Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than 99 percent of them are a single breed: the Broad-Breasted White, a quick-fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial-scale setting. These are the big lugs so famously dumb, they can drown by looking up at the rain. (Friends of mine swear they have seen this happen.) If a Broad-Breasted White should escape slaughter, it likely wouldn’t live to be a year old: they get so heavy, their legs collapse. In mature form they’re incapable of flying, foraging, or mating. That’s right, reproduction. Genes that make turkeys behave like animals are useless to a creature packed wing-to-wing with thousands of others, and might cause it to get uppity or suicidal, so those genes have been bred out of the pool. Docile lethargy works better, and helps them pack on the pounds. To some extent, this trend holds for all animals bred for confinement. For turkeys, the scheme that gave them an extremely breast-heavy body and ultra-rapid growth has also left them with a combination of deformity and idiocy that renders them unable to have turkey sex. Poor turkeys.
So how do we get more of them? Well you might ask. The sperm must be artificially extracted from live male turkeys by a person, a professional turkey sperm-wrangler if you will, and artificially introduced to the hens, and that is all I’m going to say about that. If you think they send the toms off to a men’s room with little paper cups and Playhen Magazine, that’s not how it goes. I will add only this: if you are the sort of parent who threatens your teenagers with a future of unsavory jobs when they ditch school, here’s one more career you might want to add to the list.
When our family considered raising turkeys ourselves, we knew we weren’t going to go there. I was intrigued by what I knew of older breeds, especially after Slow Food USA launched a campaign to reacquaint American palates with the flavors of heritage turkeys. I wondered if the pale, grain-fattened turkeys I’d always bought at the supermarket were counterparts to the insipid vegetable-formerly-known-as-tomato. All the special qualities of heirloom vegetables are found in heirloom breeds of domestic animals too: superior disease resistance, legendary flavors, and scarcity, as modern breeds take over the market. Hundreds of old-time varieties of hoof stock and poultry, it turns out, are on the brink of extinction.
The Price of Life
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Industrial animal food production has one goal: to convert creatures into meat. These intensively managed factory farms are called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The animals are chosen for rapid growth, ability to withstand confinement (some literally don’t have room to turn around), and resistance to the pathogens that grow in these conditions. Advocates say it’s an efficient way to produce cheap, good-quality meat for consumers.
Opponents raise three basic complaints: first, the treatment of animals. CAFOs house them as tightly as possible where they never see grass or sunlight. If you can envision one thousand chickens in your bathroom, in cages stacked to the ceiling, you’re honestly getting the picture. (Actually, a six-foot-by-eight-foot room could house 1,152.)
A second complaint is pollution. So many animals in a small space put huge volumes of excrement into that small space, creating obvious waste storage and water quality problems. CAFO animals in the United States produce about six times the volume of fecal matter of all humans on our planet. Animals on pasture, by contrast, enrich the soil.
A third issue is health. Confined animals are physically stressed, and are routinely given antibiotics in their feed to ward off disease. Nearly three-quarters of all antibiotics in the United States are used in CAFOs. Even so, the Consumers Union reported that over 70 percent of supermarket chickens harbored campylobacter and/or salmonella bacteria. The antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that grow in these conditions are a significant new threat to humans.
Currently, 98 percent of chickens in the United States are produced by large corporations. If you have an opportunity to buy some of that other 2 percent, a truly free-range chicken from a local farmer, it will cost a little more. So what’s the going price these days for compassion, clean water, and the public health?
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STEVEN L. HOPP
The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy keeps track of rare varieties of turkeys, chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle that were well known to farmers a century ago, but whose numbers have declined to insignificance in the modern market. In addition to broader genetic diversity and disease resistance, heritage breeds tend to retain more of their wild ancestors’ sense about foraging, predator avoidance, and reproduction—traits that suit them for life in the pasture and barnyard rather than a crowded, windowless metal house. Many heritage breeds are adapted to specific climates. Above all, they’re superior in the arena for which these creatures exist in the first place: as food.
Heritage livestock favorites are as colorfully named as heirloom vegetables. You can have your Tennessee Fainting goats, your Florida Cracker cattle, your Jersey Giant chickens, your Gloucester Old Spots hogs. Among draft animals, let us not forget the American Mammoth Jack Ass. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy publishes directories of these animals and their whereabouts, allowing member farmers to communicate and exchange bloodlines.
We decided to join the small club of people who are maintaining breeding flocks of heritage turkeys—birds whose endearing traits include the capacity to do their own breeding, all by themselves. Eight rare heritage turkey breeds still exist: Jersey Buff, Black Spanish, Beltsville Small White, Standard Bronze, Narragansett, Royal Palm, Midget White, and Bourbon Red. We picked the last one. They are handsome and famously tasty, but for me it was also a matter of rooting for the home team. This breed comes from Bourbon County, Kentucky, a stone’s throw from where I grew up. I imagined my paternal grandmother playing in the yard of the farm where these birds were originally bred—an actual possibility. Fewer than two thousand Bourbon Reds now remain in breeding flocks. It struck me as a patriotic calling that I should help spare this American breed from extinction.
Slow Food has employed the paradox of saving rare breeds by getting more people to eat them, and that’s exactly what happened in its 2003 Ark of Taste turkey project. So many people signed up in the spring for heirloom Thanksgiving turkeys instead of the standard Butterball, an unprecedented number of U.S. farmers were called upon to raise them. The demand has continued. So we jumped on that wagon, hoping to have our rare birds and eat them too.
Lily’s chickens, however, were a different story: her own. The day of their promised arrival had been circled on her calendar for many months: April 23, my babies due! Some parents would worry about a daughter taking on maternal responsibility so early in life, but Lily was already experienced. She started keeping her first small laying flock as a first-grader, back in Tucson where the coop had to be fortified against coyotes and bobcats. The part of our move to Virginia that Lily most dreaded, in fact, was saying good-bye to her girls. (The friends who adopted them are kind enough to keep us posted on their health, welfare, and egg production.) We prepared her for the move by promising she could start all over again once we got to the farm. It would be a better place for chickens with abundant green pasture for a real free-range flock, not just a handful of penned layers. “You could even sell some of the eggs,” I’d added casually.
Say no more. She was off to her room to do some calculations. Lily is the sole member of our family with gifts in the entrepreneurial direction. Soon she was back with a notebook under her arm. “It’s okay to move,” she said. “I’ll have an egg business.”
A few days later she brought up the subject again, wanting to be reassured that our Virginia hens would just be for eggs, not for meat. Lily knew what farming was about, and while she’d had no problem eating our early turkey experiments, chickens held a different place in her emotional landscape. How can I convey her fondness for chickens? Other little girls have ballerinas or Barbie posters on their bedroom walls; my daughter has a calendar titled “The Fairest Fowl.” One of the earliest lessons i
n poultry husbandry we had to teach her was “Why we don’t kiss chickens on the mouth.” On the sad day one of her hens died, she wept loudly for an entire afternoon. I made the mistake of pointing out that it was just a chicken.
“You don’t understand, Mama,” she said, red-eyed. “I love my chickens as much as I love you.”
Well, shut me up. She realized she’d hurt my feelings, because she crept out of her room an hour later to revise the evaluation. “I didn’t really mean that, Mama,” she sniffled. “I’m sorry. If I love my chickens six, I love you seven.”
Oh, good. I’m not asking who’s a ten.
So I knew, in our discussions of poultry commerce, I needed to be reassuring. “They’ll be your chickens,” I told her. “You’re the boss. What you sell is your decision.”
As weeks passed and her future on the farm began to take shape in her mind, Lily asked if she’d also be able to have a horse. Her interest in equines surpasses the standard little-girl passion of collecting plastic ones with purple manes and tail; she’d lobbied for riding lessons before she could ride a bike. I’d long assumed a horse was on our horizon. I just hoped it could wait until Lily was tall enough to saddle it herself.
In the time-honored tradition of parents, I stalled. “With your egg business, you can raise money for a horse yourself,” I told her. “I’ll even match your funds—we’ll get a horse when you have half the money to buy one.”
When I was a kid, I would have accepted these incalculable vagaries without a second thought, understanding that maybe a horse was out there for me but I’d just have to wait and see. The entrepreneurial gene apparently skips generations. Lily got out her notebook and started asking questions.
“How much does a horse cost?”
“Oh, it depends,” I hedged.
“Just a regular mare, or a gelding,” she insisted. When it comes to mares and geldings, she knows the score. I’d recently overheard her explaining this to some of her friends. “A stallion is a boy that’s really fierce and bossy,” she told them. “But they can give them an operation that makes them gentle and nice and helpful. You know. Like our daddies.”
Okay, then, this girl knew what she was looking for in horseflesh. What does an animal like that cost, she inquired? “Oh, about a thousand dollars,” I said, wildly overestimating, pretty sure this huge number would end the conversation.
Her eyes grew round.
“Yep,” I said. “You’ll have to earn half. Five hundred.”
She eyed me for a minute. “How much can I sell a dozen eggs for?”
“Nice brown organic eggs? Probably two-fifty a dozen. But remember, you have to pay for feed. Your profit might be about a dollar a dozen.”
She disappeared into her room with the notebook. She was only a second-grader then, as yet unacquainted with long division. I could only assume she was counting off dollar bills on the calendar to get to five hundred. In a while she popped out with another question.
“How much can you sell chicken meat for?”
“Oh,” I said, trying to strike a morally neutral tone in my role as financial adviser, “organic chicken sells for a good bit. Maybe three dollars a pound. A good-size roasting bird might net you ten dollars, after you subtract your feed costs.”
She vanished again, for a very long time. I could almost hear the spiritual wrestling match, poultry vs. equines, fur and feathers flying. Many hours later, at dinner, she announced: “Eggs and meat. We’ll only kill the mean ones.”
I know I’m not the first mother to make an idle promise I’d come to regret. My mother-in-law has told me that Steven, at age seven, dashed through her kitchen and shouted on the way through, “Mom, if I win a monkey in a contest, can I keep it?” Oh, sure honey, Joann said, stirring the pasta. She had seven children and, I can only imagine, learned to tune out a lot of noise. But Steven won the monkey. And yes, they kept it.
In my case, what I’d posed as a stalling tactic turned out to be a powerful nudge, moving Lily from the state of loving something as much as her mother (or six-sevenths as much) to a less sentimental position, to put it mildly. I watched with interest as she processed and stuck to her choices. I really had no idea where this would end.
Chicks must be started no later than April if they’re to start laying before cold weather. We moved to the farm in June, too late. From friends we acquired a few mature hens to keep us in eggs, and satisfy Lily’s minimum daily requirement of chicken love. But the farm-fresh egg business had to wait. Finally, toward the end of our first winter here, we’d gotten out the hatchery catalog and curled up on the couch to talk about a spring poultry order. Lily shivered with excitement as we discussed the pros and cons of countless different varieties. As seed catalogs are to me, so are the hatchery catalogs for my daughter. Better than emeralds and diamonds, these Rocks, Wyandottes, and Orpingtons. She turned the pages in a trance.
“First of all, some Araucanas,” she decided. “Because they lay pretty green eggs. My customers will like those.”
I agreed, impressed with her instincts for customer service.
“And for the main laying flock I want about ten hens,” she said. “We’ll keep one of the roosters so we can have chicks the next spring.”
She read listings for the heavy breeds, studying which ones were strong winter layers, which were good mothers (some breeds have motherhood entirely bred out of them and won’t deign to sit on their own eggs). She settled on a distinguished red-and-black breed called Partridge Rocks. We ordered sixteen of these, straight run (unsexed), of which about half would grow up to be females. Lily knows you can’t have too many roosters in a flock—she had mentioned we would “keep” one of the males, implying the rest would be dispatched. I didn’t comment. But it seemed we were now about seven roosters closer to a horse. I hoped they would all be very, very mean.
She paused over a section of the catalog titled “Broilers, Roasters and Fryers.”
“Look at these,” she said, showing me a picture of an athletic-looking fowl, all breast and drumstick. “Compact bodies and broad, deep breasts…,” she read aloud. “These super meat qualities have made the Dark Cornish a truly gourmet item.”
“You’re sure you want to raise meat birds too?” I asked. “Only if you want to, honey.” I was starting to crumble. “You’ll get your horse someday, no matter what.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I won’t name them. I’ll have my old pet hens to love.”
“Of course,” I said. “Pets are pets. Food is food.”
Out on the near horizon, Lily’s future horse pawed the ground and whinnied.
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Eating My Sister’s Chickens
BY CAMILLE
During my first year of college, one of my frequent conversations went like this:
“Camille, you’re a vegetarian, right?”
“Well, no.”
“No? You really seem like the type.”
“Well, I only eat free-range meat.”
“Free who?”
I guess I do seem like the type. Personal health and the environment are important to me, and my vocational path even hints at vegetarianism—I teach yoga, and may study nutrition in graduate school. The meat-eating question is one I’ve considered from a lot of angles, but that’s not easy to explain in thirty seconds. A lunch line is probably not the best place to do it, either. For one thing, all meat is not created equal. Cows and chickens that spent their lives in feedlots, fattening up on foods they did not evolve to eat, plus antibiotics, produce different meat from their counterparts that lived outdoors in fresh air, eating grass. That’s one nutritional consideration to bear in mind while weighing the pros and cons of vegetarianism.
There are others, too. Vegetarians and vegans should consider taking iron supplements because the amount of this nutrient found in plant sources is minuscule compared with the amount found in meat. Of course, eating plenty of iron-containing dark leafy greens, legumes, and whole grains is a good plan. Along wi
th a host of other essential nutrients, they do offer a good bit of iron, but in some cases it may not be enough to keep the body producing hemoglobin. Vitamin B12 is also tricky; in its natural form it’s found only in animal products. There are traces of it in fermented soy and seaweed, but the Vegetarian Society warns that the form of B12 in plant sources is likely unavailable to human digestion. This means that vegans—people who eat no meat, dairy, or eggs—need to rely on supplements or
foods fortified with B12 to prevent this dangerous deficiency. Vegan diets also tend to be skimpy in the calcium department, so supplements there can be helpful as well.
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