Thomas Turkey, aged 140 days, could be inside an oven right now. It’s more likely, however, that his sister, Henrietta Turkey, aged 88 days, has the honor of serving as the Thanksgiving centerpiece.
Henrietta’s entire life, planned out more than two years in advance of the holiday meal, has been leading to this moment, timed so she hits peak weight three weeks before Thanksgiving.
Many of the turkeys consumed in Northwest Arkansas come from this area, often courtesy of Cargill, which runs a Springdale-based turkey growing and harvesting operation. Feed for the turkeys is manufactured in Springdale. Turkey eggs hatch in Gentry. Farms where the turkeys grow surround the area in a 100-mile radius, and the plant where the turkeys are rendered employs 1,200 at its Springdale location. This is farm-totable eating, too, even if the bird passes through far more sets of hands than one plucked from a backyard cage.
The Thomases and Henriettas of this holiday season had to come from somewhere. They started out as an artificial twinkle in the eyes of their parents, who were ordered in early March 2010.
Thomas and Henrietta’s father and mother were born in August 2011 and placedon one of Cargill’s 10 breeder farms that circle the Springdale homebase. At full capacity, 85,000 laying hens and 6,000 breeder toms are kept to produce the next generation of future meals.
Because of strict bio-security rules, visitors are not allowed at breeding farms. A disease introduced to the flock might not just affect the eggs, but the parents as well, rendering an entire flock dangerous to consume.
The turkeys wake up to manufactured sunlight and go to sleep at a pre-ordained nightfall, as the cycle is regulated to produce optimal laying conditions. Artificial inseminations take place weekly, which ensures the three or four eggs these mothers produce each week are viable.
This process is necessary; the made-forfood turkeys, at about 20 pounds for females and in excess of 50 pounds for the males, cannot physically mate because of size differences.
The hens laid their first batch of eggs about April 1 of this year. Thomas’ egg (and his many brothers) would have been laid about May 10. Henrietta’s egg would have followed about July 1. Theeggs were then collected from automated nests and hauled to Gentry, home of Cargill’s hatchery.
About a week separates the date Thomas’ and Henrietta’s mothers dropped them in egg form and the startof their incubation, with Thomas always 50 days in advance of his little sister. Thomas and Henrietta are hard to distinguish among the 311,998 other white and brown-splotched eggs the hatchery in Gentry receives every week. The eggs move from a cold storage facility that hampers the start of the growth process and into an incubator, which speeds it up again. Giant racks of eggs, most of them with black marker scribbles on them indicating the lay date, get placed in the incubators, which are about eight feet tall and just as many feet deep.Computers regulate the temperatures of the air pumped across the eggs. Newer eggs are placed nearer to the incubator’s heating units, as the older eggs and the growing poults inside will produce some of their own heat toward the end of the poult’s time in the egg. During the incubation period, the eggs are checked by hand during a process called candling. A light pressed against the exterior of the shell should show an air pocket developing at the wide end of the egg and a dark splotch - the tiny turkey - at the narrow end. Some eggs, however, just glow bright throughout, having never been fertilized.
At 25 days, just three days before they are scheduled to hatch, the eggs are transferred by hand from the incubator racks into baskets stacked about a dozen high. Thomas was born on June 14; Henrietta followed on Aug. 5. Both of them weighed a little more than 3 ounces and stood about 3 inches tall on the day they pecked through their shells. Of their potential brothers and sisters, 83 percent made it from egg to chirping, fuzzy yellow poult. In addition to those never fertilized, another portion of the eggs simply do not grow to the full term of 28 days.
Henrietta and Tom are then placed on a conveyor belt, where they are funneled into a basket. Two of the hatchery’s 35 employees spend their day turning the chicks over to determine their sex. Tom and Henrietta get split up.
Depending on the customer’s preferences, the hoursold poults go through a series of potential modifications designed to keep them from injuring each other in the future. The hook of their beak is removed, leaving them able to eat but unable to sink their beak into a neighbor. Toenails are seared off from the babies via an automated system, as are the spurs from male turkeys. The birds then receive a coating of a green pro-biotic complex, delivered from a water mister. Thebirds will preen the material off each other, ingesting the compounds in the spray. Tom and Henrietta, doctored and trimmed, then head to growout farms.
Even through Tom and Henrietta are living at different places now, their job at the grow farm is essentially the same - they eat. Cargill manufactures the feed Tom, Henrietta and their siblings grow up on. In a competitive business where 70 percent of the cost of raising a turkey comes from making feed, the contents of the mix produced at the mill near U.S. 71 and U.S. 412 in Springdale is proprietary information. Generally speaking, it contains corn, wheat and other grains. The process of acquiring grain in this year’s drought proved to be more difficult than most years. Shipments of corn usually come from Missouri or other states adjacent to Arkansas. This year, however, corn came from as far away as North Dakota and at higher prices, too.
Thomas will consume about 96 pounds of food during his 140-day life. Henrietta will eat about 32 pounds of feed during her 88 days.
The poults, newly emerged from the hatchery in Gentry, make their way to farms such as Double L Farms near Elkins, one of about 75 grow-out farms. Farms such as Double L, owned by Jeff and Gloria Lindsey, operate on a contract basis. The Lindseys own the property but not the actual birds or food.
The youngest turkeys are placed inside pens and fed by hand. The size of the pens is gradually expanded until the birds are capable of eating from row after row of automatic feeders. In the hen barn at Double L Farms, Henrietta was turned loose inside a 500-foot-long red barn - that’s more than a football field and a half long - with 26,999 of her best friends. At four weeks, a stage Jeff Lindsey refers to as the birds’ awkward teenage week, the all-white turkeys lack some of the feathers that will fill out their frame closer to Thanksgiving Day. They run down the tracks of barn, following Lindsey and other Cargill employees who are decked out in blue protective jumpsuits, plastic boot covers and hair nets, all necessities that prevent the introduction of diseases into the barn. All entrants sanitize their boots in a two-step process involving chlorine and a white granulated substance. The Lindseys go through this process every time they walk into the barn, which features a mulch-like substance on the floor and a series of fans dangling from the roof.
Henrietta and about half of her friends moved into other barns on the property as they grew. A barn of similar appearance and length to her original home then housed about 13,000 hens, with another 13,000 placed in a neighboring barn. About 100 of the 27,000 turkeys delivered to Double L Farms did not survive to the second stage of the grow-out process.
On the day before being hauled to the processing plant, Henrietta weighed about 16 pounds. Her brother Tom, born about 50 days before she was, weighed about 40 pounds. At 2 feet in height or more, they have less room to play in the second pen but still pecked at the plastic-covered boots of those who walked into the barn.
On harvest day, which is about Nov. 1 for never-frozen Thanksgiving birds, workers built a funnel-like pen on the face of the barn, leading into a semitrailer truck fitted with metal cages. Henrietta and friends are placed into the wire boxes on the trucks, which then depart for Springdale’s processing facility, one of four within the Cargill’s U.S. operation structure.
Yesterday, two Cargill turkeys, both from a flock in Virginia, received a presidentialpardon at the White House, granting them a lifetime of roaming around on a farm. Tom and Henrietta aren’t so lucky.
At the unloading dock attached to the processing plant in Springdale, turkeys are carefully grabbed by hand and placed by their feet into metal stirrups, their heads hanging below. A short ride on the system led Henrietta through the machines that would first knock her unconscious and then end her life. Thomas arrived earlier that same day, processed by the first shift of employees. Hen turkeys fall to the second shift, and a third shift is needed to clean up after the first two.Big birds such as Thomas aren’t made for dinner tables, at least not whole. Instead, Thomas could become one of a wide variety of products manufactured at the Springdale plant, from turkey bratwurst to turkey tenderloins to assorted neck pieces, sold in bulk to customers all across the world. Still other parts are shipped to Cargill’s cook plants, which turn the products into lunch meats such as turkey pastrami. There is very little waste from a processed turkey, and even the bones get ground into dog food.
Henrietta’s path took a different turn than Thomas’.She was bred all along for the kitchen table. After passing through the kill station, a series of steps prepared Henrietta for her tabletop appearance. A scalding hot bath helped clean her and loosen her feathers, which were then removed by a series of highspeed rubber fingers. An evisceration followed, as well an examination by a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector. Bruises or signs of disease disqualify the birds from being considered a Grade A product. Those that pass the inspection are clamped and bagged whole after sitting in a chiller for several hours and being trimmed. Those that don’t pass the initial inspection might have their breasts removed for Cargill’s bone-inbreast product, with the back half of the bird chopped into other useable pieces, perhaps turned into ground meat.
The Springdale plant can process about 30,000 hens per shift. Of those birds, about 16,000 make the cut as whole birds, with the other 14,000 turned into bone-in-breast varieties.
Henrietta received a designation as a fresh bird, meaning she never made it into a freezer. But others processed outside of the holiday season were quick frozen in blast cells, which douse the turkeys with temperatures below 30 degrees and a rush of wind.
The plant runs six days a week during the holiday season to keep up with demand.
An army of independent contractors removes about 300,000 cases of turkey products a week from the Springdale processing plant. Some of the products contain the brand labels of grocers such as Kroger or H-E-B; others carry the banner of Cargill’s house brand, Honeysuckle White. The National Turkey Federation estimates 46 million birds become Thanksgiving meals, with another 22 million consumed at Christmas. Cargill’s operations in the Northwest Arkansas area contribute about 16,000 whole birds per day to that total, plus the birds that go out to consumers in pieces. That means the farmers and the surrounding turkey industry here feed about 62.5 million people, if each bird provided for an average of five meals.
Tom and Henrietta’s parents were processed just before their offspring were. But some brothers and sisters live on, with eggs produced by that flock of breeding animals having hatched through about Nov. 11. The resulting hens will be processed in early February, and the toms will live until late March.
Meanwhile, the hatchery in Gentry stays full for programs that fall outside the fresh bird market during the holiday season. More than 1.2 million eggs are at the facility right now.
There’s another Tom and Henrietta already in the works.
Editor’s Note: This narrative and timeline were constructed after interviews with the following people: Shane Acosta, general manager of Cargill’s turkey operations in Springdale; Lon Cearley, grow-out manager; Mark Maris, feed mill manager; Tim Alsup, live schedule manager; Gerald Duncan, live operations manager; Mike Martin, director of communications; Terry Smith, hatchery manager; Terry Slagle, breeder/ hatchery manager; and Jeffand Gloria Lindsey, owners of Double L Farms near Elkins. Tours of Double L Farms, the Springdale processing plant and the Gentry hatchery also contributed to the reporting.
Style, Pages 29 on 11/22/2012