for turkeys. They’re big, heavy (especially when their feathers are full of water from being in the scaler and Steve has to lift them back out), and we have no help from the plucker. By mid-afternoon, our hands and fingers and backs are done in and it’s time to clean up and start again next week.

This year, we raised 30 broad-breasted white turkeys and hatched 27 heritage birds. That’s a lot of good eating for Thanksgiving!

One of my tasks in the days’ process is to catch the birds and bring them to the butcher site. When we’re doing meat chickens, this can be a one-person task, but not with turkeys. This time, Kara was the designated helper. I’d walk through the turkey pen, watching for a tail to snag, then catch the legs quickly before too much flapping happens.

Turkey wings and legs are very strong. They can batter you rigorously and can hurt themselves in the process. The trick is to get the birds upside-down as quickly as possible. For all poultry, being upside-down causes them to soon give up the struggle. “Opps, it’s hopeless now” they seem to say, their feet up in the air, their necks snaked so their heads can be as close to right-side-up as much as possible. Wings spread for balance, but the fight is over.

Kara helps to carry the birds out of the coop or tractor to the first station. “Quick!” she says, hefting an especially big one. “Take my picture!”

Many of the turkeys we raise have already been pre-ordered, so they have homes waiting for them once they’re all chilled down and weighed. But 15 are still available for purchase. Hopefully those will all find freezers soon too and our summer-long efforts to raise tasty, healthy, natural turkeys will be enjoyed at many tables this year.

One culinary trick when roasting (or grilling) a pasture-raised turkey is to cook them with the breast side down. Because our turkeys have not been injected with saline or oils, the natural fat on the bird is in its back. Roasted in this direction, the turkey naturally bastes itself, and the breast meat with be nice and moist. For crispy breast skin, flip the birds for the last 15 minutes of cooking.

Have you been thinking about turkeys? Maybe you’ve been watching the packs of wild ones crossing the road, or planning where the family’s Thanksgiving dinner will be held. Here’s to a great year for turkeys and the celebration of the autumn harvest season.

This is where the real bounty of the season comes to our plate. What’s your turkey’s story this year? See you down on the farm sometime.