Through Kansas to our final destination by Dawn

I could bore you to death with landscape pics (oops, I think I just did!), but it’s just so beautiful driving across this huge country. The time flies by- looking out the window at the ever changing view, I’m never bored. I thought I might be, Kansas is a long, long state, but it’s more interesting than I imagined. We had made it quite a ways through Kansas yesterday, so just the last 1/3 or less we had to finish today- and we made it to our final destination – Boulder, CO.

Along the way, the weather looked a little scary, but it turned out to just be dark clouds – a little rain, thunder and lightning. We were heading to a heritage turkey farm just outside of Denver and I was afraid that we might be bringing the bad weather with us, but it completely missed the farm. We drove for 8 miles off of I-70, on a mostly dirt road to Dallas’ house and turkey farm. We missed the drive way the first time around, but hung a u-turn in the middle of the dirt road (there weren’t other cars around) and got back to the right spot.

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.

Dallas has to drive his birds to a processing plant 3 hours away! It is the closest USDA plant, and he needs to use this plant if he wants to sell his turkey. He taught me that during processing, plants often use a “water” chill which include chemicals, but he uses an “air” chilling process and then there is no need for chemicals. His birds also take up to 16 weeks to get to size before he processes them as opposed to the 6-8 weeks that are allow for conventional birds. He stores them in a few freezers at his place and sells directly from his house and also has a drop off point in Denver.

Dallas is expanding the area for his birds on his property, they are going to have even more room to roam around soon. He let us hang out with the two donkeys, who were fuzzy (kind of like the little geese) - we fed them some food and they let us pet them, they actually followed us around and wanted more! Dallas also caught and held this amazing rooster in the picture above. His coloring was so vibrant, and his claws looked deadly! Dallas says that roosters don't always get old enough to have the claws grow so large, but he keeps "Mr. Rooster" around - he has become more of a pet.

We wrapped up our tour and headed back to I-70. What a great pit stop on the last leg of our road trip!

We made it to our conference, LOHAS - Lifestles of Health and Sustainability, just in time to set up our booth and get ready to share Sustainable Table, The Meatrix and the Eat Well Guide with fellow conference attenders first thing in the morning.

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