* * Harvesting the turkeys

(Cross-posted in the Montgomery Messenger)

I drove to Floyd County this morning on a crisp, gorgeous November day where cows fed lazily in green pastures, birds flew across an azure sky, and all seemed right with the world. I was seeking to find where my Thanksgiving dinner was going to come from.

John Paul and Rainey Houston and their eight children run Sweet Providence Farm, seven miles outside of town. They are involved in a variety of farm activities from raising cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys to growing Christmas trees and running a retail country store. The store is a beautiful timber-frame structure filled with gifts and foods, mostly from local sources. I parked and then walked a hundred yards behind the store down a muddy lane to the killing fields.

A flock of a couple of dozen white birds clustered outside a covered pavilion, where the production task of rending live birds into cookable meat occurred. Ten or twelve people, many of them Houston children, handled the various tasks. The process went like this:

First, a young man literally chased down his target bird, catching it by one or both legs. He held the legs together and inserted the bird head-first into a large funnel-like apparatus hanging by a rope, under which was a bucket to catch the blood. Another man reached inside the funnel opening and grabbed the turkey’s head, stretching it through the hole, and in a quick moment slashed its jugular vein. Blood gushed, and then dripped into the bucket. The bird thrashed for a moment and then expired. Moments later, he removed the dead bird and then slashed off its feet. He then dropped it into scalding water for a few moments to loosen the feathers, that were plucked by hand and by a machine that resembled the agitator of an antique washer. From there, the neck was cut off, the insides were gutted (keeping the heart, gizzard, and liver and disposing of everything else), and the bird was washed and bagged. 

Eldest son John William Houston told me, “Yesterday we made apple cider from apples grown in Calloway. We’re involved in a variety of food products. We also make apple butter at a community cannery. Yesterday we produced 42 gallons of cider.

“We do not breed turkeys. Baby turkeys are called ‘poults’ and we buy them from a grower in Pennsylvania. They are literally mailed to us through the U.S. Mail in boxes, and they arrive around the first of August. They’re only a couple of days old and are about 4” tall. They survive with minimum mortality for a few days with no food or water, living only off the nutrition contained within their eggs.

“We give them food and water and within a couple of hours they get really happy. They actually seem hardier when they’re only a few days old than when a week or two has passed. Then they become very sensitive to their surroundings and can overheat or suffocate, crowding each other. After about four or five weeks, they’re outside most of the time and they seem to handle cold weather better than the chickens.

“The turkeys graze the grass much like cows. We’ll rotate them over ground the cows have grazed and each will eat what they want. They will eat almost anything we give them, like grain, grass, old pumpkins, and apple scraps. On a farm, nothing goes to waste. We compost their feathers, heads, entrails, and blood and use it for fertilizer.” He pointed at a green area in the field. “We’re growing turnips to feed the hogs on ground fertilized by turkey byproducts.

“We’re having trouble now with hawks and eagles eating our layer hens. These raptors are protected by law. I can’t imagine killing a bird of prey. So we live with them and we adjust what we raise.

“Most of our turkeys are pre-sold, mostly at the food co-op in Roanoke. Because of the expense in growing them, we like to know how many will be bought before we raise them.”

I asked if his turkey tasted better than industrial products. He said, “It depends upon how you cook it. But it has to be better quality if a bird is foraging on the ground rather than being kept in a cage.”

I drove home with a fresh, farm-grown 12-pound bird, eager for the holiday meal!