Heritage Turkeys Catch On

It’s a turkey with a proud heritage, so much so that gourmet cooks seem to be flocking to poultry farms this Thanksgiving season to buy one.

Mary and Rick Pitman say the phone at their Fresno-area farm has hardly stopped ringing since summer. The questions are always the same: Is there still time to reserve a heritage turkey for Thursday’s Thanksgiving feast?

The Pitmans and preservationists believe that revived interest in eight varieties of turkeys such as the American bronze, bourbon red and Narragansett will help keep the food supply diverse and save the breeds from extinction.

“There’s such a huge demand for these turkeys; I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mary Pitman said. This despite a heritage bird’s higher price -- anywhere from $3 to $7 a pound -- compared with $1.40 a pound for a factory-farm-raised turkey.

Some customers say it’s a small price to pay for a bird that they find tastier and more flavorful than the modern, mass-produced turkeys found in supermarkets. People from as far away as Florida have been calling Sylvia Mavalwalla’s farm in Petaluma, Calif., to order one, and those who live nearby insist on driving straight to her ranch to pick up a fresh bird.

With word about heritages spreading, the Pitmans say, they expect to sell 6,000 birds this year, 5,000 more than last year, when they first started raising them. Mavalwalla said she would sell 110, up from 45 last year.

About 274 million turkeys were raised in the United States in 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and most were the mass-produced broadbreasted white.

A census conducted in 1997 by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy found only 1,335 heritage turkeys in the country. This year, about 20,000 were raised, according to Slow Food USA, which launched a campaign in 2001 to reacquaint Americans with the birds.

Heritage turkeys take eight months to fully develop, whereas commercial turkeys have about a three-month life span. The broadbreasted white was developed in the 1950s to get to market faster and fatter, and they have lost the ability to run, fly and breed naturally.

Farmers say it is worth the added time and money it takes to raise them.

“I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t making a profit,” Mavalwalla said.

For people who like to pay close attention to what they eat, a company called Heritage Foods USA even offers a way to trace the origins of their turkey. By ordering with the company’s online service, a would-be buyer can log on to a live webcam and watch the birds being raised.

For those who just want to go to the store and buy one, many upscale markets such as the Bristol Farms chain in Southern California have also picked up on heritage turkeys’ popularity and are now selling them.