Oven-Ready Turkeys
For 80 years, we have been raising the finest quality turkeys. We raise 3000 turkeys each year and all of our turkeys are sold directly from our farm market.
Our turkeys are fed a natural feed mix with a corn and soybean base that we make ourselves. Absolutely NO fishmeal. That’s just gross. They are raised without antibiotics or growth hormones.
Throughout the year, we sell frozen oven-ready whole turkeys and turkey parts, including boneless breast meat, breast on frames, thighs, wings, legs, giblets, necks, and stock.
You don’t have to wait for the holidays to have turkey… small turkeys are perfect for deep-frying, and turkey parts are great for the crockpot or the backyard grill!
We guarantee our frozen turkeys to be just as good as our fresh turkeys! (Seriously, we’ve done taste tests.) How is this possible? Through an aging process and flash freezing! (Read more about this below.)
Fresh turkeys are only available for Thanksgiving. We take orders in advance. For Thanksgiving, we take 1000 orders typically beginning on October 1st. No worries if you don’t get your order in on time because, as stated above, we do raise 3000 per year. The rest are sold on a first-come, first-serve basis on the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and there is always plenty for everyone!
Are our turkeys free-range?
Technically yes, but the answer isn’t quite that simple.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), free-range just means that the turkeys have access to the outdoors for an undetermined period each day. In practice, this can mean that turkeys live most of their lives outdoors, or it can mean the turkeys spend all their time in cramped, indoor pens that have a small door opened to the outside for just a few minutes each day. Obviously, there’s a world of difference between these two scenarios in regards to humanely raising poultry, but both scenarios meet the definition. Free-range isn’t always as good as it sounds.
When most people think of free-range, they are actually thinking of pasture-raised… turkeys happily frolicking in a wide-open field. There is a practical reason that we cannot do this. Domestic turkeys are very susceptible to diseases from other birds. Since our turkeys are raised without the use of antibiotics, we do not allow them out in the open because this would put them at risk of coming into contact with other birds and the diseases they carry.
At our farm, we work hard to take the best possible care of our turkeys. We raise them in open-faced barns where they have constant natural light and air circulation, and there is plenty of square footage per turkey (although funny enough, they tend to hang out in a crowd anyway). Our turkeys are happy and healthy. We make sure that they have a great life, with just one bad day. Come see for yourselves!
About aging and flash freezing…
Once the turkeys have been processed, they are not put directly into a freezer. They are first put into a refrigerator and held for at least 48 hours. This ages the meat, optimizing its texture and keeping it tender.
Flash freezing is the next process. We freeze the turkey quickly at an extremely low temperature with cold, circulating air. This preserves the meat much differently than if you were to buy fresh meat and freeze it yourself. Your home freezer and grocery store freezers are not designed to freeze foods, only to keep food frozen. They are not set to a low enough temperature for flash freezing quality.
When you put fresh meat into a normal freezer, it takes hours for it to fully freeze. During this time, ice crystals form between the fibers of the meat and basically “break” the fibers, forcing the delicious juices right out of the meat. Hence, when you thaw out the meat, it is no longer juicy.
Flash freezing meat freezes it so quickly that the ice crystals don’t have time to form, so when you thaw out our flash-frozen turkeys, you keep all of the nutrients and juices inside of the turkey, instead of down the drain.
Additionally, our turkeys are vacuum-sealed, protecting them against freezer burn and dehydration.