Talkin' turkey

Justin Messner/Herald-Tribune-- These turkeys will grow to a weight of about 38 pounds before being trucked to a Butterball processing plant, to be prepared for our dinner tables. This year, the turkeys reared at Tom and Tricia Peelen's Nevada farm won't be packaged as whole birds, but don't worry -- there'll be plenty of whole birds to go around for the holiday season.

Nevada, Mo. -- Tom and Tricia Peelen have been contracted Butterball turkey farmers for more than 10 years.

Butterball, headquartered in Mount Olive, N.C. has several plants including one in Carthage, Mo., which holds about 120 contracted farmers in Missouri alone.

The 130-thousand-square-foot Carthage plant houses about 800 employees and on average produces about 254 million pounds of turkey a year.

According to Ned Glascock, public relations director for Butterball, as a whole the company is responsible for the production of around 1.4 billion pounds of turkey per year, making it the largest producer in the United States. Twelve million pounds of this is produced for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Many farms raise these turkeys, which later are shipped to production plants and used for a variety of meat products.

Turkey farmers are paid by the pound, and, according to Tom Peelen, the last shipment of birds to leave his farm weighed about 38 pounds each. Starting with approximately 18,000 turkeys, this gives him an average of 580 - 620 thousand pounds of birds per flock.

Since "Not many people own ovens that can hold a 38-pound bird," Peelen said, Butterball retrieves the turkeys for holiday production several weeks sooner simply so the birds are more manageable. This cuts the turkeys weight going out of the farm significantly. "We don't take a loss, but we make less," said Tom "the birds for whole bird production are picked up at 13 weeks and they weigh quite a bit less than the ones we raise now."

To offer an idea of the growth rate for turkeys Tricia said, "They drop the turkeys off in one van, then pick them up in 16 loaded semis."

Taking care of all these turkeys is no easy feat. According to Peeland an average flock of turkeys will go through 1.6 million pounds of feed per year and 3,000 gallons of water per day on his farm.

On top of this, the farmer is responsible for maintaining an appropriate temperature throughout the barn while regulating the amount of ammonia build up from the bird's waste.

There is also the transportation of the turkeys from one barn to another. Around 18,000 turkey babies, called poults, start out in one large shed, after around six weeks the population is split into two groups and put into two sheds for another six weeks.

Finally the birds are moved to finishing houses where they wait to be retrieved by Butterball.

All in all, the Peelens say they are very happy working as contracted Butterball farmers, but they are still glad they were not called upon to supply any holiday dinners.