Frank Reese, Jr., is an anesthesiologist, who is also a part-time poultry fancier and breeder. Reese owns Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch, located outside of Lindsborg, Kan., and his collection of Bronze, Bourbon Red, White Holland (Jefferys), Black (Hall) and Narragansett (Nelson) turkeys is the largest in the country. Reese says his flock is the only group of true heritage breeds of turkeys in the USA that numbers over a few dozen individuals, and this year he is raising around 18,000 head.
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Reese defines heritage turkeys as birds that can mate naturally with normal fertility, take 24 to 28 weeks to get to market weight, and can live for several years. Reese’s toms, if they don’t become someone’s Thanksgiving dinner, can live for 8 to 10 years and the hens can live for 8 to 15 years.
Reese’s father showed cattle and sold registered Hereford bulls. On trips to cattle shows with his father, Reese said that he would always take a look at any birds being shown. His dad would buy some turkeys from a local hatchery each year and they would be butchered in the fall for the family and for sale. When Reese was in high school, he started showing turkeys and chickens in 4 H. It was at this time that Reese began raising his flock of Bronze turkeys, whose lineage can traced back to 1917. “I got my turkeys from Norman Kardosh, and his mother got them from Bird Bros in 1917 as a wedding gift,” Reese said. Bird Brothers, Meyersdale, Pa., were known for their “Gold Banks” Bronze turkeys.
“When I was a child, I wanted to be a turkey farmer when I grew up,” Reese said. “There were people around who raised flocks of 5,000 and 10,000 turkeys, and that is what I wanted to do. But, dad said, ‘You go to school and learn something else and raise turkeys for the fun of it.’ He didn’t want to see us struggle to survive as farmers like he and mom did.” Reese explained that the family’s 160-acre farm was never big enough to be a crop farm, so his father raised quality cattle breeding stock. “Dad said that he would keep the turkeys going while I was in college,” Reese said.
After finishing college, Reese moved to western Kansas to work. Later, he and his turkeys returned to Lindsborg in eastern Kansas, and he continued to breed his turkeys.
Through his affiliation with American Poultry Association (APA) and attendance at shows, Reese came to know many of the breeders who shared his passion for turkeys. Over the years, as many of these turkey fanciers retired or died, Reese acquired their flocks. Now, Reese believes that his flocks are the last of their kind.
Reese had always sold some of each year’s flock of birds to help pay the feed bill. He gradually built a clientele among local supermarkets. As Reese accumulated flocks of each of his five breeds, he realized that he would have to expand the number of birds he raised if he was going to keep the flocks genetically viable. Reese said that the old breeding text books recommend at least 200 hens to maintain a closed flock, and with five breeds, that meant carrying over 1,000 hens each winter. That number of turkeys eats a lot of feed, and it was going to take a lot of feed, and money, to keep these gene pools going. This ultimately led to Reese’s efforts to find shackle time to process thousands of birds each November and to his association with Heritage Foods USA, which is discussed in the article Heritage Foods USA: A Breed Apart in the November WATT PoultryUSA.
Raising Turkeys The Old Fashioned Way
Reese said that you need 5 acres of good pasture per thousand turkeys on range (Wampler), and you need to have shade available for the birds. The ideal is to have the pasture planted in milo, alfalfa or sorghum cane (Allen). Reese begins setting eggs in February in incubators on his farm. The birds are started in battery cages and, later, are moved to houses with concrete floors. Reese’s turkey houses also have screened-in porches with slatted raised floors. When the birds are old enough to handle the weather, they are put out on range. While on range, the birds can go into the houses for feed and water and go out into the pastures at their leisure. No coccidiostats are needed in the all-vegetable feed that the turkeys eat.
Kansas weather only allows a two month placement window for ranging birds for early November slaughter. In order to set eggs for another month or even a few more weeks, he would have to develop a Christmas business. Reese now has six other Kansas farmers who raise birds on contract with him. He said that his contract producers wind up netting about what they were getting for raising commercial turkeys year round, but now only have birds from April through November working with him.
Reese has four other individuals working with him on this project, besides the contract growers. Jeff May, who works for Dawes labs, helps out Reese and formulates the feed.
Brian Anselmo is a recent business school graduate of the University of Missouri, who worked for Reese on weekends while in school, and has now chosen raising turkeys in Kansas over selling insurance in Kansas City. Another person contributing to the effort is Danny Williamson, who is working with the Black turkey breeders.
Breeding & Selection
Next year’s breeders, and some exceptional individuals from prior years, who best reflect the standards for their respective breeds, are selected out of the flock and are carried over the winter (Price) on Reese’s 160-acre prairie farm. Eight turkey breeds were first recognized in 1873 by the APA, but over time, only the five breeds Reese has flocks of developed commercial value.
Heritage hens of all ages can fly and so can young toms; fences don’t contain them. The birds get everywhere. As Reese separates the breeds in to pens, he clips one wing on each hen to prevent crossbreeding.
“The reason that my bronze turkeys do so well is because Rala Henry did so well with them back in the 1930’s, when they were the industry standard. The Bourbon Reds do well because Sadie Lloyd and Gladys Hunsinger did well with them. I am just standing on the shoulders of those before me,” Reese said.
Chickens, Ducks & Geese
Over the years, Reese has acquired several other heritage breeds of poultry. Reese raises Plymouth Barred Rock chickens and Cornish chickens and a couple hundred of these are processed every other week. Reese credits much of his success with maintaining the quality of his flocks to the farmers who bred and maintained the flocks before him. “My Barred Rocks go back to Ralph Sturgeon’s bloodline out of Ohio. They have been maintained the way they were back in the 1930’s and 1940’s. That’s why they win culinary contests, not because I am a great farmer, but because I think Ralph Sturgeon was,” Reese said. The chickens are 16 to 17 weeks old when processed and they should dress out at 3 to 3.5 pounds.
Reese said that he is working with two other breeds of chickens, New Hampshires and Jersey giants. Both of these breeds have been recognized by Arc de Taste as breeds that are considered to be unique to America and have culinary value. He hopes to have individuals from both breeds to market in the coming years.
Several breeds of waterfowl have also found a home in Lindsborg. Reese raises Pekin, Rouen and Aylesbury ducks as well as French Dewlap Toulouse and African Dewlap Toulouse geese. According to the Heritage Foods USA website, “The Toulouse is like the truffle of the poultry world. It is the original foie gras goose.” Around 600 ducks are processed in a year and a couple of hundred geese are also sold. The geese are processed all at once for the holidays.
An Investment In The Breeds
Reese’s work with Heritage Foods USA has given him a growing market for his birds, and this could make his preservation efforts self sustaining. Reese is 59 years old, and he worries what will happen to these breeds when he is gone. He said that no one else in the USA has Bourbon Reds, White Hollands or Spanish Blacks. “There is only one other breeder that I will get Bronze turkeys from in the United States and that is the Morgan family in Texas, and C.C. and Marie are close to 80 years old. Dwayne Urch, in Minnesota, is the only person who has Narragansetts.” As the breeders have retired or died, so have their flocks, unless Reese adopted them.
Reese encountered a number of hurdles in getting his birds to market. “The infrastructure that allowed for individuals to raise a few birds and then have them processed and shipped to a customer doesn’t exist anymore,” Reese said. “I have had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money to make this happen. I had to buy processing equipment and have bags made and shipping boxes and crates and egg washers.” Reese formed a partnership with Krehbiels Specialty Meats, Inc., to purchase poultry processing equipment. Krehbiels processes the chickens and waterfowl and any out of season turkeys. Reese purchases the shackle time at Nebraska Turkey Growers to process his Thanksgiving turkeys.
Reese said that a lot of the people he speaks with that are interested in raising birds are city people who buy 15 acres and move out to the country, and think that they are going to support themselves doing this. Many who try to go this route complain about difficulty getting good genetics and access to shackle time.
According to Reese, there is so much difference now between the old breeds and the commercial birds that many people interested in raising something “different” will just cross commercial birds with a bird with colored feathers. “My biggest fear is that someone is going to try and corner the market with a fake example of this. I am sure that the big guys could do this if they wanted to, but I don’t think that they will. There whole system is set up differently,” he said.
In the future, Reese said that he hopes that groups interested in preservation like American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC) focus their efforts on particular lines of a breed that have been well managed and selected over the years, ones that actually have value. He thinks that in the past too much effort has gone into saving every flock, regardless of the flock’s genetic quality.