A smaller number of farmers raise extremely slow-growing heritage turkeys. Many small farmers, like Ramsberg, opt for those breeds. Aviagen also owns companies like Valley of the Moon, which sells slightly slower growing breeders like a broad-breasted bronze. (Just like with chicken, Americans have developed a massive appetite for white breast meat, so the industry has altered the birds to match that demand.) The standard bird in the industry is commonly referred to as the broad-breasted white companies like Butterball and Jennie-O use some variation of this breed. A company called Aviagen owns almost all of the turkey genetics in the world, and it has created fast-growing, efficient turkeys bred to gain weight quickly and produce large breasts.
Whether the bird is free or cheap, the costs of industrial turkey production are greater than the price at the supermarket.ĭifferences in turkey production start with genetics. In the US, contract growers - mainly in Minnesota, North Carolina and Arkansas - raise turkeys for a few massive meatpacking companies: primarily Butterball, Jennie-O, Cargill and Tyson. The free Thanksgiving turkey your grocery story hands out via its frequent shopper rewards program, however, has a very different life and death. Ramsberg’s birds live active, curious lives outside until the day they are slaughtered, on site, by a small team of careful, highly trained workers. “If I don’t bring in something for them to roost on soon enough, they’ll just jump the fence and fly up onto the greenhouses.”
“At night, turkeys seek out a high place where they can get off the ground,” he said, looking out across a field he’s divided into different pastures for chickens, sheep, ducks, pigs and - this time of year - turkeys. At Rettland Farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, farmer Beau Ramsberg’s six-week-old turkeys look perfectly happy pecking their way through tall grasses on the ground, but he can tell it’s likely time for them to start roosting.
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