The five-year jinx catches up to us again

 
We thought we had foiled the rule of fives, but we were wrong.  Our first two bad years had been five years apart – 1989 and 1994 – with pretty good to excellent years between. So, we held our breath in 1999 (five years after the previous down year) and we squeaked through with a decent season.  So, come 2004, we had thought we were home free and had beaten the five-year jinx. We weren’t and we hadn’t. 

In a sentence, 2004 was the worst year The Turkey Farm has had. So bad, in fact, that if we don’t pull out of it in 2005, we will retire. 

Our problem in 1989 had been growing too fast – we jumped from 800 birds in 1988 to 2,200 – and underpricing our wholesale birds at Thanksgiving.  We lost about $15,000. In 1994, the problem was a refrigerator truck we rented from O’Hara Ice in Rockland, and we lost another $15,000 when Thanksgiving birds spoiled while we had thought they were safely refrigerated. 

In 2004, the problem was fowl cholera, with which we have been battling for three years. Each time we think we’ve whipped it, cholera comes back stronger than ever.  Other than the cholera, the farm had record or near record years in other areas, including the Fryeburg Fair, the Brunswick Farmers’ Market and sales at our farmstore.

We started the 2004 season on Feb. 6 with a flock of 700 birds hatched that day at Mont-St-Gregoire, P.Q. The birds brooded well and began spending days outside by the end of March.  A little more than a year earlier, we had secured a vaccine for the serotype 9 cholera that had been identified as the culprit on our farm by Dr. Michael Opitz of the University of Maine. The “killed” vaccine had been made by Maine Biological Laboratories in Winslow. 

MBL stored the vaccine for us to pick up a few bottles at a time when we needed it. But when we called in late February to arrange pickup, we learned that MBL had destroyed our vaccine and would not make more for us. That ended a 15-year arrangement in which we secured the baby Turkeys that the lab used (at no added cost to MBL) and MBL made vaccines available to us. 

On the recommendation of Dr. Opitz, we switched to a live vaccine and vaccinated in late March. Come April, they went outside to stay. We vaccinated then and again in late May. (Live vaccine needs to be boosted about every four weeks.)  In early June, we began seeing mortality in the flock. Boosting the vaccine again didn’t help, so we began dressing those birds in July but before we finished dressing the entire flock, we had lost about 40 percent of it.  Our next flock hatched in late April, and when we moved it outside in June, mortality was very low, so we thought we were beating the cholera. 

We weren’t. 

As it developed, the live vaccine didn’t hold past the second boosting, which was at 13 to 14 weeks of age.  We lost more than half the birds from the flock hatched on June 14. We lost 40 percent of those hatched on July 16 and nearly 40 percent of those hatched on July 29. We lost more than 25 percent of the Christmas flock, hatched on Aug. 16.  

The loss of the June 14 flock meant we hadn’t nearly enough 18-pound hens or 20-pounds-and-up toms for the Thanksgiving trade. These are the most popular sizes for retail.  Faced with the failure of the live vaccine, we switched, on Dr. Opitz’s recommendation, to a broad-spectrum antibiotic (chlorotetracycline) to shore up the birds’ immune system and help them fight the disease naturally. 

The serotype 9 cholera may have come here with wild animals. We’ll never know, but a wild animal might have eaten a wild turkey that died of the disease and then carried the disease to our ranges where it could have deposited the cholera in our feeders or directly onto one or more of our birds.  When a Turkey with cholera pecks another Turkey, it can transmit the cholera to the pecked bird.  The organism can even travel on the clothing and boots of people who go onto the ranges.

To prevent spreading cholera by human contact, one or another of us would tend only a pen containing contaminated birds while others worked only in the pens not yet contaminated.  We made a “walkabout” every few hours in the contaminated pens to pull out mortality and to isolate birds that appeared sick. The person doing the walkabout changed boots and sometimes pants after each cruise. We washed and sanitized the tractor after each trip into a contaminated yard.

Despite this biosecurity, the disease gradually spread throughout the farm.  For 2005, we have found a laboratory in Iowa to make a new “killed” vaccine. We expect it to be delivered just in time to vaccinate the first flock of birds for 2005, which is to hatch March 24 in Quebec. 

Without the cholera, 2004 might have been a decent year. The generally wet autumn broke for the eight days of the Fryeburg Fair, and we returned to within 1 percent of our record income of 2002.  Sales at the Brunswick Farmers’ Market rose by 17.6 percent, and the final day of market, Oct. 30, was our best day ever at any market.  Sales at our farmstore rose by about 3 percent, largely due to the increasing popularity of our Turkey pies. 

Thanksgiving sales would have neared a record, absent the cholera. As it was, we had fewer and smaller birds to sell.  To get an idea of the scale of the financial loss, look at our major fixed cost: processing. It costs virtually the same to dress a 14-pound Turkey as to dress a 22-pound Turkey. But the 14-pounder brings in $18.32 less.  One needn’t be a math whiz to see that when we lack several hundred 20-pound Turkeys we can lose a bundle. 

Christmas sales were a record high, but we dress fewer than a fifth the number of birds at Christmas that we dress at Thanksgiving, so Christmas didn’t go far toward making up the sales lost at Thanksgiving.  In 2004, more people signed up for shares in Community Supported Agriculture (see article on Page 3) than in any of the six previous seasons. 

We sold 52 shares to 44 people (eight used up their shares and renewed during the year), up from 46 shares in 2003.  Our top priority this year will be controlling cholera. More on that when we publish our goals for 2005 in the next issue of The Turkey Times.

No heritage breeds for this year

We asked in the Thanksgiving issue of The Turkey Times whether people wanted us to raise a small flock of heritage Turkeys.  The response was not strong enough for us to decide to raise the heirloom Turkeys.  We needed about four dozen commitments, but customers came forward for only a bit more than one dozen.  We may make the offer again for next year, but for 2005, we won’t venture into traditional Turkeys. Heritage Turkeys are those breeds that have been superceded by the faster– and larger-growing strains of Turkey that virtually all growers use today. 

They are regaining popularity because some people believe they taste better and because people who are concerned about the genetic variety of our livestock don’t want to see any breeds die out.  When a breed dies out, its unique genetic material goes with it, and the world loses forever the opportunity to go back through selective breeding and pull up the genetic traits from those strains that might make for even better turkeys in the future. If some of the heritage strains contained natural resistance to infections, scientists could breed that resistance into the next generations of Turkeys just as they have bred vertcilium resistance into tomatoes.

 

Community Supported Agriculture begins its 16th year

 Our farm has changed a great deal in its first 19 years, but some activities have become mainstays. One is Community Supported Agriculture. 

In 1990, we became the second CSA farm in Maine, following the lead of Jill Agnew of Willow Pond Farm in Sabattus. Today several dozen Maine farms offer CSA plans as a way for people who eat food to participate in the farm. We offer a paid share and a work share (see related article).  Through CSA, people buy a share in the season’s production.

Then, as the season rolls along, they collect the proceeds of their share, plus a dividend, from the farm’s harvest.  Our CSA shares begin at $100 and rise in $50 increments to $450. We add interest to your investment, and you can begin collecting your proceeds as soon as we receive your check.  We pay 6 percent interest on a $100 share, so you collect Turkey worth $106. To encourage larger shares, we raise the interest rate by 2 percentage points per $50, to wit:

It’s obvious that you get a nice payback in food when you invest in CSA. It is less obvious but just as certain that you get other benefits. For one, you can influence our decisions. Guidance of a sharer (the late Dr. Roger Perry of Farmington) helped us on the road to using feed free of genetic engineering.  And, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping to support a Maine farm. 

Of course, there are benefits for the farm as well. CSA gives us some start-up capital each year. We can use the CSA investments to buy baby Turkeys each spring and summer and to buy feed, so we don’t have to dip into our line of credit at the bank so early. Interest on the line can run $150 a month. up their shares and renewed before the share year had run out. 

You can take your share in any form you wish. A couple of small business owners buy shares with which to provide gift Turkeys for their employees at Thanksgiving or Christmas. 

If you need more information, just e-mail us at turkeyfarm@gwi.net or phone Bob at 778-2889. If you’re already convinced and want to sign up, just fill out the form (here) and send it along with your check.

We also get a guaranteed market for some of our production. CSA helps spread demand better through the year. 

It keeps people coming to our farmstore, which makes it easier to justify keeping the store open year-round. And it underpins our effort at the Brunswick Farmers’ Market because we can count on CSA sales each week.  A share runs for a year. If you use it up in less than a year, you may renew without waiting for the share year to expire.

The work-for-Turkey plan

Some people prefer to work for their Turkey, and that’s just fine with us. We offer CSA work shares as well as the paid shares described in the main article.  Work sharers receive a $150 share, which means $162 in Turkey. You can work at our farm or at the Fryeburg Fair.  Workdays at the farm are on weekdays and consist of two 8-hour days. The work is maintenance and repair of fencing and outbuildings, vaccinating Turkeys, processing and packing meat and sometimes light land clearing.