Oven-Ready Turkeys
Unfortunately, we have discontinued turkey production as of July 2025.
“To everything there is a season.”
When our family took over this farm in 1868, specifically Clement Updike and his son, Levi Updike, it was a typical subsistence farm. Since then, the farm has gone through several seasons of change.
During the season of Charles and Levi Lee, this farm became half covered with apple orchards, and apples were sold to Trenton markets and cider mills. It was aptly called Lee Orchards.
Richard Lee’s season was a season of great change- a real turning point for the farm. What began as a 4H project for an 11-year-old boy grew into a business which raised over 8000 turkeys annually (later less with the arrival of supermarkets). In homage to the turkeys that saved the family farm, Richard renamed the business Lee Turkey Farm.
In 1964, Richard and his wife, Ruth, also turned this into the first public u-pick farm in NJ, and soon after offered farm tours to local schools.
Ronny and Janet’s season has been a season of both continuation and expansion- a season for adding a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, for beautifying the farm, for carrying on the previous generations’ legacy and growing the business to what it is now.
Now, it is with hearts full of bittersweet emotions that we announce that, after 87 years, our season for raising and processing turkeys has come to an end.
This was a heavy decision to make. We know our turkeys have been a huge part of the Thanksgiving tradition for so many families, so this will be a sad shock for you.
This is really a decision that has been several years in the making. We have a lot of reasons for this decision, but we won’t list them in their entirety because we don’t mean for this to come across as a pity party for us. However, the straw that ultimately broke the camel’s (or turkey’s?) back for us is that getting poults (baby turkeys) from the hatchery has become a real difficulty.
When Richard first started raising turkeys, he was able to purchase the poults at a local hatchery right in Cranbury, the next town over. After that hatchery closed, we were able to have them delivered from various companies in the mid-west for many years. At some point, the large mid-west hatcheries decided that we were not a large enough farm to deal with. They actually dropped all the turkey farms in NJ at the same time.
We eventually landed on a hatchery in West Virginia 15 years ago. This worked out fine for many years, but as time went on, we were increasingly deprioritized by the hatchery since we are considered a small grower with 2500+ turkeys annually.
For years, they delivered the turkeys to us, but they stopped a few years ago, and now we have to drive 7 hours each way to West Virginia to pick them up ourselves two to three times a year. They also cost us $5 per poult. For a larger grower, they deliver the poults and charge half the price per bird.
It’s also frustrating when you place an order for a certain hatch and pickup day, and then they regularly change the pickup dates around on us because the needs of the larger growers comes first. It becomes a difficulty because we rely on a certain date range to get the sizes that we need in time for Thanksgiving.
Additionally, when we would go to pick up the turkeys, we could not drive onto their property for biohazard reasons, so they would meet up with us in a parking lot. They rarely arrived at the agreed upon time. We would call to say that we were in a hotel right around the corner, if they could please just let us know when they were actually coming. They would say, “Oh no, we can’t do that,” and would show up sometimes 2 hours later. There was a total disregard for our time.
Also, at the end of the day, the labor and expense to produce a quality turkey at a price point that people can afford to buy is becoming less attainable for smaller growers like us.
As the farm transitions to a new era, we will be figuring out what the future holds for the next generation. We will still be growing the same fruits and vegetables that you know and love, with the same quality you’ve come to expect. Dylan and Charli have ideas to try in the coming years, and we intend to keep this farm going through the 7th generation, hopefully longer.
Most importantly, thank you to every one of you that chose our turkeys for your holiday tables for so many years- decades for some of you! We loved seeing your familiar faces annually when you came to pick up your birds, and we will deeply miss that season of festivity.
Thank you to everyone who has helped over the years with the processing and selling days. We have met so many wonderful and interesting people that way, and we couldn’t have done it for so long without you. Many of you will live on forever in the stories we tell around the table.
You will be wondering where to get your Thanksgiving turkeys now. We invite you to check out these other NJ farms:
Ashley Farms
DiPaola Turkey Farm
Hincks’s Turkey Farm
Spring Valley Turkey Farm