Locally grown turkeys elusive in Jeff Co

Posted
Royal Palm. Broad Breasted. Bourbon Red. Black. Blue Slates. Once you look beyond the turkeys mass-produced for loss-leader pricing at hyper-rmarkets, there is more to holiday birds than meets the eye in a meat case. At Spring Rain Farm & Orchards in Chimacum, about 200 Thanksgiving entrées were still afoot last week, scratching for bugs and fallen apples on the northeast side of John Bellow and Roxanne Hudson’s 28-acre operation. White, brown, black and mottled, the birds represent perhaps a half-dozen breeds, Bellow said. But that vision of plenty collides with this rural-town reality: if you want a local turkey, you are almost out of luck. It turns out Bellow and Hudson may be the only Jefferson County farmers turning out turkeys commercially, according to several meat managers and farms. By Nov. 11, Spring Rain reported every bird sold directly from their certified processing house was spoken for. Supplies are running out in stores, too. At the Food Co-op in Port Townsend, butcher Josh Madill said he had a half-dozen left. Ditto Chimacum Corner Farmstand, where meat manager Jenna Dern reported Tuesday morning (Nov. 12) that she had a half-dozen local birds left of the 25 on order. Though expensive and somewhat rare, Dern encourages Thanksgiving celebrants to try a local bird sometime. “The biggest part for me is that you know where your food is coming from,” she said. “The dark meat is darker and more flavorful.” Bellow, a Ph.D in agricultural ecology, strives for an interlocking system of animals and plants in his patch of the valley, which straddles salmon-hosting Chimacum Creek. Kicking the green layer under his apple trees, Bellow pointed to the gravel in an excavated mound nearby and said the soil in the orchard was that rocky until he turned the birds loose. Now, it’s a close-cropped greenscape on an inch or so of black dirt, scratched at by hundreds of turkeys and an even larger flock of laying hens. Watched over by four huge Maremmas, an Italian shepherd dog that stands waist-high on an adult, the birds investigate newcomers in hopes of a handful of feed, then swing away, spreading their tail feathers and strutting in groups of three and four.
Turkey Thanksgiving Local food Rain Spring Farm