Is Turkey Cheaper Than Chips?

We keep hertigae turkeys on our farm year-round as they offer natural pest control, especially with regards to combatting wireworms.

Our pastured heritage turkeys nest outside and hatch a clutch of eggs in the summer. Unlike incubated eggs where we can manipulate the hatch date, these poults hatched out in nature will not grown big enough to be processed for Thanksgiving or Christmas (this is one of the reasons why we also raise Nicholas White turkeys for Canadian Thanksgiving).

The heritage birds keep foraging over the winter but come spring, we can’t keep all the males, as they start fighting in the mating season. Therefore, we have heritage turkeys going to the abattoir in May.

Most people only eat a roast turkey for special occasions but in my book, Radical Farm: Animals, Food and Our Future, I encourage consumers to embrace eating turkey more often, as it supplies amazing nutrition- and a sustainably produced meat if mindfully sourced.

While the price tag on a pastured bird might seem high at first, it depends what you are comparing it to- and please, don’t compare the price to those awfully cheap store-bought turkeys available in the fall, as those are produced in concentrated animal feeding opperations, and those abhorrent poultry facilities shouldn’t even exist.

But how do our $10/lb turkeys stack up against other common grocery store items? $10/lb works out to just $0.62/oz. Annie’s gluten free mac and cheese (before you add the milk and butter which is the healthiest part) comes to $0.69/oz, Kettle brand chips are $0.71/oz and (even on sale) an Alter Eco chocolate bar is $1.73/oz. Sure, you can get regular Kraft Dinner for $0.44/oz or rolled oat for $0.22/oz, but turkey is definitley supplying superior nutrition with its deeply satiating fat and protein.

We recently had this feedback from a customer:

“I thought you might be interested in knowing how far a 28 lbs, $280.00 fresh Ruckle Farm Thanksgiving Turkey went this past Thanksgiving period:
-Thanksgiving meal for 16 people, including seconds
-2 full meals of leftovers for my wife and me
-meals for 5 people using a Moroccan-style turkey leftover recipe
-using the carcass as a base for stock, with lots of morsels of turkey thrown in = 42 individual bowls of nutritious homemade turkey soup “

That’s a lot food.

It’s tempting to try to cut costs in the grocery store, but keep in mind that cheap processed food comes at a cost to our health, our collective productivity, and our health care system. Supporting local food also builds food security in our local communities and good production methods uplift animal welfare and benefit the environment, with which we all depend.

Our turkeys offer fertility and pest control to our farm and the meat they provide is a valuable nutritional powerhouse.