Watch a video of of the turkeys on the farmFor 3,500 turkeys awaiting execution and a date with fine bone china on Thanksgiving, it’s not a bad life.
Consider the fact that for most of their short-lived but happy lives, these turkeys from the New Rockport Hutterite colony near Choteau wander around an enclosure six or seven acres in size.
And for the toms, outnumbered by hens almost three to one, it just might be the ideal turkey life.
On this brisk November morning, just weeks before their date with destiny, the stunningly white Nicholas turkeys are in a much smaller compound, though they mill about from feeding trough to colorful new curiosity at will.
“Coyotes will get them,” Wipf said of moving them to a more contained area at this stage of the game.
Apparently, the deceptively flat rolling hills around the colony harbor a host of predators as keen to do with the fresh turkey what dear old dad does with a carving knife and a roasted bird on the fourth Thursday of each November.
Wipf, who has been raising turkeys at the colony for 35 years, stared out at the bleak landscape and talked about mountain lions and grizzly bears as if the bloodthirsty beasts were waiting in a gully just beyond sight.
“Oh, yeah, we got ’em here,” he said in an accent more like a polished Scottish brogue than the Hutterisch (old German dialect) spoken around the colony. “Mountain lions and grizzlies. Two grizzlies, in fact.”
The houses on the colony’s land are as austere as the landscape.
Drab yellow - like long, simple, proficient ranch-style houses - with clotheslines and gravel out front, they are testimony to the Hutterites’ strict adherence to values dating to the 16th century Reformation.
Like the Amish and Mennonites who also hold strict religious observances from the Reformation, the Hutterites carry on a rich, rural agricultural existence, mostly in the North American prairies.
Colonies can be found from South Dakota to Alberta and in Washington state and Montana.
“There are 140 people on the New Rockport Colony,” Wipf said. “That’s probably a large size.”
When asked how many acres the colony, one of 40 or so in Montana, had, Wipf said, “Not enough.”
It takes a lot of land to sustain a colony, let alone all the people who live in the population centers.
“We got about 6,000 acres,” Wipf said. “Grain mostly, a couple thousand acres of grass. Looks like a lot, but you take 25 families and you give ’em each 500 acres, we would need a lot more land.”
So giving up even a sliver of land for turkeys to roam comes at a cost for the colony.
Unlike the Amish, who largely shun technology, the Hutterites have embraced farming technology and processing methods that allow them to streamline production.
This weekend, as Thanksgiving nears, 30 or 35 people from the community will gather in the hours before dawn for a daunting task.
They must kill hundreds of turkeys, pluck them, eviscerate them, clean them, chill them and get them into refrigerator trailers for the 170-mile haul to Missoula and beyond to the Bitterroot Valley, so consumers can purchase them at the peak of freshness.
The Hutterite process, not unlike a commercial turkey processor in terms of technology, still is a lot more hands-on.
“We actually cut the vein inside their throat,” Wipf said. “They’re dead before they even feel it.”
From the farm to the table in less than four days is the typical journey of a New Rockport Colony turkey, which differs significantly from that of a commercial bird, which might have been frozen since Halloween.
“It’s clean, it’s neat, well-organized and they have a true love for the land,” said Jim Edwards, owner of Missoula’s Pattee Creek Market. “Whatever they grow or harvest, they use.”
Edwards inspects the New Rockport Colony’s turkeys every year on his annual pheasant-hunting forays to the area.
“My first instinct is to go and see what kind of condition they are in,” Edwards says of his turkey inspections. “Are they cooped up, no room to move? No, they’ve got plenty of room, plenty of space. Everything is organized and it’s simple common-sense stuff like that.”
Edwards has been selling Hutterite turkeys for 30 years, and it’s the consistency of the product that keeps him coming back.
“I always deal with the same farms,” he said. “I feel comfortable with these birds. It’s the proper slaughtering process and they’re butchered as close to the date (Thanksgiving) as possible.”
Because of huge cost increases in grain for feed this year, the Hutterites have had to raise prices, which in turn will be passed along to the consumer at stores like the Good Food Store, Pattee Creek Market and the Orange Street Food Farm.
But if the trend of naturally raised turkeys for Thanksgiving holds up, many consumers likely won’t flinch at the price.
Turkeys, despite the relative fame they’ve brought to many Hutterite colonies around Montana, are not the mainstay of the colony. Not by a long shot.
Pigs, dairy cows, chickens, a few geese and the grain to feed them make up the lion’s share of the work that is doled out to everyone at or above the age of 15.
“Every colony has a few turkeys,” Wipf said. “It’s just a side thing.”
Geese were an early moneymaker for the New Rockport community when their feathers were in high demand for down sleeping bags and comforters, but natural free-range turkeys rapidly replaced the goose in the popularity contest.
And Wipf, who has seen the trend grow over his 35 years of raising turkeys, acknowledges this year’s problems as he would an approaching storm front - a predictable inevitability.
But he doesn’t need to prove much as he stands near the gobbling flock of intensely curious turkeys that are playing with a piece of twine and sizing up the stocky man dressed in black pants, a black dress coat and a black hat, unaware of the inevitability of their own situation.
Reporter Timothy Alex Akimoff can be reached at 523-5246 or at tim.akimoff@missoulian.com.
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Ray wrote on Nov 24, 2008 8:06 PM: