Turkeys Move Center Stage At Pat's Pastured

Listening to Pat McNiff talk about his turkeys - literally talk turkey - makes you think differently about about your holiday bird - that large frozen mass you usually dump into your shopping cart along with the canned pumpkin, fresh string beans and box stuffing this time of year.

McNiff is owner of Pat's Pastured and the new tenant at on South Road. His turkeys are different.

"How many people actually know where their turkey came from - what state, what country, how they were were raised?" he said during a visit Friday to see his turkeys. They are in Jamestown on the farmland he's leased for the past few years and they will not be making the move to East Greenwich.

Instead, the turkeys will be slaughtered this weekend and prepared for pickup by customers on Tuesday.

But on Friday, all 260 turkeys were roaming on a field overlooking Mackeral Cove, pecking and grazing - "expressing their full turkey-ness" as McNiff calls it.

He offers two types of turkey: standard white, which is more like the turkeys we're used to, with large breasts and lots of white meat; and broad-breasted bronze, a heritage breed, a bit smaller, with more dark meat.

The bronze turkeys cost more per pound because they are more labor-intensive early on, but in truth both types aren't cheap. The whites cost $5.50 a pound and the bronzes cost $6.50. For a 20-pound bird, that's more than $100 - a far cry from the cost of a typical supermarket turkey.

McNiff offered clear reasons for the price difference.

"The labor involved in a free-range, pastured-raised turkey is much different than raising a confinement bird that’s in an operation like Tyson or one of the big companies," he said. Those companies "are kind of vertically integrated with the grain companies, the milling companies and everything else. They own the hatcheries. They can take best advantage of subsidied corn - which we all pay for.

"The price of what our turkeys cost actually reflects the real cost of what the food is. What it takes to buy a poult, to brood them, to feed them, to process them and package them," he said.

And, he said, supermarkets often artificially reduce the price of their turkeys to get people in the door. "A lot of supermarkets do the special because they want you in the door to buy everything else and that’s where they make their margins."

For McNiff, the extra cost for his turkeys enables them for the time they are alive - headed for the Thanksgiving table as they are - to live the way turkeys are meant to live.

"We see it as having a life and having the best life possible."

Interested in buying one of McNiff's turkeys? Visit the Pat's Pastured website or go to the North Kingstown Winter Farmers Market today (Sat.) at Lafayette Mill from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.