One Man and a turkey

Will and I are both first generation farmers and from a small boy Will always wanted to be a farmer but I’m sure he never imagined he would be a turkey farmer!

Our turkey enterprise started as a hobby with a friend, rearing 20 turkeys for friends and family. Little did we know where that small hobby would take us….. It is so interesting to me that such whimsical decisions we make in life can change the course of your entire destiny.

Roll on to this year where we are producing 2500 birds for Christmas which will be enjoyed across the length and breath of the UK.

Our turkey enterprise also changed the course for the farm, prior to producing turkeys we were still a beef farm but it all looked very different. For starters we had Limousin cattle which are large commercial cattle and are very well known for their highly strung flighty nature. I could tell many a tale of chasing escaped cattle for miles across fields, climbing through hedges and wading through rivers in hot pursuit of bullocks on the run! We were also arable farming barley which we would then crush and feed to the cattle to ‘finish’ them.

Once we had built up a customer base for our turkeys lots of people kept asking about buying beef from us. However we didn’t think that our beef at the time matched the slow grown heritage credentials of our turkeys. The decision was made to switch to a native breed. We settled on the ‘Beef Shorthorn’ well known for their marbled meat, docile nature and phenomenal grass converting skills oh and they are very photogenic! Ranging in colour from pure white to a dark conker brown with many carrying the beautiful roan coat colour.

At the same time as switching breeds we switched farming practices from a high in put cereal finishing system to a very low input, totally grass based ‘regenerative’ system. Although back then the term ‘Regenerative Farming’ hadn’t been coined!

We really started to direct sell our beef during covid and haven’t looked back since. At the beginning we had a pipe dream that ‘one day’ we hoped we would be able to sell all of the beef we produced on the farm direct to customers. If you had told us that just 4 years later we would be at that point we would have laughed hysterically! However here we are and are now absolutely thrilled to be working with neighbouring farms who produce outdoor saddleback pork, pasture fed hoggets and deer stalkers who are controlling the huge population of deer we have whilst supplying us with venison.

If I’m entirely honest I am not sure how this happened, it has been such a whirl wind and every day really is a ‘school day’. We have learn’t a million skills which have absolutely nothing to do with farming! From butchery, marketing, shipping, websites, ecommerce, and stock control, cooking for the public, trade stand set ups and the list goes on.

Whilst we live in a total whirl wind with our mini farmers in tow we are beyond grateful to all our wonderful customers who make this mad farming life possible. It fills us with joy to know that the work we put in on the farm to produce our meat in harmony with nature is being enjoyed across the UK.