Take a little peek inside the life of a turkey on our farm.
Life for these birds is beautiful and blissful as they get to live a natural life.
Come along with me on a four month journey watching how they grow and change.
I love to look at these pictures through a filter of GRATITUDE rather than getting sad that they ended up on my dinner table.
Grateful that my food lived a natural life, rather than a life of confinement.
Grateful that I can eat food that I don’t have to feel guilty about.
Grateful that I can celebrate the holidays with my family and enjoy homegrown turkey.
So here we go…Life Cycle Of Your Thanksgiving Turkey
In August we pick up day old chicks from a local hatchery called Jenks here in Tangent, Oregon.
The turkey poults go into a warm 90 degree brooder with food and water for their first month of life.
The poults get daily pets and visits from our kids.
When they have lost all their chick fuzz and are fully feathered they graduate out of the brooder onto the pasture.
By September they are growing into teenage turkeys, curious and brave.
When the turkeys are about 3 months old they have doubled in size and start to “strut their stuff”.
They get to roost at night in their turkey tractor. They fly up on their own and pick a spot to sleep.
They enjoy eating different types of grasses and foraging for grubs, bugs and seeds. This makes their meat high in Vitamin D and Omega 3’s
They live on pasture and under the bright warm autumn sun.
By November the chilly mornings bring frost, but the turkeys continue to graze and roam, like they would in the wild.
By Thanksgiving the turkeys are four months old, fully mature and ready to butcher.
Then you come to our farm to pickup your Thanksgiving Turkey. It’s the highlight of our year. We overflow with gratitude and thankfulness that we get to be a part of nourishing your family.
We hand over the fresh turkey to your family, with rich gratitude that you trust us to raise nutritious happy meat.
Getting to give hugs and exchange smiles makes all the hard work well worth it for us.
You get to take home your bird and decide on a special recipe! Some years we’ve spatchcocked it. This is when you cut it in half, lay it flat and roast it on a pan. Some years we brine and smoke it. Some years we have pieced it out and made several meals. Last year when we had just our immediate family, we made a sausage stuffed roulade with the breast meat.
Next week I’ll share my favorite ways to cook our pasture raised turkey, so be on the lookout.
For now, click the link below and get your Holiday Turkey reserved.
With gratitude,
Julia
P.S. Comment below your favorite way to cook a turkey!