Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 22, 1995 TAG: 9511220076
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: DAYTON LENGTH: Medium
Turkey Day in this tiny Shenandoah Valley town comes a little early. It's been going on all week.
Truck after 18-wheel truck has been rolling in from farms all over the valley this month, laden with squawking, white-feathered turkeys. The birds' destination: dinner tables from Richmond to Maine, with a two-hour stop at the world's largest turkey processing plant to slip out of feathers and into a shrink-wrapped package.
The week before Thanksgiving is crunch time at the sprawling facility, where 1,600 employees working two shifts scoop out innards, scrub the sides and tie the legs of about 6,000 gobblers an hour.
``It doesn't get any busier than this,'' said the plant's general manager, Ben Pritchard, as he surveyed a steady stream of oblong, packaged turkeys coming down a conveyor belt.
Owned and operated by Rocco Enterprises Inc., based in nearby Harrisonburg, the plant shipped 300,000 turkeys Thursday and Friday. It has packed 55,000 turkeys a day in three weeks, compared with its normal daily production of 8,000.
Although Thanksgiving always has been big business for the turkey industry, it has been an especially hectic period in recent years because of an increased demand for holiday turkeys that aren't frozen, industry officials say. Unlike their colder counterparts, such ``fresh'' turkeys can't be produced and stockpiled year-round.
The need for speed has led to an elaborate, labor-intensive production process. Workers take the feisty birds out of large holding pens and hang them by their legs on an automated production line.
``It's one of the hardest jobs in the plant because some of those guys are real heavy,'' said Harold Roller, a Virginia Cooperative Extension Service agent. ``It's tough work.''
Rocco's automated slaughtering facilities are closed to visitors, and company officials would not say how the birds are killed. Roller, who has seen the operation, said the turkeys are quickly beheaded by a machine. After their blood drains out, they are dipped in hot water, and fingerlike rubber devices pull the feathers off, he said.
Then, in a process that resembles a car wash and is open to observers, workers vacuum the insides, and machines dip the turkeys into cleaning and rinsing solutions. Later, the legs are tied and the birds are chilled in vats of 34-degree water before they are hand-stuffed into plastic packages.
Although the factory uses conveyor belts and computerized equipment, much of the work must be done by hand because of variations in the size of turkeys; hens can be as small as 12 pounds, while males, or toms, can reach 30 pounds.
``They're just like humans,'' said Rocco President Steven Willardsen. ``Some can be twice as big as others.''
The packaged turkeys are taken to a warehouse the size of four football fields that can hold more than 200,000 chilled birds, said Rocco spokeswoman Patricia May. Rocco sells its turkeys under the Shady Brook Farms label.
Delivery trucks keep the packages at a temperature just above freezing - warm enough so that the birds can be classified as fresh but cold enough to ensure a shelf life of three to four weeks, Rocco officials said. Each box has a temperature gauge.
As busy as Thanksgiving is, it's Americans' growing year-round appetite for the low-fat meat that has fueled the rapid growth of the industry. Since 1960, annual turkey consumption in the United States has climbed from 6.3 pounds to 18.3 pounds a person.
by CNB