Farming is Just the First Step
A lot of stores are going to be short on turkey this year. A lot. There were a lot of reasons for that. While TC Farm managed to get our turkey processed, it wasn't easy. Farming is just the first step in getting food to your table. A lot of smaller farms went through the same sorts of challenges that we did so we thought we'd be totally transparent and let you get a peek into all of the logistics and last minute changes involved in getting this year's turkeys ready! -Jack
We've said it before but: Farming always involves risk. Farming the way we do has even more risks. We spend an extraordinary amount on organic feed, shelter and labor to care for our animals. But without the last step of processing, we have nothing to provide to our members and our entire year's work would be for nothing.
Last year we were worried our small family-run processors might become sick with the pandemic and be unable to process the food for our members. Any mis-steps and our livelihood would disappear and could have put us out of business. Fortunately, we managed to get through 2020, but we knew 2021 was going to be even harder once we heard several poultry processors were considering closing for good.
Where have all the Processors Gone?
We worked all through the winter to figure out options to replace the Minnesota chicken processing that wasn't coming back online for 2021. The western Wisconsin family that we also worked with seemed like they were not going to be able to re-open in 2021 either. Nobody that wasn't at a factory-scale had secure access to process chicken. The only processors that were for sure going to operated in Minnesota were the 250,000 bird a day facilities. Those plants would not agree to process any birds that had set foot outside. (Those same plants actually do process "Free Range" birds, but that label is kind of misleading since those birds don't actually go outside in any meaningful way.) This is actually a big deal and it affects nearly all farmers that aren't at a factory scale. (Also: just try to imagine 250,000 chickens at one place all on the same day (!))
I have a lot of connections in the region and found that many other poultry plants were closing in Indiana, Ohio and other areas. Most weren't shutting down, but were instead switching to only process beef and pork because it was more profitable.
Pivot, Pivot, Pivot again
Over the winter, we found an Amish community that has a well run poultry plant with a reliable and hard working Amish team. Great! I scheduled time to have them take over TC Farm's poultry processing for 2021. The challenge was: we needed bigger transport to bring all of our birds there on one truck for each batch since the drive was longer and we needed to process everything on the same day. The local plants we had used only could take 600-800 birds at once, so we have a livestock trailer setup to handle just that many. In order to make the new processor work, we needed to bring more like 2500 or 3000 all at once. We didn't have a setup for this.
We ran into challenges finding anyone to humanely bring our live birds to the processor, but eventually found a recommended driver who could transport the birds for us. He strongly recommended a smaller plant that he works with on a regular basis and I couldn't find anyone to bring birds to the Amish plant that I had wanted to partner with.
When I toured the smaller plant, I was discouraged. Like most facilities, they did not meet our humane standards and we simply could not allow our turkey or chicken to be processed there.
We had been talking about partnering with a small mobile processing company in Minnesota. They come out to the farm and humanely process birds onsite. The main challenge there is they can't process cut up birds and only can do a very small number at once. I watched videos of their humane process and I felt it was quite good so we went to work planning a way to support and expand their capabilities.
Through partnering with our long time family-run butcher shop that makes all of our sausages, beef and pork, we agreed to have the mobile processor set up at their facility and do a trial run of some of our summer chickens and turkey. Having the mobile plant focus on the humane slaughter and our larger more efficient butcher shop doing all of the cutup and packaging meant we could process enough birds each day.
The process itself was clean and humane. However, there were lots of delays that didn't work well for TC Farm, the farmers or the butcher shop. Those delays made it clear the mobile processor would not be able to handle the turkey as planned. So we had to make plans with a third turkey processor for the year!
The Best Laid Plans...
To put things in context, we usually organize all of the processing about one year in advance to ensure we have everything needed for our members and nothing is left to chance. So the fact that we had turkeys we needed to process and our first two options had fallen through was quite stressful.
Fortunately, the family who ran that small Wisconsin plant we talked about earlier did re-open this year. It was in a limited capacity (and understaffed) but they said they would be able to help us, so long as our staff came to help process the turkeys. Perfect! I asked for volunteers and thankfully many of our TC Farm team members (those friendly faces who get your deliveries ready and deliver it to you!) were interested in seeing how processing worked.
We were able to schedule our 2021 turkey with the same family who processed our turkey in 2020. They would be processed humanely and in a trusted space where we were directly able to help. Whew!
By that point, our turkeys were already supposed to be processed. Instead they continued to eat their organic feed, enjoy the wonderful weather, forage on pasture by day and roost in the trees at night. That's all great, but as turkeys tend to do, they continued to grow and were already larger than we had planned. (That is why we don't have any small turkeys this year!)
The day before we were going to load up our turkeys for processing, I got the call: several staff members at the processor were sick and they were waiting their Covid test results. Sure enough the day our processing was scheduled, the plant had to shut down due to positive Covid cases, but only for the days we were scheduled! There was no way to process our turkey there anymore (again!).
To put things in context, we usually organize all of the processing about one year in advance to ensure we have everything needed for our members and nothing is left to chance. So the fact that we had turkeys we needed to process and our first two options had fallen through was quite stressful.
Back to Square One - What are We Going to Do?
Once again, we were starting from scratch. We desperately had to find someplace to process these turkeys and we were now out of options! It's a horrible feeling. I took one last shot and called back the original Amish processing plant to ask if they might do us a huge favor and help us out.
The timing was just right. They had just had someone call to ask if the could re-schedule their turkeys' processing time back a couple of weeks due to those birds still being too small. We had twice as many birds as they had openings for but they would squeeze us in. (!!)
Now we just needed to find a way to transport our turkeys. That was the original challenge that I couldn't find a way to solve last winter. Now we had just one week to figure it out.
Fortunately, Nathan, our turkey farmer, had bought an old semi trailer turkey truck. He was confident he could get someone to drive it for him.
Unfortunately the local farmers who usually work for him were busy with harvest and didn't have the specific kind of license required to drive across state lines. Farmers usually have an exemption to drive semi trucks inside of their own states, but not for interstate transit.
This was all new to me, but I just knew we needed to find a way to get a driver for our turkey. You might not have seen the articles in the news, but I was keenly aware that there is a severe shortage of truck drivers in the world right now. There were more than a few sleepless nights while we worked to find an answer. I kept calling everyone I knew.
Pictured: Nathan Kranz, who raises our turkeys, along with son Isaac.
Roller Coaster
Finally someone recommended a company who committed to bringing the turkeys to the processor for us. It was Friday and the (new) processing date was one week away, but it looked like we would be all good!
Monday morning, the company called back and said they would not be able to help to after all. Now we had to start over and have just four days to find transport! Super stressful.
Everyone we had already called had run into dead ends. We didn't have any leads.
I thought of one of my friends who might have some contacts. Maybe he knew of a driver or a larger scale trailer we could use? Fortunately, he did have a "rock solid" driver that he used twice a week to transport piglets. We talked with the driver and he said he could make the schedule work. The timing was really tight. Our processor agreed to process the turkeys at 8am instead of the planned 6am start on Friday in order for him to make the appointment time, which required driving overnight.
We were all set! That is, until the morning of the pickup when the driver called to let us know his schedule had been changed and he would be four hours late. There was simply no way for him to make the 8am processing time.
Now it was the DAY of pickup and we had to find a new driver! This was just heart-wrenching. I didn't imagine there could be any solution to be found. But, once again, we got on the phone.
Farmers are an interesting bunch. They really want to help everyone out when they need it. But we had a ridiculous request. We were looking for someone with a big trailer or semi-truck who also happened to be free to drive overnight and return the following morning. All starting in just a few hours time! Asking people to help in that way just felt laughable.
I called everyone I knew (again) and asked if they might know someone who might know someone who might be able to help. The calls went something like this "Hi, you don't know me, but someone who I don't even know told me to call you and see if you could help us with our emergency need... here is the ridiculous story. Can you help?"
Of course they couldn't help because it was an absurd request. I knew that. They knew that. But I still had to ask. And then after that, I had to ask if THEY might know anyone who might be able to help. And I'd repeat once again. I filed a notebook up with the names and numbers of people so I could keep track of who told me to call who. That way I'd know who I was talking to when they called ME back! Just imagine a morning full of calls like that...
"Hi, you don't know me, but someone who I don't even know told me to call you and see if you could help us with our emergency need. Can you help?"
Finally!
Finally I got a hold of a friend of a friend of a friend who had the perfect trailer we needed. Of course he wasn't free to drive, but he knew someone who might be interested and had a truck that could haul the trailer.
So we waited and then he finally called back and agreed to help, picking up the birds about ten hours later. This time the exact day it had to happen, it happened. Amazing.
We had originally planned for our family butcher shop to cut up and package our turkey and make those amazing smoked and sous vide turkey items. But with all of the processing changes, they really weren't available the new week of processing to do the work. To further complicate things, the Amish processor didn't have time to cut up and individually package our birds either. They only could process the birds and get them in bulk packaging to transport back. They also required that we picked up the birds the same day because they didn't have the extra storage room for the 12,000 pounds of our turkey they weren't planning on being there!
To solve this, our family processor agreed to work on Saturday. The turkey was processed on Friday morning at 8am as scheduled and we somehow (through a story with about as many twists and turns as this one) managed to get a refrigerated truck driver to pick up the turkey late Friday afternoon. The driver drove (again) overnight and dropped off the turkey at our butcher shop around 1 or 2 am on Saturday morning. At which time the butcher shop started working on the turkey for our members. Starting at 1am(!!)
Six of them worked all night and late into the day on Saturday and got it all done in time for us to pick up on Monday.
It was amazing, stressful and so incredible that so many people pulled together to save Thanksgiving for all of us!
Food for Thought
Whew!
There was so much that went into this you're probably exhausted just reading about it. I certainly earned some more gray hairs through this all. But here's the thing: We work really hard planning things out months and years in advance at TC Farm. That long-range planning is part of why we absolutely need our members support to make the improvements to agriculture we all want to see. We were able to pull this off because I was able to spend weeks at a time focused on this and only this. That's a huge benefit that TC Farm brings to our local farms (we also helped other farms outside of our group with similar issues this year). With the loss of smaller scale poultry processing across the midwest, smaller farmers are at an enormous disadvantage. Without support, a year like this could completely wipe them out.
We should all be aware of the things going on with our food systems and the challenges farmers face and actively looking for ways to allow them to raise food the right way.
We have some more exciting plans to announce that will improve the resiliency in the local food system and to be honest, there is a lot we are already doing I haven't had time to write about (I am too busy with turkeys!)
Thank you for your continued support and for making a healthier, more sustainable system possible.
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