Turkey Time

The weather has been incredibly kind this November. Nearly all of the gardens are put to bed for the season, coops are cleaned and we’re well into the housing shuffle as we prepare for winter. We know that winter is certainly coming, and each sunny, warm day we’ve packed with hay and straw pickups, garden work, pig pen building, firewood sorting, and poultry butchering.

Butchering is no one’s favorite on the farm, but it’s part of the circle of life that brings homegrown food to the table. The turkeys we hatched from our own eggs this spring or chicks that arrived in the mail have grown all summer and fall to maturity. It’s impressive how a tiny fluff ball snuggling in a cardboard box in our walkout basement can become such a large bird in just a few months.

Last year, the turkeys grew far too large on us, so this year we started them later and have been processing sooner to hit the ideal dressed size of 14-16 lbs. Today we’ll finish the last few toms of the season, just in time as Thanksgiving is around the corner.

Our poultry processing station has changed dramatically since we started raising meat chickens in 1999. We mostly learned from Grandpa and his childhood farming background, using a stump with two nails and a hatchet for the dispatching. For small numbers of birds, we’d boil pots of water on the stove, then carry them outside for scalding the birds. For larger batches, Grandpa rigged up a big cast-iron pot that looked like it was from the Middle Ages over an open fire. It was crude at best, but it was a place to start.

Later, we borrowed a propane scalding tank from a friend and never went back to the pot over a fire, as the much more precise temperature regulation makes the feathers pull out consistently without cooking the skin. Helpful tips from pasture poultry folks like Joel Salatin of Virginia also upped our game with the use of cones and soaping up the scalding tank like a bubble bath to cut through the oil on the feathers.

Unlike the barbarous mechanized processes of factory poultry butchers, our is still all done by hand. Birds are caught by hand and calmed down with a sturdy Temple Grandin-style hug, some of them falling asleep as they wait. While we’ve tried many a plucker, we’ve gone back to plucking the scalded feathers by hand to avoid tearing the skin. Mom holds the eviscerator position, while I take up pin feather patrol and bagging.

From late July to Thanksgiving, almost every week on our farm involves a butchering day, whether it’s chickens, turkeys, or ducks. 20-25 chickens or a dozen turkeys is about what we can work into a butchering day—between what our hands can tolerate and the many other necessary tasks for the day as well.

These birds are all sold directly to the families who will cook them. It’s a short circle from start to finish. Especially for the turkey chicks we hatched in our own incubators, their whole lives have been on the farm under loving care. There’s no need to herd them onto trucks to ship off to a processing plant, where they wait in crammed terror with neither food nor water for their fate. Here, they are tended by people they recognize, enjoying their cozy homes until the very last minute.

If I only had access to meats raised in factory farms and processed at plants, I’d likely be a vegetarian. But when you can raise the animals yourself or purchase direct from a caring family who raised the animals, this fosters a completely different relationship with our food, where it comes from, and the lives those animals lived.

There is a definite sadness to butchering day, but it is also the completion of a cycle. If we kept every bird that was ever hatched on this farm, we’d be completely overrun and there would be no vegetation left! It all must be kept in balance. From the turkeys we hatched and ordered as day-old chicks, we are keeping a fresh cohort of females and a couple Toms as the breeding flock for next year’s baby turkeys.

Because turkeys typically lay just as many Toms as hen chicks, this means we have too many Toms in the group to keep through the winter. If we did keep all those Toms, they would fight and kill each other, which is no way to live either. Instead, we watch their behavior closely and select the best two boys to keep for the breeder flock—based on temperament, conformity (shape), lineage, and other desirable traits. Those who don’t make the cut as studs are what become Thanksgiving dinner.

This is the same balance we find across all of historic animal agriculture. You keep several sows to one boar, many ewes to one ram, many nannys to one billy, many cows to one bull, many hens to one rooster. The boys have their way of getting around to get the job done. Too many boys in the mix, and it’s all fights. So, as reproduction tends to be 50/50 males and females, what happens to the other males?

In nature, territorial fights and predation have their way of maintaining the balance, but in farming that is up to us as stewards of the animals in our care. As we come to November and our turkey Toms feel their testosterone kicking in, it’s time to thin out the bossy ones and have a nice feast. In its own way, this is a kindness to the birds that remain.

This Thanksgiving, I hope that your table is graced with a bird that was well loved and tended, humanely processed, and part of the cycle of regenerative life. See you down on the farm sometime.