THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601100066
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: MY JOB
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
DON'T TALK turkey to R. David Flanagan. Not right now, anyway. It'd make him sad.
Flanagan grows sweet potatoes, corn, wheat and soybeans. His Virginia Beach place is down on Princess Anne Road a little past Pungo. Six months out of the year, as his father and grandfather did, he also raises turkeys. During the winter holiday season Flanagan's fresh birds show up on hundreds of local dining room tables, baked a tender, tasty brown, nestled in stuffing and cranberries.
But now, the gobblers are gone. The roast beasts have settled around the waists of Flanagan's customers. And like each January for the past 40, nothing is left in Flanagan's turkey pen but a handful of feathers and mud.
``Nothing to see out here,'' he says wistfully, his back to the wind, his hands jammed deep in his jumpsuit pockets, his eye on thousands of turkey tracks frozen in the cold dirt. Nothing to hear, either, except the wind in the trees and the rush of an occasional car passing on the road.
Sure, raising poultry to perfect plumpness is a headache. Sure, turkey profits keep son Roy and daughter Amy at Ferrum and Longwood Colleges.
But if truth be told, Flanagan misses his birds. Between now and June, when the next truckload of poults arrives, he'll wake up at night to an owl's hoot and think he hears them, all 400 suddenly scared into flight.
``Yeah, I miss 'em,'' he says wistfully and then recalls the bother of them, fretting over extreme heat and cold, having to come out of his fields twice a day to feed them, ``But it's a good miss.''
The last turkey left, headless, featherless and ready for the oven, two days before Christmas. It's a good feeling to see the last one go, because when Flanagan loses his grip on his turkeys, they lose theirs on him.
From the first of June until Dec. 23, when the last bird is killed, plucked and sold, Flanagan, 58, and his wife, Susan, don't wander far from the farm.
``We don't go many places,'' he says. With 400 birds headed for sale at $25, $30 each, he's got a lot of drumsticks to keep track of.
Turkeys are a headache to feed, heat robs their appetite, and wet weather can bother them.
``They can be a problem. They get out, fly over the fence or something like that, you can have disease wipe the whole works out. Once they get big, for every one that dies, that's $25 to $35 out of your pocket,'' he says. And he hates the job of killing them.
``When we're killing - about two days for Christmas - it's a terrible job. I don't like to kill 'em, but it's a part of life,'' he says. And, really, during that six months they have together, Flanagan feels fatherly toward his flock. There's just something about turkeys that touches a soft spot in him. It starts the day after they hatch when he drives down to North Carolina to pick them up. He brings the fluffy white hatchlings home to Pungo and serves them a first meal of poultry feed with chopped-up hard-boiled eggs sprinkled on top.
``They love those eggs,'' he says, shaking his head. They grow up in a pen shaded by a dropping umbrella tree and a cedar almost 50 feet tall. Over the first few months they plump up on turkey feed and Flanagan's own corn and get to feeling vulnerable long before the roasting pans come out of the cupboards.
``Owls, animals, anything can shake 'em up,'' Flanagan says. ``They don't like birds, fish hawks, buzzards. Anything like that goes over, they don't like it.''
If a hawk swoops overhead, the turkeys will huddle up in a bunch. If a piece of paper or plastic blows past, they take off running, necks stretched and wings flapping like crazy. Even a gust of wind makes them skittish.
Meaty in the breast and thighs, they don't get very far.
``They can fly a little ways when the wind's blowing,'' Flanagan says.
Just before Thanksgiving, the birds weigh about 20 pounds each and are ready for the table. That's when Flanagan says ``it gets a little wild'' on the farm.
Working from a standing list of regular customers, about three dozen workers hand-pluck, pick pin feathers and dress the birds after they're killed. Then, on one pickup day, dozens of cars pull off the road and into Flanagan's driveway, stopping just long enough to toss a turkey into the trunk, pay and pull back onto the road.
``One company gets 20, 25 birds. We've got a judge who gets 10 or 15 and we load his Cadillac up,'' he says.
After Thanksgiving the rest of the flock gains weight a little more slowly, about a pound a week. That's partly because turkeys stop eating in cold weather. But Flanagan has another theory.
``I think they realize something's going to happen. All their buddies are gone,'' he says.
Two days before Christmas, everybody's worries are over. The last batch of turkeys is killed and sold and Flanagan puts a few in the freezer for his family. Cooked and carved, the white meat has his name on it.
``If I had more land, I wouldn't have 'em,'' he says. ``But I'm going to keep doing it for a while.''
Right now, it's a long way until June. And even though he sometimes thinks he hears them in his sleep, not having turkeys means feeling free as a bird. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
During that six months they have together, Flanagan feels fatherly
towards his flock. There's just something about turkeys that touches
a soft spot in him.
by CNB