Let's talk free-range turkey
Your nose catches a whiff of Dave Jones’ prized Thanksgiving turkeys long before your ears discern their gobbles along the Butler-Freeport Community Trail in Cabot.
Actually, it’s not the fluffy, white-feathered hens themselves causing the acrid odor of ammonia on the Butler County farm. The 300 or so birds that had met their demise in Mr. Jones’ processing room the day before are the real culprits. After evisceration, their carcasses were layered on top of a stinky mix of turkey excreta, spilled feed and feathers at the far end of an adjoining field.
“We turn them into compost,” Mr. Jones, 62, explains as nonchalantly as he might relate what he had for lunch. He’s wearing a fleece John Deere pullover to chase away the brisk morning chill, and boots to keep his footing in the mud. Once cured, the compost will be spread over the 800 acres of soybean and feed corn he grows on rented land to feed his flock.
It sounds gross, and smells even worse. But it’s actually vital to the farm’s biosecurity. Proper composting destroys all major bacteria and viruses, preventing outbreaks of disease. Plus, it’s free fertilizer for the farm, which produces some 4,000 holiday birds between October and December from day-old poults.
Mr. Jones’ paternal grandfather, Clarence, raised cattle on the original 100-acre homestead farm up the road near Saxonburg when he wasn’t working as a mold maker for a glass company
in Brackenridge. It was his father, Carl, the oldest of nine, who would venture into the poultry business after the patriarch died at age 40 in the mid-1950s, adding ducks, chicken, geese and turkeys to the fold. Carl Jones only made part of his living on the land; he worked for Oberg Industries before turning a small tooland-die shop he opened on the farm in 1971 into Penn United Technologies, a precision tools company that today employs about 600.
“That’s how people made it,” Mr. Jones says. “Everyone farmed here as a second job. It was a way of life.”
In the early years, before so much of the surrounding farmland was bulldozed into sub-divisions, Pittsburgh cooks wanted live turkeys they could butcher for their holiday feast. That’s slowly changed over the years, and today a small crew of teenagers from Butler and Knoch high schools lend a hand when processing starts in early October. It’s messy, physical work but so far this year Mr. Jones has only lost one of 20 or so teen workers.
“He couldn’t handle the smell,” he says.
The turkey operation moved to its current location on Jones Road in 1986, but Mr. Jones — who lives with his wife, Jeanne, in a house within a stone’s throw of the 1,000-by-30-foot turkey barn — started ramping production to current levels about a decade ago. Following in his dad’s footsteps, he, too, worked at Penn United for 35 years while growing his famous sweet corn on the side. (He has 40 roadside carts throughout Butler County.) It was only after he retired two years after his father’s death in 2006 that he decided to turn his passion for animal husbandry into a fulltime job. The free-ranging turkeys are raised naturally, without preservatives, antibiotics or growth hormones.
“Everyone says I have agriculture in my blood,” he says, with a laugh. Or maybe it was just that neither his two sisters nor his younger brother wanted to have anything to do with the farm.
Raising free-ranging turkeys isn’t easy. Nor is it especially lucrative when you’re a small-scale operation that does everything by hand. What makes it worth it, he says, is the gratification he feels in putting food on people’s tables. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
From poult to plate
The fuzzy poults arrive in the mail from a hatchery in West Virginia in early April. They’re supposed to be only hens, but a few toms inevitably find their way into the mix; this year Mr. Jones got six. They’re removed when they reveal themselves at three or four months because their claws are razor sharp, and toms can be aggressive. He doesn’t want them scratching up the hens. But generally, turkeys are as friendly as they are nosy.
“If I go into the pen, they’ll come up and grab at my pant legs,” he says.
It takes between six and seven months and tens of thousands pounds of grain to grow the birds to a butchering weight of between 18 to 22 pounds. They’re especially vulnerable when they’re little, and Mr. Jones has to walk through the turkey barn every two or three hours to make sure the chicks haven’t fallen asleep on top of one another. A loud noise or chilling by dew or rainfall can cause them to stampede, and it only takes a few minutes for 50 baby turkeys to pile up on the sawdust bedding in a corner, smothering one another. That’s why you have to have round corners, he quips.
Turkeys also are susceptible to any number of diseases, so only a precious few hired hands can enter the turkey house and pasture — and only after scrubbing their boots and hands. As for natural predators, a fence keeps the birds safe from foxes, dogs and coyotes during daylight, but swooping hawks and owls are a constant concern. So are humans, as evidenced by the warning signs Mr. Jones has had to post along the trail.
“Kids were throwing rocks,” he says, shaking his head.
At their peak, Mr. Jones’ turkeys can go through more than 7,000 pounds of homegrown feed a day. They also require gallon upon gallon of cool, clean water that’s changed several times a day.
Equal care is taken in the processing room, where big bottles of anti-bacterial Dawn detergent sit at the ready. Everyone on the line wears gloves, aprons and safety glasses to fend off flying feathers and accidental cuts, and they handle the birds as humanely — and respectfully — as possible. Butchering is quick and efficient; a team of 16 can process 120 birds an hour.
Grabbed by the knees and flipped upside down, eight turkeys at a time are positioned with their beaks pointing down in stainless restraining cones on a far wall. Using a sharp serrated knife, a worker cuts off their heads. It takes just a few minutes for them to bleed out.
After lopping off their legs, Mr. Jones places the turkeys, four at a time, into a scalding tank filled with 170degree water and rotates them four times to loosen the feathers for plucking. Then it’s into a motorized plucker outfitted with threeinch-long rubber fingers for 10 seconds to defeather, after which workers use tweezers to manually remove any resistant feathers.
“I have to be at the top of my game,” he says.
After the internal organs are removed, the birds are thoroughly rinsed inside and out in cold water. (The gizzards, liver, hearts and
necks are set aside in separate pails of cold water.) Once clean, the turkeys are submerged in ice water until their body temperature reaches 35 degrees — a process that takes about six hours.
Twenty-four hours later, they’re rinsed off, a giblet bag is placed in the back side and they’re bagged and boxed.
Then they’re either stored at 25 degrees for a “frosty fresh” bird (1 week shelf life) or frozen at 0 degrees (6 to 9 months shelf life).
It’s exhausting work that often leaves Mr. Jones with burnt hands and feathers pasted to his skin with tiny bits of blood. “As soon as I’m done, I run and get a shower
and put on clean clothes,” he says.
Half the turkeys are sold to groups while others go to individual cooks who have heard about the farm from friends or online. (Mr. Jones only offers them on-site.) What doesn’t sell gets donated to Butler’s Lighthouse foodbank or Westminster Church,
“It’s our tithe,” he says. Consumers can buy the turkeys frozen year-round for $3.50 per pound, or frosty fresh from Monday through Nov. 21 for $3.75 per pound. The farm also sells frozen bone-in turkey breasts ($4 per pound) and thighs ($3.50 per pound) along with whole frozen chickens, which are kept in a self-serve cooler outside the processing room. You pay using the honor system.
And if you have some sort of turkey emergency? The farm is open both the night before and on Thanksgiving morning with a supply of frosty fresh birds to prevent a holiday meal disaster.
Every once in awhile, Mr. Jones says, his wife will look at him and tell him he’s crazy to be so crazy about turkeys. She wonders why he just didn’t retire. He just smiles.
“I like helping to feed America,” he says.