Early experiences on a turkey farm gave me great appreciation for the grocery store
This is the third of 5 Days of Thanksgiving, which will run Monday through Friday, Nov. 21-25. Look for other blog posts with a Thanksgiving theme this week.
Pennsylvania ranks ninth nationwide in turkey production, which doesn’t surprise me because I visited a turkey farm on a field trip when I was in just the second grade.
The details of my adventure are a little foggy. My second-grade teacher at St. Hilary elementary school in Washington, Pennsylvania, was Mrs. Apple. She lived on a turkey farm. In 1983, I went to the farm along with the other students in my class on a November fieldtrip. Sadly, I don’t remember the name of the farm and I could not find it after extensive online research.
What I do remember has stuck with me a very long time.
Apple Turkey Farm, Take 1
We arrived on a yellow school bus and pulled onto a paved parking area near a barn. I could see turkeys and other animals roaming the area as our driver stopped. All of us piled out of the bus and were excited with the prospect of seeing live turkeys for the first time. Our teachers and chaperones did their best to maintain order.
If I recall, our guide was our teacher’s father-in-law. He showed us the henhouses and production centers. At the tender age of 6, I remember being stunned with the device used to cut off the head of poultry. I guess I had never thought about it before. It didn’t turn me off from eating chicken or poultry, but I also don’t think I connected all the dots at that time.
Yet, the sight of that poultry head cutter mounted on the wall has remained embedded. I tried to find a similar one online to show a picture. No such luck.
Apple Turkey Farm, Take 2
Although I remember very little of that event, I returned to that same farm in 1994. By then, I was 17 and helping a friend deliver meat chickens to the farm. They would be processed there. This trip also happened in November, but at night.
Packing meat chickens into crates for transport is not much fun. The chickens squirm a lot and you must keep packing them into small crates. You have to catch them, and you have to be quick.
Unlike the first trip to the farm, this one almost did get me off poultry for a while. After all, these are living chickens that we were essentially shoving into containers. As an animal lover, it bothered me that we were treating the birds this way. The friend, and experienced farmer, assured me that they had been humanely kept, but they had been bred just to be meat chickens.
Somehow, that made me feel a little better about it. These chickens were genetically engineered, and not ones that would have occurred naturally.
After loading the truck, we drove about 45 minutes to the farm. It was near midnight when we got there. The call for them had come in about 9 p.m., and it was 10:30 by the time we were packing the chickens. The friend checked them in while I waited in the cab. When he came back, we simply unloaded the chickens before climbing back in the truck and returning to the farm.
Chicken Out
At this point in life, I’m happy to let the 1,000 turkey farms in Pennsylvania process the birds for me. Check out this image series by the Inquirer in Philadelphia, which journeyed to the Howe Farm in Downington if you want to see what a small working turkey farm looks like.
I’ve had my fill. The trip 28 years ago was my last trip to the turkey farm, and I’ve been satisfied to get my poultry from the grocery store since.
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