Volume 13, Issue 3, Spring 2003

GOALS 2003
As busy as 2002 was for The Turkey Farm, it was the year in which we achieved more goals than any other year.

Of the six goals we established last year, we fully met four and partly met two. This was the first year that no goals were missed entirely.

Our first goal was to increase cooling capacity so we could slaughter more birds for Thanksgiving. We met this goal in May when we bought a 1987 Ford diesel truck with a 22-foot refrigerator box. On this truck, which we have named Guido because it came from Guida (pronounced GUY-duh) Dairy in the Hartford area, we can store 700 turkeys at a temperature cold enough to ensure food safety.

For 10 months, we use Guido for dry storage. Then, we license and insure him and put him on the road for the Fryeburg Fair and Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving, he goes back into his parking spot and we fill him with some of the equipment we use only occasionally and with the pine shavings we use for bedding.

Using Guido to store equipment and shavings also helped us to partly meet our second goal, which was to finish our projects from 2001. Wouldn’t you know that this holdover goal was the one on which we made the least progress. Of the four projects, the only one completed as planned was installing a new computer. In July, we began using our Gateway 700L for records and for writing and typesetting The Turkey Times.

Guido obviated the need to build a storage shed. We are still looking at vacuum-packing our whole birds and at building a loading dock, although the dock looks less feasible as we try to match it to the indoor space from where we would bring items onto the dock.

We also wanted to introduce two new products in 2002, and we did. The more successful was our “turkeyaki,” which is breast strips marinated in a teriyaki sauce that we make with soy sauce, vegetable oil, vinegar, Cider and spices. It was our Most popular item some Saturdays at the Brunswick Farmers’ Market, and we are now trying to learn how to freeze it without the marinade separating. 

Also popular at the market was our turkey chili, which we made with spicy sausage and ground turkey. This year, we may make chili both with and without beans.

We also developed and sold shepherd’s pie last year, but we weren’t satisfied with the consistency of the mashed potatoes so we withdrew it for further work. We hope to reintroduce it this year.

Resetting our electric fences was our fourth goal, and we achieved it early in the season by attaching the electric fencing to insulators nailed to boards extended from the fence posts. This is a project that was helped along greatly by the participation of a work sharer in our Community Supported Agriculture project (see the CSA article on Page 3).

By summer, we had completed the first phase of our fifth goal, beautification, when we installed stockade fence around our fire pit and between our farmstore and the barn and began a low stone wall along one edge of our parking lot.

We also regraveled the parking lot and our driveways and built driveways leading to five of our ranges and started a driveway to three other ranges. Much of the beautification in the future will consist of picking up and trimming weeds and shrubs. In fact, we plan a workday and maybe two this spring for CSA sharers to help with a lot of these tasks (see the CSA article on Page 3).

Our final goal was to reduce some of our commitments of time and energy. We met this goal in three ways. We reduced dramatically the reselling of baby turkeys to backyard growers; we marketed only one day a week, Saturday, at the Brunswick Farmers’ Market; and we reduced our wholesaling.

For the last part, we stopped selling to The Whole Grocer in Portland. While The Whole Grocer was an excellent account, one of our five largest, the store would not offer its customers our whole turkeys free of genetically engineered feeds and even declined to display our poster about our commitment to genetically clean feed.

We are limited by the USDA to processing no more than one quarter of the birds we raise, so when a store won’t sell our whole birds, it hurts our ratio of processed to whole birds.

We discontinued selling to two other stores that were expensive to serve and sold very little, and two others went out of business as we were planning to drop them. The net effect is that we have reduced the number of stores to which we sell to 19 from 24.

We have also asked some stores to which we made some unproductive sales trips to save us the travel cost and time by calling when they need to be resupplied. We still sell to those stores when they call before delivery day and give us an order.

In conjunction with cutting back those deliveries, we consolidated our deliveries to Southern and Western Maine into a single monthly trip. It makes for one long delivery day, up to 340 miles and up to 11 stops, but it has given us back a full day every month.
 

For this season, we have five goals, and for the first time none involves capital acquisitions. Three of the five, in fact, are in the realm of paperwork.

Much of our business, such as special orders, has been kept track of as notes on legal pads. Well and good until someone doesn’t recognize the note as an order and, in cleaning up around the place, throws away the order. We lost a great customer this way in Kennebunk and don’t want to lose any others.

So, our first goal is to develop an order form that we can use whenever anyone asks for items to be prepared or saved. It seems a small matter, but one order lost or misfilled is too many.

For our second goal, we want to improve our farmers’ market operation (See article at bottom of page). Markets have become a major sales center for us, and we need to make it easier and quicker to serve customers there. So far, we plan to build a higher counter and work space, to improve and simplify our signage (menu, promotions, etc.) and perhaps to get a new tent or canopy. Most of this we hope to do early in the market season, which began on May 2.

We also need to finish drawing up our plan for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points, our third goal. This mouthful of difficult-to-figure-out jargon is a requirement of the USDA. 
It means that we need to analyze our operation and determine at what points in the processing of turkeys we face the most critical risks of contamination. Then, we must set out the steps we regularly take to control those hazards.   In almost all poultry plants, the critical points arise in the feather picking of the slaughtered birds and in controlling temperature. We generally have the birds’ carcasses chilled to less than 40 degrees F. in less than 4 hours, about half the time required by the USDA.  Under the plan, we’ll have to begin recording those temperatures, recording each time we calibrate our thermometers and recording each time we change the scalding water used in the defeathering. Basically, we have to write down a plan that states what we already do and then record each time we do it.   Our plan must be submitted for approval by the USDA inspector who reviews our operation, then the records will have to be shown to any federal inspector who demands them.  A couple of years ago, a high official of the USDA’s meat and poultry inspection division told Poultry USA magazine, the trade journal of our business, that these new regulations were the most sweeping reform in the history of meat and poultry inspection and in the same paragraph he said that they would not change the way processing plants operate.

Our fourth goal is to repair and improve our fencing. This has become almost an annual goal as frost heaves and the weight of birds pressing through the fence to eat weeds take a toll every year on the woven wire, the fence posts and the gates. We plan to reset or replace 12 gates and gate posts, to build three new gates so we can move among yards without going around entire ranges and to rebuild the yard surrounding our secondary brooderhouse, where birds from 6 to 10 weeks of age often stay.

Finally, we want to clear more land around our ranges, out to a distance of 40 to 50 feet from each fence line. The woods line is 30 feet beyond our fences, and we are finding that predators still have enough cover from the woods and brush to get near the fences. And, too early in the afternoon, the sun goes behind the trees, turning the yards shady. The shade reduces the natural drying that turkey ranges need. Ground too wet is also a disease hazard.

In addition to drying out the ground faster, the added sunshine will also help the vegetation inside the yards, which improves the health of the soil and provides forage for the turkeys.
 

We need to increase the number of shares we sell through our Community Supported Agriculture project.

Last year, 32 people bought shares and nine others signed up for work shares.

This year, we want to sell at least 40 shares, and we want to have another 12 shares purchased through work.

To encourage participation, we are sweetening the pot for shares acquired before June 15. For any share bought or worked for by June 15 we will increase the interest by half. This includes shares bought earlier in 2003.

So, if you bought a $200 share by June 15, instead of receiving turkey worth $220, you would receive turkey worth $230, or 15 percent interest instead of 10 percent.

Here’s how the interest breaks down this year with the bonus for shares acquired before June 15:

If you’re not familiar with CSA, here’s how it works. Customers buy shares in our year’s production. Then, whenever they want, they pick up (or have delivered) items from our farm.

We pay interest on the shares, and the interest grows in increments as the share values increase. The chart shows both the regular interest, which will be paid on shares bought after June 15, and the bonus interest for shares bought before June 15.

The sharer has a year to use up the share. If the turkey is just too tasty to resist, and the sharer uses up the proceeds in less than a year, she may buy another share without waiting for another year to roll around.

Sharers may come to our farmstore during its regular hours of 2 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. Or they may take a chance that we’ll be there during other hours, and we are more often than not. Or they may make an appointment and meet us there.

In addition, sharers may have us deliver their share proceeds. We deliver east of the Kennebec River on the second Thursday of each month and west of the Kennebec on the third Thursday.

Sharers may use their CSA investment for anything we sell. Last year, one sharer sent gift bottles of maple syrup to relatives, and a couple of others eat meals at our stand at the Fryeburg Fair and charge them to their shares.

We also have work shares with which the sharer works two days on the farm for a $150 share ($168 in proceeds before June 15, $162 after). The workdays are eight hours, and the work consists primarily of light repairs, clearing land, fencing, meat packing (not slaughter) and cleanup. Always cleanup.

A few work sharers may work with us at the Fryeburg Fair, where the workday is 10 hours (including breaks) and the work consists primarily of food preparation and food service. And, oh yes, cleanup.

If you want to join our CSA project, just CLICK HERE and fill in the form on the bottom of the page. If you need more information, just call Bob Neal at 778-2889.

Where to buy our fine turkey items ?

Click Here for an updated list.