American Manbirds
The Heritage Turkey in Upstate South Carolina

BY ASHLEY WARLICK
PHOTOGRAPHS BY POLLY GAILLARD AND SAMANTHA S. WALLACE

Gail Cooley seems incontrovertible proof things have changed. She comes up the driveway of Patient Wait Farm in dark wraparound sunglasses and the jeans of a teenager, vibrant and sharp and originally from New Jersey. She is part of a growing handful of farmers in the Upstate raising heritage turkeys, one of the ancestral varieties slowly bred out of the commercial standard.

With evocative names like Jersey Buff, Standard Bronze and White Midget, these breeds are the animal equivalent of heirloom seeds; less profitable, but prettier, tastier, far more pleasing revivals in the modern farm-to-table movement.

In the yard at Patient Wait, a couple of Narragansett toms bluster for our attention. They puff their chests and flare their tails, their bright red wattles flapping with their calls. They cross and nudge each other constantly, stamping the dirt the way they might stamp a hen. Their flight feathers trail in the gravel as they pass: more sound, more display, more showing off. At the beginning of breeding season, Gail says they tussle and squawk and follow each other around so much, making sure one’s not getting more tail than the other, that they actually drop weight, exhaust themselves, finally call a truce for the night and go home to roost.

The hens don’t seem to have time for this business, keeping to the other side of the barn, paler in feather and attitude. But Gail says they flirt and call to the wild turkeys outside the farm’s perimeter. I can only imagine how that might work in their toms. “You could cancel cable, just about,” she says.

The Cooleys have owned these twenty acres in Piedmont for ten years, what began as a way for their family to satisfy a passion for riding horses. Then one October, Gail wanted to order a heritage turkey and found she was too late. “I’m the brainstormer here,” she says. “I get everybody else to help me.” The Cooleys have been raising turkeys ever since.

For the breeding flock, the season begins in January with a nudge from a light bulb, the birds’ instincts dependent not so much on temperature as length of day. If a hen decides to nest she no longer lays, so Gail collects the eggs for the incubator, which evenly warms and turns them until they hatch. The new poults stay in a brooder, still too fragile for the out-of-doors, maybe even for their own company; they’ve been known to drown in their water dishes or suffocate each other in their pile-ups. But slowly, flock-smarts arrive; Gail has nineteen older poults in a pen getting used to life in the out-of-doors. Once their heads are fully feathered, they’ll be free to roam.

We walk through Turkey Heaven, a small stream in a shady break, to the pasture where older growers have been set out. Gail opens their pen and soon the flock is cluttering and flapping after each other, stripping long tails of grasses, pecking at the dirt. They seem excitable and ditzy, but there is a system of farm logic that protects them. If there are rabbits around, there are no foxes.

George, the donkey, will kill a coyote or die trying. Buffy, the guard dog, patrols at night. The BellSouth tech with this route will shoo the flock off the road. Bumbling into each other, they follow us out.

Gail keeps forty growers, because forty growers are manageable; fun. The birds are processed the first weekend in November at Williamsburg Meat Processing in Kingstree, an Animal Welfare certified processor the Cooleys refer to as the beach. “It’s on the way to the beach,” Gail says, a sly glint in her eye. It’s a family joke. It seems families and turkeys go together. People want to come pick up their birds once they’re processed, see the farm, meet the Cooleys. It’s about knowing where your food comes from. “All the birds you see, we picked up the egg, put it in the incubator,” she says. “We’re there every step of the way.”

I have visited a turkey farm before. In the Burt Reynolds years, my father arranged a field trip for my first grade class to a farm that supplied turkeys for Purina, a long cellblock of a building in a pasture littered with red-wattled white birds. The one thing I remember, past having to scrape off the bottoms of my shoes, was how we were told the turkeys were so dumb they had to be corralled inside the coops during a rainstorm, that they would look up into the sky to see where the water came from, open their mouths and drown. We passed this farm on our way to Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents’ house. The pasture seemed greener, the building whiter now that it was magically, entirely empty. There seemed little to feel bad about, everything neat and clean and swept away. But empty turkey farms mean turkeys aren’t making new turkeys for themselves.

When you consider the procreative fanfare at the heart of being a tom, it seems especially unnatural that commercially-raised turkeys can’t reproduce under their own steam. Industrial birds are 99.9% Broad-breasted Whites, bred for their double-sized breasts and speed to market, ready at ten weeks as opposed to twenty-eight. They are unable to fly, or stand on their own legs. The toms can’t get close enough to a hen to breed. Without intervention by humans, this variety of bird would become extinct in just one generation.

Charlene Harrison, of Country Blessings Farm in Tamassee, began her turkey ventures with Broad-breasted Whites. She initially chose the breed because they were what filled the coolers in stores, and she thought they’d be easy to raise and sell. But the chickens already on her farm were problematic for those first turkeys, carrying diseases immune-deficient commercial birds couldn’t seem to ward off. Her Broad-breasted Whites died within weeks of arriving in the mail.

It bothered Charlene that they were genetically engineered. “We can’t call it Country Blessings Farm if we’re raising something God can’t reproduce,” she says.

Country Blessings is founded on the principles of self-reliance, a kind of back-to-the-land lifestyle the Harrisons have been practicing for twenty-three years. Charlene and Jeff built everything on the nearly four acre farm themselves: poured concrete, dug septic and wells and fenced pasture and garden. There is a sense of pride in controlling their own destinies. They began growing their own organic food when Charlene was diagnosed with a rapid heartbeat that medication couldn’t control. Now she grinds her own wheat for bread, makes pies and salsa, spins fiber for yarn and sells eggs and raw goat’s milk. Concerned with the effects of chemicals and hormones speeding up and slowing down our natural functions, she believes her diet saved her life.

“Fifteen-year-olds didn’t look this way when I was in high school,” Jeff says.

Charlene thinks of the farm as a ministry, and she prays that people who need good food find her. She doesn’t care about trying to advertise; bread and eggs are priced at what it costs to make them. She raises Standard Bronze and Royal Palm turkeys, and if she finds a following for her birds all year, she’ll produce them all year. She seeks a relationship where if you’re a customer, your word is all you need.

“The old way looks a heck of a lot better than the new way,” she says. The old way, it seems, is becoming new again.

Wayne Atkins and Emilie Frohlich moved from Brooklyn to take over High Farms in Landrum—140 acres that’s been in Emilie’s family for three generations. In their overalls and workboots, they look like homestead newlyweds from another time, as much a part of this place as if they’d sprung from the land themselves, but they actually met in art school, painters by training, and recent converts to the best practice farmways of Joel Salatin and the Slow Food movement. This is their second growing season, and they’re still finding their way, still involved with infrastructure as much as livestock, and big plans for the future that include a farm-to-table dinner, a CSA, a restaurant and an artist’s retreat in the refurbished barn. Listening to them talk is like listening to the bright sparkling voice of youthful energy itself.

Wayne and Emilie raise Bourbon Reds. Their first plans came from YouTube—videos posted by Frank Reese of the Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch in Kansas, a kind of heritage breed guru. Wayne says, “If it wasn’t for the Internet, this would probably be a lot harder to do.”

But lately he feels like heritage breeds go hand in hand with heritage agriculture, and he started taking his cues on husbandry from a 1940’s manual called Turkey Management. Hens and toms are rotated through a series of enclosures during breeding season, utilizing more land more freely, keeping disease down and forage high. The hens lay their eggs in tires people have been dumping on the farm for generations. Wayne and Emilie incubate the eggs, and keep the poults in a brooder until they are no longer a danger to themselves, then the young birds are put to pasture in retired chicken tractors, a home base surrounded by an electrified feathernet, enough to discourage the coyote, fox, possum and raccoon, but nothing so constraining the turkeys aren’t free to fly.

“We drove around the farm, looking for the perfect turkey tree,” Emilie says, one with lots of shade and many branches. Into the tree, they’ve built a kind of turkey jungle gym, with bamboo stakes and poles for roosting, in hopes that this idea of home will stick. Last year’s turkeys chose their own roosts, a flock of forty or fifty birds in a cherry tree next to Emilie’s parent’s house. They ate all her mother’s flowers. Turkeys are foragers, omnivores. They will eat grubs and insects, field mice, tadpoles, larvae and weeds, particularly the seeds, which are ground up in their systems and never regerminate. They will walk away from feed for ripe mulberries, and Wayne and Emilie have recently planted an orchard of white mulberries, but they plan to graft the Illinois everbearing onto that stock as soon as it’s established. They also pick up spent brewer’s grains from Blue Ridge Brewery in Greenville. The more feed they forage and grow themselves, the more they recycle, repurpose and reuse, the less cost they pass on to their customers. Wayne and Emilie see this as a part of the sustainability question, too.

“With these heritage breeds, you’ve got to eat them to keep them,” Emilie says, a refrain I hear again and again from these farmers. Getting these birds to the table is an important part of the equation.

Soby’s chef de cuisine Shaun Garcia is late to the kitchen because he’s buying discs for his tractor. On the restaurant’s farm in Travelers Rest, he’s getting ready to hill up his pumpkins, but the tractor store didn’t open until 9 or 10, which seems pretty late in the workday for this particular clientele. Shaun’s people come from the other side of the country table; growing up in Spartanburg, his family ran a series of meat-and-three restaurants, arguably the backbone of southern foodways. His great-grandmother, his grandmother and his mom were all gifted cooks, and he laughs when he tells us there’s a certain fried chicken recipe his mother still won’t hand over. He sees his various roles in the food chain as inextricably connected. “When the chef becomes the farmer, you can figure out what you want to serve four months down the road looking at what you’re planting now.”

We’ve gotten our hands on a small Bourbon Red, and Shaun has brined it overnight. While the brine seasons the entire bird as opposed to just the surface, he emphasizes that heritage turkeys have naturally distributed fat keeping the meat moist, a function of the bird’s longer life span. The texture of the meat is different for this reason, too; as the birds forage and roam, they develop muscle tone commercial birds simply can’t support. Lactic acid in the buttermilk soak tenderizes, but we should be prepared for this to taste different. It is a different animal than what we’re used to.

Shaun slices a slab from a pound of dairy butter, working the thyme into it with his hands, his favorite kitchen gadget. He recommends care when adding salt, as the brine has done the seasoning work for you, and care with the skin, as it protects the meat from the high fast heat these birds respond to best. As he cooks, he thinks and revises. We talk about adding citrus to the cavity along with herbs and bay, adding apple butter to the rub for extra sweetness, and then we’re off on the subject of heirloom apples, the Arkansas Black variety, which keeps though spring. I admire the agility of his food brain, the way he pats his belly and rubs the bird at once.

We put the turkey in to roast and start on the biscuits. Shaun uses curdled cream instead of buttermilk, partly for convenience. But too, he says, “I like the little bit of bitter scent from the vinegar, when you open the biscuit and get the steam.” He lines the biscuits on a sheet pan, drops the heat on the turkey, and sets to work on the hash. It’s clear the speed with which you might have a Thanksgiving dinner on the table, if your bird serves six to eight instead of twenty, if it cooks fast and hot instead of all day. And too, this is a menu where one element seems to provide for the next. The cranberry onion jam waits in its jar. Shaun brushes the hot biscuit tops with fat rendered from the bacon in the hash, and I almost cry with what a good idea.

When we get to eat, it’s how you eat in the kitchen, with knives and fingers, mouths full and talking. The meat is a surprise, firmer, richer in flavor and texture, substantial, like the difference between a wool sweater and a cotton one, a decision and a whim. I think back to something Charlene Harrison said: “If an animal is going to give its life for you, it deserves love, fresh air, sunshine, respect.” It deserves to get it on with other animals of its kind. It deserves to be considered carefully, cooked well and devoured, licking your fingers. This is what a feast looks like, to me. What heritage is.

RECIPES

Roasted Bourbon Red Turkey with Thyme Butter Rub

Roast Heritage Turkey with Sage Mustard Butter

Butternut Squash Hash

Biscuits

Cranberry Onion Jam