Festive food: The short, and frenetic, life of a turkey

Philip Crozier with 7-week-old free range turkeys on his farm near Ashburton. Picture / Simon Baker

There is something a little creepy about standing in a semi-lit room with 4000 4-week-old turkeys, especially after being told they belong to the vulture family.

Not quite knee-high, they have no fear and will not make much of an effort to get out of the way, even if their little feet get accidentally stood on.

They are quiet, content to huddle together and just watch their audience, even though the huge shed has more than enough space for all of them to wander freely.

They are not shy about ducking a head up a trouser leg or pecking at a shoe - which is fine unless the wearer has gone for an open-toed number.

At this small, fluffy age it is hard to imagine these birds are destined for the dinner table next Christmas.

But these poults are just two weeks off moving to the next stage of their free-range development - a rugby field-sized paddock beside Philip and Judith Crozier's house just north of Ashburton - and seven weeks away from "turkey catching day" on February 1, when they will be bundled off to the processing plant.

Mid-Canterbury's climate makes it one of the best places to raise turkeys, says Mr Crozier, who has been in the game for more than 40 years. Most harmful bugs cannot survive the harsh winter cold or the abrasive summer heat.

It is a tricky market - New Zealanders don't eat a lot of turkey other than in the summer holidays - and the turkey season is short. From fertilisation to processing plant takes just four months.

It begins in October with the "milking" of three gobblers - the big, loud and aggressive male breeders - every 10 days. That semen is diluted with a saline solution and artificially inseminated into 60 hens. The process is repeated with different gobblers and hens every 10 days.

Mr Crozier said the turkeys used to be left to do their own fertilisation naturally but the gobblers were too aggressive and too many hens did not survive the mating process.

A canvas "saddle" used to be put on the hen to help reduce scratching, but even that could not save many from a distressing and painful mating session, so the Croziers went for artificial insemination.

Their 750 breeding hens live in large pens with access to straw-filled laying boxes. They produce an average of 500 eggs a day.

Unlike chickens, most of the turkey hens lay in the afternoon, but the egg collectors do the rounds all day, transferring the large warm eggs to the fumigator, which keeps the shells sterile.

From there they go into the setter, a machine that turns the eggs every hour to make sure the embryo does not stay on one side. This is a job the hen would gently do with her claw if she was sitting on the egg herself.

The setter can cope with 30,000 eggs at one time.

It is kept at a comfortable 98.5F (36.9C), the same temperature as the next machine in the process, the hatcher. It is here that the little poults will make their entry to the world.

From the hatchery they move to the sawdust-floor sheds that can house some 5000 poults at a time. They grow quickly and by the time they are 4 weeks old their heads are almost knee-high.

The warm growing sheds are dimly lit, unless the day is hot and fine, when Mr Crozier will open the shed's sliding doors wide to let the warmth and light in. Despite the space they like to stay together, which keeps them warm but can become a problem if they scratch one another. A bleeding poult will be pecked to death by the others - an inherited vulture characteristic.

Stupidity is another inherent characteristic of the turkey, which is why they can usually be left to roam free in a large paddock without the need for high fences.

Escape is not a priority and most of the 1000 in the Croziers' paddock last week were happy to stay close to their feeding and roosting sheds, even though the gate was open.

At 8 weeks old the turkeys tend to stay a metre or so away from visitors. But they will follow anyone who walks through their masses and even run behind any car driving through their paddock.

Come turkey catching day they may have developed a bit more savvy about humans, but by then it is too late.

The Croziers' dog herds them one at a time up the ramp into the sorting cage where catchers grab the birds by the knees and turn them upside down to grade them on weight.

"I can pretty much tell what weight they are now by just looking at them," says Mr Crozier. "But picking them up gives the best idea before the formal weighing after killing."

Once upside down even the most aggressive gobbler becomes passive and quiet, so the 12-week-old birds have little fight as they head into the cage.

After being graded into the various sizes - most are 4.5kg to 5.5kg - the turkeys are loaded into an open-air truck and transported 5km away to the processing shed, where they are killed and packaged.

The Croziers sell their turkeys throughout the country and their distributors are listed on their website. But the free-range business is a relaxed one and it is not uncommon for customers to turn up and buy direct from the freezer.

The Croziers eat the meat themselves, and the eggs.

"It's great eating. We don't wait until Christmas to get stuck in to a big roast," Mr Crozier says.

"It always bewilders me that other people have it only once a year - but then I would say that, I suppose."