Organic Farmer Plucks Her Thanksgiving Turkeys

EAST DORSET, Vt. (WOMENSENEWS)--As Thanksgiving approaches, Scout Proft is preparing to market turkeys delivered as poults to the farm in July.

She says she and her husband Matt usually kill and sell about 650 turkeys in November after they spend the summer on the Profts' mountaintop farm reaching their full weight of 16 to 18 pounds.

"We process them all in one day, and weigh and bag them the next day and put them in a walk-in cooler," she says. "We want to do it as humanely and cleanly as possible and get the very best product to our customers."

It's a communal endeavor, she says, almost like a barn-raising. "We have a lot of friends come and bring food and we put on the music. We have more people wanting to do it than we have stations. Everybody becomes an expert at their station."

The process includes killing the birds by hanging them upside down in stainless steel cones and cutting their jugular veins, then sending them through an electric scalder followed by a motorized plucker.