How Your Thanksgiving Turkey Gets to the Dinner Table
The Superbowl of the turkey industry has arrived.
Although turkey farmers are busy year-round raising birds for deli meats or turkey legs, Thanksgiving is undeniably the holiday with the highest demand for the lean meat. The process to meet the moment is cumbersome.
“When you have your turkey on Thanksgiving, you’re looking at the end of a multi-year process with lots of people thinking, planning out, and worrying, to make that wonderful turkey dinner work for you and your family,” says Michael Swanson, Wells Fargo’s chief agricultural economist.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Here are the steps your turkey takes before it gets to your dinner table.
What comes first—the turkey, or the egg?
There are some 2,500 turkey farms across the U.S., per the National Turkey Federation (NTF).
On turkey breeder farms, mother hens lay anywhere from 80-100 eggs over the course of their 25-week laying cycle, which are picked and collected all day long before being sent to the hatchery, which is highly controlled. Once the poults (baby turkeys) hatch some 28 days after they are incubated, the young birds—which are only about a day old—are loaded onto heated trucks and taken to a different farm where they will mature.
When the poults arrive, they are placed in climate-controlled barns filled with wood shavings and extra sawdust. Erica Sawatzke, a sixth-generation Minnesota turkey farmer that grows light hens, calls it “the brood barn,” and it is home to the young turkeys for about four weeks. “It’s one of my favorite places to be in the winter time because we keep it at about 94 degrees when they first come,” the 38-year-old says. The controlled barn temperature is due to the poults’ inability to control their own body temperature. “They’re used to sitting underneath that mother hens,” says Zimmerman. As the turkeys age, farmers lower the temperature in the barn until the turkeys are big enough to move to a larger space.
Life on the farm
The lifespan of a turkey depends on its size and type. Sawatzke raises an average of 120,000 hens annually—a small number for the industry—and has two different flock ages of turkeys at once on the farm. Hens, sold as whole turkeys, are typically the centerpiece of the classic Thanksgiving dinner. John Zimmerman, a 51-year-old turkey farmer from Northfield, Minnesota grows hens and male turkeys, or toms, which are sold for their parts: turkey breast, leg, etc. (Zimmerman, as NTF chairman, is also raising the presidential turkey flock, which is always a tom.)
Sawatzke’s hens reach maturity at about 13 weeks, though the NTF says it takes an average of 14 weeks for the birds to reach market weight. During that time, turkeys are fed a mix of corn and soybean meal.
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If a turkey is infected with the bird flu, the rest of the flock must be depopulated. “It just really decimates the entire barn,” says Swanson. The periodic outbreaks have impacted turkey farmers in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota—the top turkey-producing state. “Luckily, it happened early enough in the year that they’ve been able to make a lot of adjustments to kind of get things back on an even keel.”
Outside factors also influence the life of a turkey. The poultry industry has been impacted by the highly pathogenic avian influenza, also known as bird flu, which has affected more than a million birds in the U.S. The virus was particularly destructive in 2022, causing the most damage to the poultry industry since 2014-2015.
Off to the processing facility
Once a turkey reaches maturity, it’s shipped off to processing plants on trucks, and sharp scheduling is a must. “They don’t want a truck to show up at the dock of the facility unless they know they can get those birds off that truck within minutes to start the process, because the longer you leave the birds in the truck, the more stressed they are,” says Swanson.
Plainville Farms CEO Matt Goodson says that as soon as turkeys arrive at the plant they are staged, unloaded, and stunned through CO2 or electric current. “Then they go through the process of [exsanguination,] defeathering, evisceration, and there’s a grading process and a USDA inspection,” says Goodson. His production line runs at about 40 birds in a minute. The turkeys are then chilled and made according to the specifications of the customer before they are bagged and vacuum sealed.
Two diverged roads
Frozen turkeys, which go through a blast freezer for about 24 hours to freeze, can be held for months. Some processing facilities start sending them to storage centers for the following holiday season almost immediately after Thanksgiving, per Goodson.
For fresh turkeys, the process is much more delicate. “What they do is they bring it really close to frozen without freezing it,” says Swanson. “It’s just an incredible ballet of contributions from hundreds of people and millions of dollars of machinery.” To meet the demand for fresh turkeys, Plainville Farms operates longer shifts and may run on weekends to process, pack, and box the turkeys. Goodson says that processing time for “fresh turkeys” lasts from October through the week before Thanksgiving.
To the grocery store
Goodson’s facilities plan out their turkey distribution anywhere from eighteen months to two years in advance. “That really allows us to plan forward. Then, when we do have customers that come and ask for changes in what they normally get, or something new, it gives us the ability to maximize what flexibility we may have,” he says. The turkeys that are processed at Plainville Farms are distributed to about 100 different retailers and grocery stores across the Eastern half of the U.S. and Mexico.
Goodson’s plant processes about 2 million hens per year that come from more than 90 independent family farmers. While that number may seem large, companies, like Cargill, Hormel and Butterball, make up about 85% of the turkey market, he says. Most grocery stores purchase their turkeys from turkey wholesalers, according to Swanson.
Fresh turkeys will immediately be prepared for shipment and can be in stores as quickly as 48 hours, Zimmerman says. Grocery stores sell more than 70% of whole turkeys, both frozen and fresh, in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, according to Swanson. This year, the average price of a 10-pound turkey, according to an American Farm Bureau Federation survey, averaged around $27. That’s down some 6% from the year prior.
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Nearly 90% of Thanksgiving hosts plan on serving turkey this Thanksgiving, according to a 2024 Butterball report. It’s a source of pride for many in the industry. “The flock size that I raise specifically for Thanksgiving is 17,000 and so my husband and I often tell our daughters, ‘Isn’t that cool that Turkeys from our farm get to feed 17,000 families on Thanksgiving?’” says Sawatzke. “I’m the sixth generation on this farm. That’s something that I feel truly grateful for and that I don’t take for granted.”