Real Meat, Real Stories

written by

posted on

December 5, 2024

A New Thanksgiving Tradition: Preparing a 32-Pound Turkey

‘Twas Thanksgiving Eve and your farmer Lou Ann began to prepare the feast’s main event; a turkey weighing in at a whopping 32 pounds. Is this the biggest bird she’s ever cooked? She recalls another gracing her kitchen years ago, when her four children were still babes. Yet, that bird only weighed a measly 28 pounds, and still bent her oven rack. How will the oven measure up this year? Her hope lies now in better forged steel than that of the 80’s.

The turkey was packaged in an opaque bag, making it difficult to know what she had to work with during kitchen prep-time. She removed the packaging to reveal the monstrous beaut of an animal. Only this animal still showed signs of the golden life lived on our land. The legs and wings were covered in patches of dark black pin feathers. After a smirk, she glances out the kitchen window and her mind wanders back in time, to a neighbors’ farm she knew very well.

Her high school sweetheart couldn’t wait to seal their fate in love; they wed only months after throwing graduation caps towards the yellow lights hanging from the dusty gym ceiling. After marriage, finding their own space outside of their parents’ home was first priority.

While attending church one Sunday, a neighbor farmer proposed to Nate and Lou Ann a solution for housing in exchange for help on his farm. He offered the apartment attached to the farmhouse. With no money in the bank, and a dream in their hearts, they gladly packed small bags and moved into the tall sturdy brick home.

The farmer raised thousands of turkeys and chickens every year for the holidays, offering fresh-dressed birds picked up at the farm, and delivering the rest to local stores. Harvest day was something the young couple will never forget.

Nate was in charge of the processing day, and helped kill, scald, and pluck the birds. Lou Ann and other ladies from the neighborhood wanting to earn extra money for the Holiday would gut, clean gizzards, pull pin-feathers left behind from the plucking machine, and chill the birds. One of the most tedious tasks of the process was removing the pin feathers, which seems true still today, 50 years later, as she stands in her kitchen.

Her attention shifts back to the gigantic bird, “I have just the right tool for this,” she pulls the long drawer, and sifts through the stainless-steel pieces to find a small treasure from the past known to her as a strawberry huller; something she rarely ever uses. She learned while working and living at the turkey farm, the best tool for plucking pin-feathers is a berry huller, which looks like an oversized tweezers. After 40 minutes of this mindful task, the bird was finally ready to settle on the cold porch for the evening.

Her heart fills with gratitude as she reminisces of the time before children and her own farm, knowing all those moments continue to shape her life as it is now. All those years, time nor flavor was lost. The next day the monstrous, featherless turkey wowed her and her family’s palettes as Nate declares, “this might be the best tasting turkey we’ve ever raised.”

Modern Challenges of Turkey Processing
Unlike Lou Ann and Nate’s first home at the neighbor’s turkey farm, our farm now must use a USDA processing facility to sell meat by the package across state lines. Finding a USDA turkey processor is challenging, with only a few left within 100 miles of the farm. Last year, we found a great processor in Illinois that also offered cut-up birds and ground turkey. Unfortunately, the business sold a couple of months before this year’s harvest, and the new owners were inexperienced with turkey processing.

Black Feathered Turkeys: Flavor, Sustainability, and Challenges
After preparing our own Thanksgiving bird, we noticed the processor struggled to remove all the pin feathers on some of this year’s turkeys. Birds with black feathers are much harder to pluck, especially if the processor isn’t accustomed to them. We raise these darker-feathered birds because they thrive outdoors and deliver exceptional flavor. Additionally, outdoor-raised birds naturally grow more feathers than those raised indoors.

For anyone who purchased turkeys and faced the unexpected task of plucking a few stragglers, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this caused during your meal prep. The white packaging this year meant the feathers weren’t visible beforehand, leaving us unaware.

Looking ahead, we’ve already booked our 2025 turkey harvest with a more experienced processor. This should resolve the pin feather issue, aside from the occasional feather or two. Meanwhile, any remaining turkeys from this year will now include a berry huller tool to help with any leftover feathers during processing.

Thank You for Supporting Local Farmers
Thank you for following the story behind the food you eat and for supporting the farmers who raise it. We truly appreciate you.

What 7 generations of Farming Teaches Us...

Earlier this month, we welcomed the Cass County Historical Society to our farm for their September event and meeting. We gathered together to talk about the history of our farm, seven generations of agriculture, and all the ways farming has changed along the way. Then we loaded everyone onto hay wagons and headed out to see what farming here looks like today. It was an evening about history, but the conversation felt just as relevant to the future. Because the story of how agriculture has changed is also part of the story of how we all buy food today. Walk through a grocery store and there are plenty of labels trying to help you decide what to buy. Natural. Local. Grass-fed. Pasture-raised. Sustainable. Premium. You can spend a lot of time reading packages and researching claims and still wonder what any of it actually looked like on the farm. That's one reason we believe knowing where your food comes from, and knowing the people who raised it, matters. Our Farm Changed, Too Generations ago, farms in this area were diversified because they needed to be. Livestock, crops, gardens and families existed together on the same piece of ground. Animals provided fertility for the soil, crops fed animals and people, and farms relied heavily on what they could produce themselves and on the communities surrounding them. As agriculture changed, farms became larger and more specialized. Livestock increasingly moved into confinement, and farmers became more dependent on commodity systems where they could be very efficient at raising something while having very little control over what they were paid for it. Our family lived that story. We raised hogs in confinement and sold into the commodity market. When hog prices collapsed in the late 1990s, our family had to take a hard look at whether that system could provide a future for our farm. Instead of getting bigger, we eventually chose a different direction: downsizing, diversifying and getting closer to the people actually eating the food we raised. Animals moved back outside. Pigs returned to pastures and woodlands. Cattle and sheep became part of our grazing system. Chickens and turkeys moved across pasture. We began thinking more intentionally about the relationship between soil, plants, animals and people, while building our own market to sell our food directly to you. What Does That Have to Do With Your Dinner? Quite a bit, actually. If you're trying to feed your family well, there's an overwhelming amount of information telling you what you should and shouldn't buy. One of the things a direct relationship with a farmer can offer is something much simpler: a source you can actually know. You can ask us what our pigs eat, how our cattle are raised, where our animals are processed or why we make a particular farming decision. You can visit the farm, see our animals and pastures, meet our family and employees, and follow along throughout the year. When you have questions, there's a real person on the other side of them. To us, that's one of the most valuable things about local food. "Local" shouldn't only mean that something traveled fewer miles. It can also mean accountability, transparency and a relationship with the people responsible for raising your food. We Aren't Trying to Farm in the Past After our talk, we headed outside to see some of these ideas in practice. We talked about grazing, livestock, soil and pasture, and we visited some baby pigs that held everyone's attention more than any story we could tell. Some of what we do today probably looks familiar to farmers from generations ago, but we're not trying to recreate the past. We use electric fencing, portable watering systems, tractors, refrigeration, USDA-inspected processing, delivery trucks, inventory software and online ordering. We're combining principles that have worked for generations with the tools and knowledge available to us today. That's part of agriculture. Farmers have to adapt. The question for us isn't how to make farming look like it did 100 years ago. It's how to take care of our land, raise animals well, produce really great food and build a farm economically strong enough to still be here 100 years from now. Strong Farms. Strong Communities. There's a lot of conversation about supporting the American farmer. When you choose to buy directly from us, you help create a market for farmers who want to do things differently. Those dollars help keep farmland in regenerative agriculture, employ local people, support processors and other small businesses. You help build strong communities, and maybe even more importantly with the average age of the American farmer on the rise each year, you give another generation a reason to believe farming can still provide a living. A Strong farm gives you an option. One that you trust to nourish you well. One that you trust to provide food that tastes incredible. One that you trust will consistently serve you. One that you trust to take care of the animals and land with respect. A strong farm gives its community a better way to feed itself, and a strong community gives its farms enough support to keep farming. Seven generations ago, our family couldn't have imagined what this farm would look like in 2026. We can't know what it will look like seven generations from now either. But we hope the people living here will still have the choice to know where some of their food comes from, to ask questions about how it was raised, and to know the farmer responsible for raising it. Thank you to the Cass County Historical Society for giving us an opportunity to look back at where agriculture has been and think about where it's headed. And thank you to every one of you who chooses to be part of what comes next. Strong Farms. Strong Communities.Real Food. Rooted Living. Renee & the Jake's Country Meats family

Real Meat, Real Stories

More from the blog

What 7 generations of Farming Teaches Us...

Beef In The News

Create Your Own Job...

Jake's Country Meats