Sara Jane Adventures: Watch your feet

Adventuring rule #17: Touch the turkey. Touch it.

Farming is a cheerful pastime, right? All those hours in the sunshine, working with the earth and the animals. The clock is the sunshine and life is run by the weather. Oh, the charms. And the crazy hard work and long hours. I visited a kind of farm last weekend. There was definitely something in the air. But it might have been the smell of turkey poo. There was a lot on the ground, according to Keith. Those are his hands in the photo.

When I dropped by with the tall friends at a free range turkey ranch run by Keith's family, the season's load was just arriving. I was handed a chirping box and told to follow the line of helpers making their way into the long building.

These are baby turkeys, called poults. At two weeks old, they made their way from their mamas or their hatching places into a number of plastic bins. From there the bins are stacked and loaded into trucks and shipped to farms, where they'll have time to grow into big Thanksgiving birds. Then we eat them.

They look so cute, don't they? All little and confused and chirpy. I'm assured that they don't stay that way. Keith, the owner of the hands in the first picture, informed me that they grow less cute with every passing week. Anytime he's home from university, he's usually working on the ranch.

Raising these birds in a free-range habitat is kind of a pain in the ass. In the buildings the birds are pretty easy to deal with. They're contained, they're warm from the heaters and all of their food containers are close by. After the little guys spend about five weeks in the long houses growing up and getting vaccinated, they are moved out to fields.

Outdoors, it's a different story. Feed has to be towed in by tractor. Near the end of the season, the food containers When it rains, the birds are gathered up and taken to shelters to weather out the storm. The turkeys don't deal well with the cold and they get stuck in the mud. With five or six fields over 100 acres, collecting all the turkeys is a big, messy job. Keith has often been stuck doing this job for long hours. Once, he was on mud duty on his own prom night. At the end of the growing period, the work days can all blur together to get the bird loaded into trucks on time. Especially with the mud still thick on the ground under the slippery truck tires. Those trucks head to slaughterhouses. From there the details are messy.

Yes, the turkeys die to make delicious sandwiches. At least the ones from this ranch had a free range open air life while they could. And the meat is healthier. Also, by the time they are big enough to slaughter, they are very ugly. And annoying. And loud. Anyone who has dealt with them is glad to see them go.

For now, this new batch of birds is still little, chirpy and adorable. We couldn't stay long because the babies will swarm at visitors and smother their little brothers and sisters in a pile. I don't think there are very many positive things about turkey farming, actually. People really like eating turkeys, though, so there will continue to be farmers to raise them. I'm grateful, in the grand scheme of things. But in the short term, I'm just glad I saw them in the cute stage.