Chicago Tribune -- Turkey on the table poses for real thing.
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Turkey on the table poses for real thing
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Farmers say the traditional bird is vanishing; the only way to rescue it is to eat more of them
By William Mullen
Tribune staff reporter
November 27, 2002
CALAMUS, Iowa -- Every morning at 5, hours before he shows up to teach science at the Calamus high school, Glenn Drowns is hard at work at his farm, trying to keep a well-known American bird from going extinct.
That would be the traditional farmyard turkey, revered each Thanksgiving as a symbol of American abundance but now surviving only in small numbers.
The modern industrial versions of the bird are, of course, plentiful. Found plucked, dressed, frozen and shrink-wrapped in stores, often at less than $1 a pound, they are produced with almost assembly-line precision, 270 million a year.
But Drowns, 41, and other preservationist farmers fear the old-fashioned gobblers will vanish forever--unless more people can be persuaded to eat them.
The factory birds are engineered to grow up fast and with lots of white meat. They spend their entire lives inside, being conceived, hatched, reared, slaughtered and packaged without spending a single moment in sunlight.
All white and with short legs, they little resemble the darker, colorful, fan-tailed turkeys of the past. And according to Drowns, they aren't nearly as flavorful.
But a handful of giant turkey processors so dominates the market with cheap, conveniently packaged birds that most farmers quit raising traditional farmyard turkeys decades ago. Varieties that once strutted and preened by the millions--black Spanish, slate, buff, chocolate, auburn, white Holland and royal palm turkeys--now are almost gone.
That includes two varieties most people probably think of when they think of turkeys, the coppery American bronze and the artfully dappled gray, white, tan and black Narragansett. Those birds are generally portrayed on greeting cards and school bulletin boards alongside pious buckle-shoed Pilgrims.
Now each variety is down to fewer than 500 breeding pairs.
Descended from wild turkeys, the domestic turkey has a complex history, beginning with specimens Christopher Columbus took from Central America to Spain. European farmers soon began developing local varieties through selective breeding.
If the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 served turkey, it would have been wild ones they hunted. A few years later, however, an English domestic variety, the Norfolk black, returned to the New World with 17th Century British settlers, and all present-day varieties probably trace back to those settlers' flocks and the wild turkeys they mingled with.
`A lot less around'
The dire straits of the old-fashioned turkeys became apparent in 1998 when the American Livestock Breed Conservancy, a national group working to conserve genetic diversity in farm animals, conducted a national turkey census.
"There were a lot less around than almost anybody imagined," Drowns said.
A once-popular Midwestern variety, the royal Nebraskan, appears to be extinct. Drowns said only 13 fawn-colored chocolates, the most common turkey on Southern farms before the Civil War, are alive, nine toms and four hens, and fewer than a dozen auburns survive.
Since he was in grade school in Idaho, Drowns has been passionate about "heritage" farming: raising old plants and animals modern agriculture has abandoned for more profitable, highly engineered hybrids.
In 1988 he bought a 40-acre farm east of Calamus, about 30 miles northwest of Davenport, and renamed it the Sand Hill Preservation Center.
There he, his wife, Linda, and their two teenage sons grow seed for more than 2,000 varieties of rare farm vegetables. They also raise 3,000 to 4,000 chickens, ducks, geese, guinea fowl and turkeys, representing scores of rare and endangered breeds and subgroups of breeds, called varieties.
"I grow and maintain things viewed as worthless by large-scale commercial interests," Drowns said.
Drowns is among a small network of preservationists around the country devoted to saving the old turkey varieties. Most of them, like Drowns, hold down other jobs to pay the bills, largely volunteering their time for preservation efforts.
They couch much of their appeal to saving the old birds in the scientific jargon of preserving gene pools and biotic diversity. Emotionally, what seems to drive them is the realization that modern life can erase the beauty of the past almost before anyone knows it's threatened.
"A good bronze turkey should have the color of a shiny copper penny gleaming in the sun," said Dr. Frank Reese, a Lindsborg, Kan., anesthesiologist who also runs a family turkey ranch passed on by his father.
Beyond their visual appeal, the old turkey varieties should be maintained simply because they make good food, Reese said.
"The flavor and the texture of the meat of these traditional turkeys is so vastly different from the mass-produced turkeys," he said. "It's the difference between eating a garden tomato fresh off the vine and a tomato from a tube in a supermarket."
Through much of the nation's history, farmers looked upon turkeys as tasty, low-maintenance livestock.
Independent and good at foraging for wild foods, turkeys were allowed to roam in the woods from early spring to late autumn. Then farmers gathered them back into a flock.
"The thing was, a lot of turkeys from neighboring farms went to the same woods for the summer, mingling and breeding with turkeys from other farms," said Craig Russell, president of the Society for the Protection of Poultry Antiquities, which works to promote preservation of heritage farm fowl.
"It was important that every farm family chose its own distinctive turkey variety, unlike any nearby," Russell said. "When they all went into the woods to retrieve their birds, each family knew which turkeys belonged to which farm."
Turkey `drives'
Farm communities used to pool their surplus birds for a turkey "drive," in which massive flocks were herded like cattle to distant city markets, shepherded by men with long switches and trained dogs.
"Sometimes they went hundreds of miles," Russell said. "They were doing turkey drives in Texas until the 1950s."
Developed for genetic traits that make them more profitable, factory turkeys grow fast, just 12 weeks from hatching to the 12-pound birds that will grace so many Thanksgiving tables. It takes traditional birds 24 weeks to grow that big.
But the mass-produced turkeys are so obese and clumsy that they can barely walk. They are incapable of mating and are artificially inseminated. They also lack immunity to a host of diseases that don't faze their farm cousins.
For that reason, the preservationists say, the genetics of the old birds may someday be needed to save the modern ones.
"If a new disease popped up that our commercial turkeys were not immune to, it could sweep through and kill off a huge portion of them," said Jerry Johnson, executive director of Garfield Farm, a Kane County living history museum that keeps a small flock of Narragansett turkeys.
"That would be a disaster for our food industry. If that happened, we would certainly want to have these old types of turkeys to go back to, looking for genetic immune traits we would need to breed into the modern birds to protect them."
Drowns said the best way to save the old turkeys is to get people interested in eating them again, creating an incentive for farmers to raise them. There are signs that strategy may be having some success.
Slow Food U.S.A., a movement encouraging people to reject mass-produced, packaged and highly processed foods and return to cooking from scratch, took up for the traditional turkeys this year.
The group contracted with Reese to raise 1,000 Narragansetts, American bronzes and red bourbons for its marketing arm this year.
"A thousand people all over the country have already ordered them for Thanksgiving," Reese said.
Compared with mass-produced supermarket turkeys going for less than $1 a pound, the Slow Food turkeys are expensive. Reese said they are being sold at $3.50 a pound before shipping.
"People think nothing of spending $90 for really spectacular turkeys," he said. "We could have sold 2,000 of them this year if we had them."
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