Christmas is served

For many, Christmas dinner is the most important meal of the year. Caroline Lindsay meets three local farmers who produce the main components for this traditional feast

Picture the scene – it’s 1523 and King Henry VIII is tucking into his Christmas feast. Alongside the roast boar’s head, swan, pheasants and peacocks is a lavish new-fangled dish called turkey, a bird only just introduced into Britain from the Americas.

Its popularity grew quickly, and each year, large flocks of turkeys could be seen waddling to London from Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire on foot, a journey which may have started as early as August.

Today around 75% of families across the UK serve up a succulent roast turkey as the centrepiece of their festive meal each Christmas, and many of us like to know exactly where our festive fowl has come from.

Susannah Pate and husband Thomas have been rearing free range KellyBronze turkeys for seven years on South Powrie Farm, on the northern outskirts of Dundee.

“The family have been here for four generations, variously farming peas, berries, cattle and cereals,” Susannah explains. “We now grow mainly cereals – wheat, barley, oilseed rape and rye, which are used for distilling, animal feed and biofuels – as well as rearing high quality, high welfare turkeys for Christmas, which we sell direct from the farm. We also have pigs and a few sheep.”

It was a visit to a friend’s farm in Fife that inspired the Pates to rear the turkeys.

“We had always been bowled over by their quality and flavour. And when our friends decided to focus on other areas of their business, they offered us the opportunity to take on the turkeys,” says Susannah. “It tied in really well with our farming year as well as our love of good, local food and connecting directly with customers.”

So what’s so special about a KellyBronze turkey? Well, it’s all down to an Essex turkey farmer called Derek Kelly, as Susannah explains.

“In the 1980s, as supermarkets were demanding fast growing, cheap white turkeys and consumers liked ‘clean’ looking white turkeys with no feather stubs, the bronze turkeys were going rapidly out of fashion,” she says.

“Derek Kelly, now in his 80s, scoured the country and brought all the bronze breeds back to his farm. Their farming friends thought they were crazy, but the Kelly family has spent the last 30 years developing a turkey for the best flavour and tenderness, through a careful breeding programme, combined with slow-growing the turkeys to full maturity.”

Each year, the Pates rear a few hundred turkeys from day-old chicks until they reach maturity at about six months when they weigh anything between 4kg and 13kg.

“We love having the turkeys around, and they are curious creatures and always react to what is going on around the farm,” Susannah smiles.

“It’s lovely to see them roaming around the paddock, especially in the autumn sunshine when the sun brings the bronze colours out beautifully.

“Our aim is always to give them the best life possible while they are with us, and we do everything to the highest welfare standards,” she continues. “It is all part of the farm cycle and we make the most of each stage.”

While the livestock will still need to be checked on Christmas Day, Susannah is looking forward to taking it a little easier.

“It’s about all being together as a family, as the month before is pretty

Each year, the Pates rear a few hundred turkeys from day-old chicks until they reach maturity at about six months when they weigh anything between 4kg and 13kg

Picture: Steven Brown. Pallets of sprouts newly harvested.