GAMBLING ON THE GOBBLE
Brenham turkey farmer bet on his birds in risky COVID season
InMarch and April, when most pandemic-frazzled Americans couldn’t plan two weeks ahead, Michael Marchand was trying to figure out Thanksgiving. In Brenham, Marchand, his wife Leslie and their four kids run Whitehurst Heritage Farms. They raise grass-fed cattle, pastured pigs and chickens, and they grow organic vegetables.
Plus turkeys: In 2019, the Marchands sold around 300 Thanksgiving birds. High-end chefs bought most of the farm’s output then, and the turkeys were no exception: About two-thirds of them were served at restaurants such as The Dunlavy and chef Richard Knight’s Atlas Diner.
But what havoc, Marchand wondered in spring 2020, would the new coronavirus wreak? His restaurant customers were closed. And as outbreaks shut meat-packing plants in other parts of the country, he wondered whether the processors he depended on would be available, come fall.
And what would his individual customers want? Would the virus be under control, and big family gatherings back in vogue?
Marchand is a farmer, not a forecaster, but he had to make a guess, place a bet. He ordered 125 baby turkeys. And on May 15, the appointed delivery day, he drove to the Brenham post office to pick up shipping boxes full of fragile day-old birds.
He rushed them home. Among farmers, turkeys are notorious for finding ways to die. By comparison, chickens are easy: When Marchand orders a batch of 200 baby chicks, he expects to lose two of them before adulthood, or maybe three. With turkeys, starting with 125, he’d count himself lucky to lose only 30.
For starters, turkey chicks are persnickety about temperature: They like 100 degrees. Crammed tight together, they can maintain that temperature for awhile in the shipping boxes — but even so, it’s common to lose a few even before opening the box.
Marchand unloaded the baby birds into the farm’s chick brooder. On a farm of his size, a brooder isn’t a little warm box of the sort that you might see in an elementary school science display. It’s a cross between a barn and a hot yoga studio — a heated, protected space where they can spend their early, most delicate weeks.
But even there, the turkeys found ways to die. They’d pile on top of each other, suffocating the unfortunate bird at the bottom. If there were a single puddle of water in the brood
er, some tiny turkey would find it, plop itself in and catch its death of cold.
Marchand hated every death. Farmers can’t let themselves be sentimental about meat animals, but his farm, like most small farms, gets by on the slimmest of margins. Every dead turkey meant a loss of his investment of time and money — and a loss of his family’s income, in the riskiest of years.
He knew the math backward and forward. Bought in bulk, each chick cost around $7. To reach a weight of 20 pounds, a bird would need at least 80 pounds of high-protein feed, at a cost of around $40. The meat processing plant would cost $20. His processed pasture-raised turkeys would sell for around $7 a pound — expensive, he knew — but even so, he didn’t expect much of a return for the five months of labor it would take to get them there.
He hoped not too many of them would find ways to die. And he worried about finding buyers for the ones he raised.
After two weeks, Marchand began lowering the brooder temperature from 100 degrees, slowly acclimating the birds to the Brenham outdoors. When they were eight weeks old, out of their most delicate phase, they were ready for the pastures.
Turkeys being turkeys, they could still find creative ways to die, like sticking their heads into things they couldn’t pull them out of. And now, there were predators to worry about. The first year the Marchands raised turkeys, they didn’t realize how vulnerable the big birds were to coyotes. The predators would go right up to the pasture’s electric fence, reach through, and make off with an adult bird. That year, he says, the family lost $5,000 worth of full-grown turkeys.
Now he keeps more herding dogs, Great Pyrenees and Australian shepherds. The dogs don’t just herd the farm’s cattle; they herd the turkeys and chickens too, bossily hustling the birds to where they’re supposed to be, safe from harm.
To Marchand’s relief, when it came time to slaughter and prepare the turkeys, COVID-19 hadn’t shut down any of the meatprocessing plants he relies on. The processors don’t like working with turkeys — they’re a lot of trouble — so he was careful to schedule them early, starting in October.
Ninety frozen birds came back: a good year.
And to Marchand’s relief, he found buyers. His restaurant clients were still closed, but to his surprise, individual orders poured into the farm’s website. As of mid-November, he’d sold out of whole birds, and had only legs and other parts left.
“I could have sold 300,” he said wonderingly.
Already, he’s wondering how many to order next year.