The Watts Family Farm

          

                                The Watts family's classic red barn

As we headed into the holiday season it made sense to find a local New England family turkey farm to add to the notches on our Guerilla Grilling belt, but it wasn’t as easy as we had anticipated. It seems not many people want to farm turkeys in Massachusetts anymore and we were curious to find out why. We finally found The Watts Family Farm in Foresdale near Sandwich on the Cape. It’s owned and farmed by Peter Watts, his two sons Ajay and Andrew and Ajay’s wife Laura and their two kids Isabella and Evan. We arranged a GG visit for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and were hosted by Ajay, the eldest son who is clearly in charge. Peter, wise elder that he is, had left in his RV the day before on his annual journey to sunny Florida.

      

                           Ajay, Isabella, Evan and Laura Watts

We had quintessential Cape Cod weather for our trip to the farm. As we climbed into our cars at 8 in the morning in Cambridge, we congratulated ourselves on choosing a day with clear sunny skies and 50ish degree temperature. We were traveling against rush hour and people hadn’t yet headed over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house so traffic was light. Without warning a huge black cloud moved in from the west as we approached the turn off for The Watts Family Farm.

        

                       Hail on Melanie's gloves when we first arrived

The skies opened up with sleet and rain as we unloaded Nuno’s truck. We were cold and wet and wanted to keep moving so we ditched Nuno and followed Ajay toward the barns to learn about turkey farming. Anyway, we knew Nuno wanted to set up the cooking station by himself and was happy to see us go. The sleet and rain had turned to hail as we slogged through the muddy trenches in the road followed by 8 adorable free range pigs.

                     

                  

                                       Very happy pigs in mud

The barn and pen where Amanda and I had met 250 Broad Breasted Giant White turkeys just 7 days before was eerily empty as they had been killed on Saturday and sold on Monday. With pride, patience and a respect for the birds, Ajay described the life of a Watts turkey to the group. Although he clearly cared about the health, safety and quality of the birds, he said when the time came, he was happy to see them go.

 

          

            The turkey's just days before their collective march of death

The turkeys come to the Watts’ when they are 2 weeks old and established from Rainbow Farm in Rehoboth Massachusetts. Ajay and his father used to take them younger, but found that the first week of life is critical and they’re better off allowing natural selection to take place before they arrive at Watts. They take 250 of them and focus on making sure they have enough water for the first 3 days. Then they grow them for 21 weeks.

The Watts take very good care of their birds. They feed on an all natural soybean, corn and wheat-based grain treated with just a small amount of necessary antibiotic to prevent the dreaded Blackhead disease from infecting the birds. The birds are never artificially fattened so their body weight may range from 15 to 30 pounds at the end of their lives. They range free during the day on what begins as a patch of grass in the spring, but by November it has been picked clean. At night they’re herded back into the barn, safe from raccoons and other predators, where they peck from groovy orange hanging feed pendants. Ajay pointed out the fine mesh wire running 2 feet up from the ground at the base of the fence around their pen. It’s necessary for the prevention of a gruesome raccoon trick. If they can reach a paw through a chicken wire fence, a raccoon will grab a turkey and rip off its head, leaving the body behind.

 

            

      Turkey processing tools like a plucker and gizzard peeler are hard to find

                      The Watt's bought theirs from a farm in Michigan

With this image in our heads, we were ready for anything and gathered inside the processing plant to hear how the birds get from barn to table. Although there were no birds left to see processed, Ajay’s description was accurate and thorough enough to create a vivid picture. In the first step, the birds receive a very low voltage shock (not more than what you'd get from an electric fence) in the neck to slow them down. Next, they’re turned upside down--head sticking out of the bottom of a cone over a stainless steel trough. With a swift cut the necks are slit and the birds are bled for 1 ½ minutes. Without the shock, the birds would be flailing around and the bleeding could take significantly longer—not what anyone wants. Once drained of blood, they get a quick 45 second scalding dunk in a hot water bath and are then swiftly transferred to the plucker, a drum with many rubber fingers, for another 45 seconds. Next they’re ready to be evisorated and beheaded, and finally they’re plunged into an ice bath to bring their temperature down quickly. Once chilled for 5 hours, they’re dried and bagged and ready for the oven.

“These are,” Ajay reported, “delicious moist birds with lots of white meat…and you can’t dry them out”.

 

         

                                       Nuno enjoying the juice bird

Peter Watts and his family have been farming and selling turkeys since he bought the property 20 years ago. Their turkey seeking following shows up at 6:30 am the Monday before Thanksgiving, and waits in the cold, clutching steaming cups of coffee, until the gate opens at 8:00. It’s such a seller’s market that the Watts don’t take orders, don’t guarantee size, and sell out of their 250 birds by noon. It wasn’t always this way. At the height of their turkey farming, they grew over 1000 birds at both Thanksgiving and Christmas, but with the rise in labor costs and the increase in the cost of grain in recent years, the Watts found that turkeys just don’t pay anymore. So now the birds they do grow are a labor of love for their community of loyal customers. These happy free-range farm raised turkeys take 21 weeks to grow, and at $3.09 a pound dressed, don’t turn a profit.

 

        

                   The skys cleared up over the Watt's composting site

What does turn a profit in 21 weeks is compost. Someone whispered into Mr. Watt’s ear in the early ‘90’s, that there was a market for dirt. After much trial and error and in collaboration with Stop and Shop and local horse farmers who pay to dump their manure with the Watts, the family developed a system for turning Cape Cod Potato Chips, cranberries, leaves, wood chips and bruised produce from local supermarkets into organic compost used by gardeners, landscapers and garden centers around the Cape. It’s a simple, process, one that is local, sustainable and organic and the only carbon footprint left is from the really cool big bold earth moving machines used to turn, strain and transport the dirt. They mix 3 parts manure to 1 part vegetable waste, keep it between 150 and 180 degrees, and turn it as often as they can when the wind blows north, (so as not to offend the neighbors south of them) for 6 months. It’s then strained of stones, sticks, large shells, baseballs, plastic rope etc resulting in 1500 cubic yards of clean smelling deep dark black dirt each year.

 

         

                  Compost is the Watt's pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

We had heard about the composting and were eager to take a look. As we stepped out of the processing plant, the sun was out, the hail had stopped and a rainbow swept across the clouds. It definitely had been a day of perfect Cape Cod weather…one of everything. We took a quick tour of the compost business, found a baseball, played around on the equipment, and then headed to the grills followed by our cute piglet friends to see what Nuno was up to. We were happy to know that the pigs, once grown, were sent out to auction and not slaughtered on the farm so we didn’t have to hear details about how they were killed.

 

        

                                   Playing on "big kid" toys

Since roasting a whole bird would have taken too long, he broke it down into legs and breast and prepared it in two different ways. The legs, with herbs under the skin, were deep frying in a pot over a propane stove under Nuno’s watchful eye. We nibbled on olives and antipasti with the Watts family and prepared the rest of the meal. As I was slicing the breast into cutlets to be wrapped in pancetta, one of the pigs came by, snagged our bacon and made a run for it. It caused a bit of a raucous as Melanie and Peter chased the pigs and 2 big beautiful lunky brown labs chased them. No luck… but there was some justice in a pig eating stolen pork goods.

 

         

              There was something just in knowing the pig had stolen the bacon

I topped the thick turkey slices with sage, smeared them with some of my fig-ginger jam and improvised with prosciutto for the pancetta. Onto the grill they went with whole red bliss potatoes and dumpling squash. Nuno had baked an entire apple pie over embers. We’d also brought garlicky greens, gravy and pomegranate seeds for eye appeal and a little acidic crunch to round out the dinner. We gathered around the table, the Watts family and the Rialto rag tag Guerilla Grillers, and had a feast.

 

        

  Nuno traced the Watt's hands to make the pastry turkeys for the top of the pie

The mission of our Guerrilla Grilling trips is to see, smell, touch and taste the food we eat at the source, to get to know the stewards who grow our food, to have a ton of fun and to learn some new stuff. Success!

 

                

               All the fixin's for a Thanksgiving feast, Guerrilla Grilling style

P.S. FUN FACT: the standard American Thanksgiving turkey is a selectively bred Broad Breasted Giant White. They can’t naturally reproduce because of the enormous size of their breast and their skinny weak legs. We worried they might be sexually frustrated.