To say that November is a busy time of the year for us is an understatement!
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving is a very long day for us.....this year it was a 16.5 hour day. The day started at 6 am (we slept in). Lee headed to the farm & I got the boys to school. By the time I got back to the farm our volunteers were there, the turkeys were caught and we were ready to start processing.
Since some of our volunteers had never processed poultry we ran through the game plan with everyone. It really does work well if everyone has a specific job. We had someone killing the turkeys, then they went to the scalder (this helps to loosen their feathers), next the plucker (where the feathers are removed) and finally to the tables to be eviscerated. Lee & I supervised & helped out as needed but our job was to take the turkeys weigh them, tag them & get them into their ice baths.
The time went by quickly & then customers started arriving at the farm to pick-up their turkeys. I didn't even have time to change clothes....... We learn something every year that we can use to improve upon the next year. This years lesson was to label the coolers & freezers with which turkeys are in them. Then maybe we don't have to look through 5 coolers to find turkey #22.
Then came the task of assigning everyone a turkey. I had about 6 sheets of paper that we had written the turkey number & weight on. I compiled them onto one sheet of paper and then took our spreadsheet of all the customers which included name, phone number, where the turkey would be picked up at, & if they had requested a larger or smaller bird. After assigning everyone their bird it was time to package them up & load the market trailer to start our drop-offs.
Did I mention that by this time it was around 6 o'clock in the evening and we had eaten a slice of pumpkin bread & coffee at about 9 o'clock that morning and a handful of chips for lunch.
Our first drop-off was Davidson Town Hall. Of course no matter what time we say we will be there we are late. This year the traffic was AWFUL!! We had a couple different people call and ask where we were and I told them we would be there soon.... We also had a few customers call us and say there is no way I can get there. This put us late getting to our Salisbury drop-off also but I had called a customer to say what everybody know please.
So once again the Thanksgiving season has ended for Wild Turkey Farms.
We are very thankful for our customers who continue to support us year after year. We are very thankful for the volunteers that we have year after year. I actually had a couple volunteer to help next year with the logistics of the turkeys so maybe we can find them a little easier next year.
I included a few pictures of our day.
There will be more posted on the Facebook page.
Turkeys
Scalder
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