NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Vic and I are aware that it isn’t even October, but if you want a heritage turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner table, it’s already late in the season. We wanted to promote locally grown, naturally raised heritage turkeys, so I visited www.localharvest.org. That’s how I found Xenia Stavrinides and her delightful Rainbow Ranch Farms in San Bernardino County.

I ordered our turkey in August, and drove out to the Mojave Desert farming community of Pinyon Hills last week to pick it up.

Heritage turkeys are old breeds such as Bourbon Red, Narragansett, Holland White, and Standard Bronze. Farmers of the 1700s and 1800s developed these breeds from the Eastern wild turkey. Today these breeds are quite rare, with only a few hundred breeding birds of each type left in the country.

Oddly enough, the best way to save endangered breeds is to eat them. If no one buys and eats them, then the breeds will no longer be grown and will go extinct. If that happens, we will lose whatever genes might be unique to these breeds.

The turkeys you find in stores today are all broad-breasted whites. This breed was developed in the 1950s. With selective breeding, the size of the turkey and especially breast size has gotten bigger. Too big. These turkeys have been bred to produce massive amounts of breast meat at the lowest possible cost. The birds reach market size in 14 weeks, versus eight months for heritage breeds.

As a result of this rapid growth, broad-breasted whites have lost their ability to mate naturally. All of today’s broad-breasted white turkeys have to be artificially inseminated because the large toms are unable to climb onto a hen’s back. In fact, they can hardly stand up. Crippled birds—the result of overly fast weight gain before legs are sufficiently developed to support that weight—are common.

We wanted an old-fashioned turkey that could mate naturally, one that was raised under open sky the slow, old-fashioned way. We knew these slow-raised birds were more expensive than the grocery store turkeys—about $125 to $135 per bird—but I wanted to support a local farmer who grew heritage turkeys.

I arranged to pick up my turkey—normally Xenia ships them to the customer—because I wanted to see the farm. I was thrilled to find her poultry farm was clean and well managed. It reminded me of my cousin’s farm that I visited in the 1940s and 1950s back in Indiana. The birds roamed freely with lots of space, and were well-loved.

Rainbow Ranch Farms birds are free-range and certified natural, which means that they were raised on pasture with no herbicides or pesticides and with no antibiotics or hormones. Factory farm birds are overcrowded and receive prophylactic antibiotics to stave off the infections that are common under these stressful, overcrowded conditions.

I’m not sure what I was expecting in a turkey farmer, but Xenia wasn’t it. With rubber boots, shorts and coal-black hair tied up in perky ponytails, Xenia bounced with unbridled energy.

Until I learned that Xenia had been at this farm for 20 years, since she bought it sight unseen from the Recycler at age 19, I would have sworn she was only 25.

“I’d never seen a double-wide trailer in the desert before,” she said. “I cried for the first three years I was out here.” But she adjusted. She drove a long commute as a mental health worker.

She was distressed at how factory farm animals were raised, and wanted to grow her own food ethically. She started out with a few birds for herself, but word spread through her friends in the music and acting industries.

“Five years ago, I had 50 turkeys and orders for 750 birds,” she said. The demand was there, so she quit her health care job and expanded her poultry operation. Now she raises 500 turkeys each year.

However, poultry farming—she also raises heritage chicken breeds in a separate area—is still her second job. Her other job is lead vocalist in an alternative rock band (think punk), the Parthenon. But during the busy turkey-slaughtering season of November, they don’t tour or record.

A storm was approaching—the one that brought us rain last week—and snow was in the forecast for the high desert. Xenia had lots of preparations to make. Because her turkeys prefer to stay outdoors, they won’t use the $25,000 shed that is exclusively theirs. They prefer to roost on the straw bales and log structures that Xenia built for them.

Rather than catch 200 turkeys one-by-one and put them inside the coop, Xenia and her helper were building temporary plywood and straw bale shelters for the turkeys to huddle under.

Xenia gets 500 one-day-old chicks from a supplier in March. They spend their first two months in the shed where they can stay warm by a brooder. Then they are turned out to pasture, which has plenty of shade structures to protect them from the desert sun.

Because the birds quickly decimate the alfalfa growing in their yard, Xenia grows squash, mint, and other vegetables in pots that she puts into the yard periodically. The turkeys also have unlimited access to bales of alfalfa and a feed mix.

This year, Xenia has White Holland, Narragansett, Standard Bronze, Eastern Wild, and some crossbred turkeys in her flock. We ate our turkey—a Standard Bronze—last weekend, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that it was tender, juicy and incredibly delicious.

Three hundred of Xenia’s birds have already gone to market. Of the 200 that are left, a hundred are reserved for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. She’ll be out of available birds soon, but there is still time to reserve one.

Visit Rainbow Ranch Farms online at www.localharvest.org/ farms/M9885 or call (760) 868-6206. Bon apetit.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].