Turkeys Lurking

To start off the new year, we thought we'd post some farm folly highlights from the last.  Highly ranked among these is the fall's turkey burglary.  Jennifer's father, Peter, was in town for a visit, and Jasper and I took him to the farm one nice day for a visit.  Entering through the house, we were greeted by a calm group of turkeys taking in the living room's afternoon sun.  This video says the rest.

Heritage Turkeys in the News

A piece from yesterday's New York Times on heritage turkeys.

How to Cook Heritage Turkeys

Turkey Brining 101:

Why Brine?
Brining your turkey before cooking is the best way to ensure that the meat is juicy and flavorful. The salt in the brine solution breaks down some of the muscle protein in the meat (making it more tender) and also allows the meat to absorb whatever flavoring you add to the solution.

Basic Brine
2 cups salt
2 cups sugar
2 gallons of water (orange juice or apple cider can be substituted for some water)

Optional ingredients for flavor:
3 bay leaves
1/2 cup of your favorite dried herbs and spices (sage, oregano, thyme, basil, cloves, cinnamon, etc.)
1 tablespoon cracked black peppercorns
lemon or orange slices
crushed garlic cloves

First: In a large stockpot over medium-high heat, combine 1 gallon of water, salt, sugar and optional flavor ingredients. Stir until sugar and salt have dissolved, but do not boil. Remove pot from heat and let cool for 15 minutes.

Next: Spread a layer of ice into the bottom of a cooler that is a little larger than the turkey. Set the brining bag inside cooler of ice and place turkey, breast side down, inside bag. Pour cooled brine over turkey, plus an additional 1 gallon of water or juice. To further cool brine, add 2 scoops of ice into brine bag. Seal bag, making sure to let out as much air as possible. Add additional ice to cooler so that your turkey stays at 40 degrees Fahrenheit while brining. Brine for one hour per pound of turkey. Do not over brine, or turkey will be salty.

Last: Remove turkey from brine, scooping some of the herbs and spices from brine solution and spreading onto the skin of the turkey for extra flavor. Brush turkey with vegetable oil or melted butter and cook as desired until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees F. Discard brine and clean area exposed to raw poultry.

Cooking your heritage turkey:

Besides the fact that these heritage turkeys have been raised the old fashioned way--with plenty of grass and sunshine--they need to be cooked differently than their modern, factory-farmed counterparts. Heritage turkeys are much leaner and smaller than sedentary commercial birds. Fast cooking at high temperatures is a better method than slow roasting. Heritage turkeys should be roasted at 425-450 degrees F until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees F. Use a meat thermometer to check the temperature in the thigh! Butter (plus flavorings like rosemary, sage, maple, etc) can be added under the breast skin to add flavor and moisture during roasting. Loosen the skin around the breast with your fingers and insert butter between the meat and the skin as well as on the inside of the bird's cavity.

Remember your giblets inside!

Giblet Broth:

- 2 cups white wine
- 2 cups water
- Giblets (look inside body cavity of turkey)
- Bay leaf

Simmer everything in a small saucepan for 15 minutes. Discard bay leaf. Giblets can be discarded if they aren't your type of thing or they can be finely chopped and added to the broth. Giblets can also be used to make gravy.

Finally, take a picture of your bird on the table - and maybe even with the family! - and send it to us and we'll put it on the blog. If you include cooking/eating notes, we'll post those as well!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkey Processing: DIY

Holiday Turkeys!

This holiday season, Ecotone Farm is pleased to offer heritage breed Blue Slate turkeys for your family's table!

Contrary to industrially-raised turkeys - almost without exception the only birds available in supermarkets - heritage turkeys are slow-growing, naturally-reproducing birds that are intended to be raised on pasture their whole lives.

Raised from day one on our farm - eating bugs and grass and grains in the sunshine and rain - these are turkeys truly worth giving thanks for!

Eating an all-natural, custom-mixed feed with no antibiotics or hormones, you can be confident that these birds were raised in a sustainable way with integrity and care.

Now accepting deposits on a limited number still available. The price is $5.00/lb. less a $25 deposit. Please mail deposits to the address at the top right of this page.

Check out the older posts on this blog for their entire life story! Bring the kids to the farm to pick out your bird!

For more information, contact C.J. Sentell at 318.272.4288 or sentellcj@gmail.com. For more information on heritage breed livestock, please see The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.

Turkey Update

Well, the turkey processor in Bowling Green called a few days ago to both move our appointment and to raise the price. After speaking with several folks about it, we found a plucker in Little Rock and have decided to do the processing ourselves.

So....we'll have FRESH turkeys for Thanksgiving! I think they'll be much better this way. Fresh is always better, and so is keeping it local. We'll process the birds the weekend before, and store them in my neighbor's walk-in refrigerator until pick-up. For those of you who've ordered a bird to ship, we'll do those somewhere around Nov. 12th and freeze them prior to shipping.

If you have a problem with this, and would like your turkey still USDA processed, please let me know and we'll try to work something out. If not, feel free to come to the farm the weekend before the holiday to pick out your bird and/or help out! It's sure to be a learning experience for all!

In the meantime, we still have about 15 birds available. Please send a $25 deposit to the address at the top right of the page to make a reservation. Also, many folks have been asking how much they'll weigh. To be honest, I don't know. But there are plenty of hens out there, which will give us a nice range I estimate to be between 8 and 20 lbs. Reservations secure your size preference as well.

Call & Response

Predators Inside and Out

Well, after I reported that we were under little or no predator pressure, one showed up just on cue. Because of my faulty observations, I had let the well-constructed defenses go relatively unused: letting the turkeys sleep outside the tractors (both on top of and in the bushes around them), accidentally leaving their electric netting off, not doing an evening walk with the dogs, etc.

Silly. It even took me a few days to figure out that it was happening. I discovered the problem one evening when I noticed an area of silver feathers in the pasture. Close by, I found a turkey, still alive and whose wounds were relatively superficial. Gathering them up together inside their tractors, I counted 38 healthy birds and 1 wounded. We'd lost five.

In the days and nights that followed, the dogs and I scoured the property looking for any signs of this elusive but deadly critter. We found a feeding location deep in the bush, covered in feathers but no flesh. We found a fresh corpse, drug under the electric netting close by and with the same scratch wounds around the neck. All this pointed to a predator not much bigger than the birds, and not especially efficient at killing this size prey. This, of course, ruled out what I've been told is the biggest threat - stray dogs or coyotes - as well as anything like a large cat; given their weight, too, I doubted a hawk or an owl or any other bird of prey. My first hypothesis was that it was a raccoon. After that, I thought it could be this other medium-size mammal both Jen and I have seen but neither can identify.

Whatever it was, though, it was elusive. Leaving not a trace, I searched in vain for its tracks as it continued to scare the turkeys at night by pacing around their secured roosts. I set traps. I walked around. In the rain. At night. In my underwear and boots. With a 410 shotgun thrown over my shoulder. On a mission. I was the Department of Homeland Security and the terrorist must be eliminated.

But all to no avail. Whatever it was continued to be elusive, displacing its wild traces into the nocturnal lives of our domesticated dinners. Within these traces, marked by blue feathers and stressed faces, the difference between this predator's presence and its meaning began to open up for me and, I think, for the turkeys too. Perhaps this is because, as Derrida notes, "[t]he trace is the differance which opens appearance and signification. Articulating the living upon the nonliving in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics can describe it.” Very well. I just needed to stop the flow in the feeding ecology in one particular direction.
At first, the wounded turkey healed nicely. He hung out in the back yard, and John and Jen and I cleaned his wounds. After a few days I tried to put him back with the rest of the turkeys, but after only 20 minutes the other males had identified his weakness and were very close to killing him themselves. Weakness, too, seemed in need of elimination. Instead I moved him into the chicken pen, where he lived and slowly recovered from his second brush with death. But yesterday I found him dead under a small bush. This time it was another predator - or, rather, a scavenger. Flies had found the wound that somehow opened again without me noticing. Dinner was to be had one way or another. This time it was from the inside out.

After finishing my own dinner, I was standing on the porch in the moonlight and finally caught a glimpse of the predator. Traced on my retina, silver as the moon and blue as the turkeys she was clearly pursuing, a fox crossed the road and disappeared into the pasture. Finally, with all the birds secure, I found a new response to this exquisite spectre of death looming amid the thorns in the blue moon light. Welcome, I said softly, belly full and mind soothed by my renewed attention to those things that threaten from both the inside and out.

Although he was talking about his cat looking at his member in the bathroom, again I find Derrida helpful with respect to our fox: "The animal is there before me, there close to me, there in front of me – I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also – something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself – it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat." But soon enough the dogs will be on the job and an entirely new ethic will already be underway. In the meantime, it looks as though we'll still have 35 turkeys available for Thanksgiving.

Turkey Lurky!

The turkeys are now big enough to venture out into a day pen to peck around the grass. A day after letting them out, their behavior began to noticeably shift to being much more turkey-like. What must be young toms have even begun to puff up and strut around like adult males. The pecking order in the flock is also being worked out, sometimes with what is for us an uncomfortable violence. But, as always, Ozark is keeping an eye on things.

Also, coming back from Virginia and North Carolina last week, Jen and I stopped by to visit with Ziggy Forester of Sunrise Farm in Columbia, NC. He raises heritage turkeys (as well as cattle, sheep, and pigs) and had a few Blue Slate poults available that derive from the McMurray Hatchery gene pool. Because we're planning to raise our own turkeys next year, we decided it might be good to go ahead and get a few of these to begin expanding our own gene pool. Once we arrived, though, he also had some (very rare) Chocolate and Naragansett poults, which I just couldn't pass up. We got two of each, and will keep them to breed. But when we tried to release them with the rest of the turkeys, the Slates were having none of that. The new additions were just too new - too Other - and they promptly began harrassing them so much that I had to re-separate them. Now they are in a cage within the brooder on the idea that over a few weeks they'll all get used to each other and can live as one happy flock. Only if we could do the same...

Franklin's Folly

On May 22nd, the turkeys arrived! Ordering the hatchery's choice of heritage turkeys, we received 38 healthy poults that all appear to be Blue Slates. When they arrived at the dawn of their third day, some even had the tips of their primary feathers emerging.

So far, the turkeys are my favorite. They're so much calmer and quieter than the chickens, which are still running and screaming from me when I enter their enclosure. Turkeys have a reputation as being rather dumb youngsters. Sometimes, apparently, some fail to begin to eat and drink and die shortly thereafter. Legend also has it that young turkeys will drown if placed outside too early and it rains, looking skyward with their mouths agape. But after watching these little guys for only a week now - and talking with Jen, John, Mary and Scott - I've been thinking about how this so-called stupidity of turkeys might actually be the first stage of intelligence. Compared to chickens, whose consumptive instincts are seemingly stronger from the outset, turkeys must be shown where and how to eat and drink. They need to be imprinted upon, in other words, and this may be an early point of differentiation for learning and adaptation. Just some beginning thoughts.

But one of the other reasons I so like the turkeys is their symbolic connections to our national identity. As John reminded me, Ben Franklin supported the idea of the turkey - over that of the Bald Eagle - for the national bird. As the story goes, during the Revolutionary War a regiment of soldiers flew the Bald Eagle insignia Congress eventually adopted as the national seal, but drew it so badly that it looked like a turkey. Franklin used this likeness to compare the two birds, lamenting the ultimate choice in a letter to his daughter from Paris in 1784:

"For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

"With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country...

"I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America....He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."

Plus, you can eat turkeys. And they have really cool heads.