HAMPTON, N.H. (AP) - Walking a dung-covered dirt road on his family’s farm, Steve Hurd attracts his flock of 600 broad-breasted white turkeys, all waddling, gobbling and expecting some food.
Hurd bought the birds at a hatchery when they were six weeks old and trucked them back to his heirloom farm, to feed on grass and grain, then be sold for Thanksgiving dinners. They’ve been grazing at the 160-acre farm for months and soon will be butchered, plucked and put on ice by Hurd, with a small team of helpers.
Unlike commercial poultry operations, Hurd said his turkeys, “only have one bad day.”
If this Thanksgiving is like the last, he said, hundreds of his turkeys will be sold from his farmhouse the week before Thanksgiving.
Hurd’s grandparents bought the 11 Old Stage Road farm property in 1923 and it was run as a dairy farm, with milking cows, until Hurd switched to livestock. He now raises cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys, for beef, pork, poultry and eggs.
Hurd’s mother Gwen lives in one of the antique farmhouses and he shares a second one with his wife Cheryl. The pig pen is nearby, where Hurd chucks whole pumpkins over a fence, they smash into pieces and dozens of pigs exit a barn to fight over them.
“Not really,” he said when asked if he knows how many pigs he’s now raising for food. “Up in here it’s close to 60 and there’s more down back. “I’m not sure I’d want to fall down in there. The other day, one grabbed hold of my leg.”
Behind the pig pen is a stable and shelter for Hurd’s cows. Across his unpaved driveway, roosters crow in a rusted livestock trailer for hauling poultry.
A nearby field is filled with his turkeys, “broad-breasted whites,” attracted to anyone who walks near them. The males have blue around their eyes, the females “do most of the squawking,” he explained.
The flock is hearty enough to stay outside unprotected and are fattened with grass and grain, all without antibiotics or hormones, Hurd said. He buys them in batches of six different age groups, to grow them in different sizes, this year ranging from 12 pounds to “a little over 25 pounds.”
Predators have been a problem, with something getting his early turkeys a few years ago, but now he surrounds the flock with an electric fence that can be moved around the farm for fresh grazing opportunities.
The turkeys are slaughtered in a trailer on site and the feathers removed in a commercial plucker; a tub lined with rubber fingers that rotates and cleans the turkeys one at a time. Last year Hurd had a crew of six helpers worked until midnight for a week to ready the turkeys for pickup starting the Sunday before Thanksgiving.
No one has ever asked to select their turkey from the flock, said Hurd, who likes his turkeys roasted, prefers dark meat and will bring the Thanksgiving turkey to his wife’s cousin’s house.
“I have people say, ’I didn’t know there was a farm in Hampton,’” Hurd said about his family’s property now protected from future development by a conservation easement. “We’ve been here since 1923.”
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Information from: Foster’s Daily Democrat, http://www.fosters.com
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