We raise our turkeys in a system similar to our egg-laying hens, out on pasture in a fenced-in area with a portable house that regularly gets moved to fresh pasture.  Weathertop turkeys make for one fantastic Thanksgiving dinner and we typically sell out months in advance.  So get your orders in early.

 

Turkey sizes:
We often get requests for very specific weights, like an “18 pound turkey”.   Please remember that when you order a turkey we cannot guarantee a specific weight because unlike the mega-farms who raise untold thousands and can offer a consistent range to choose from, we only raise a limited number (about 200) and because they are raised outdoors they have other factors affecting their growth.  That said, when you come to pick up your bird we will work with you to get you the size you want, in the past everyone has ultimately been happily matched up with their turkey.

We do offer turkeys at 2 different times, in Oct and in Nov.  So if you’re looking for a smaller turkey, the October turkeys tend to be about 8-12 lb, while the November turkeys, right at Thanksgiving time, tend to be in the 15-20 lb range.

New this year
For the past few years we have had Thanksgiving requests for heritage breed turkeys, so we finally decided to try some out.  We’re getting a small number of Bourbon Red turkeys that will be ready for Thanksgiving.  Because these birds take twice as long to raise as the white turkeys, they end up costing quite a bit more. 

So why bother?  When you consider that over 90% of turkeys raised in America are of one breed, namely the broad-breasted white, many other breeds that traditionally were found on family farms are now flirting with extinction.  This is not just an aesthetic issue.  A basic principle of Nature for surviving the countless challenges to the livelihood of any ecosystem is diversity.  Thus the saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.  Animals bred to grow at such fast rates (like the broad-breasted whites) are generally less hardy and more susceptible to disease and such, which means that the basket containing all the eggs is at a high risk.  If some strain of virus were to hone in on the BB whites, we may find ourselves unable to stop an epidemic that wipes out nearly all of our country’s turkeys, making Thanksgiving a very different experience.  A more serious example of this happening in history is the potato blight in Ireland during the 1800s.  When the fungus hit the potatoes, the Irish were raising a very limited variety of potato and thus nearly all their plants were affected, leading to severe famine.  Today we find ourselves with the ironic tenet that if you don’t eat them, you’ll lose them.  So we thought we’d take a small part in trying to keep alive the diversity.