About Our Turkeys...

We first started keeping turkeys on our Devon farm 25 years ago because we wanted to be sure of a good turkey for our own family Christmas dinner! Since then we have been fortunate to enjoy the encouragement and support of loyal customers and this has persuaded us to develop the enterprise little by little each year.

We keep our own breeding flock of Norfolk Black turkeys - a traditional slow-growing breed that is renowned for quality. We are one of the few registered organic producers in the UK to be breeding and hatching our own Christmas turkeys.

In the Spring each stag (male turkey) keeps company with his own group of hens in a large grassy pen of their own. The first eggs are usually laid in March and (with the help of the incubator) we expect the first turkeys to hatch at the beginning of May. That is always when the hard work begins and hopefully you will see the result at Christmas!

A small area of the farm is used for growing organic cereals – oats are the most successful crop but we occasionally grow wheat or triticale and the turkeys enjoy all of these as whole grain. To balance things up, we also buy in some organic poultry feed. However, without a doubt, what the turkeys like best is to go foraging for themselves. Acorns, stinging nettles, docks, windfall apples and even blackberries would all be among their favourites!

Our turkeys have a pretty good life – they fly, they perch and they love to come out in the mornings. They live free-range in our orchard and surrounding fields and are painstakingly put to bed each night - unlike chickens, turkeys don’t take themselves indoors to roost!
In December our turkeys don’t have the stress of travelling anywhere else. We are fortunate to have a wonderful team of local helpers ensuring that the turkeys are killed individually, calmly and humanely. They are dry-plucked, entirely by hand, then hung before being finally prepared a few days later. All preparations are done here on our farm. It takes great teamwork and we take great pride in the result.