Heritage Turkeys and the Road

I’m sorry that we have been neglecting our blog. I do hope that you have had time to check out pictures on our flickr.com account and read our tour journal to see that we haven’t been neglecting our jobs – we’ve just been focused on our mini road-trip, “From Bonnaroo to Boulder!”

We have made it to Boulder… driven from TN all the way to CO. It was a beautiful drive and it actually went by pretty quickly. Along the way we made as many stops as we could to visit with people who contacted us about places just off of our route. Every stop was amazing and you can read all about them in our tour journal.

I’m going to cut and paste a little bit of the most current stop we made at the largest heritage turkey farm in Colorado to visit with Dallas Gilbert:

Dallas Gilbert met us as we came up to the house and we got started on the tour of his turkey farm, called Tedach Ranch (he also has Pilgrim Geese, Khaki Campbell Ducks, Donkeys and a pet Rooster!). Dallas has owned these 70 acres since the 80s – but he hasn’t always had a farm here. Originally he was going to raise a just few chickens for himself… he wasn’t happy about where his food was coming from – not a lot of sustainable or organic options then. These few chickens soon became too many for himself, so he started sharing them with family and friends, and now he has a heritage turkey farm that is the largest in CO. Last year he had over 400 turkeys, while this year, due to a cold winter, he will only have about 300 for the season. Did I mention that in addition to all of this, Dallas has a full time job at the local post office? This man is dedicated to his turkeys!

He sells his heritage turkeys through his CSA (www.EasternPlains.com) where he also coordinates selling of local beef. The heritage turkeys are Blue Slate and they end up being 3 different colors- all blue, blue with black spots and all black. He keeps the males separate to control the blood lines of the birds. He also has geese – pilgrim geese which he sells as meat, and ducks that he has for eggs. The geese supposedly have a great personality and their babies are little fuzzy balls. The babies we saw were more like teenage size, but they were still pretty fuzzy and were completely entertained by a kiddie swimming pool.

Read the rest here.