Originally published 11/8/24 by WTTW Chicago PBS
The majority of Mint Creek's turkeys are a heritage Black Spanish breed that is descended from birds raised in what is now central Mexico, where turkeys were likely first domesticated. Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW
What the turkey on your Thanksgiving table ate matters. Harry Carr knows this from experience. The turkeys he raises at Mint Creek Farm some 80 miles southwest of Chicago outside Cabery, Illinois, subsist on a grazing diet – like his sheep, goats, and cattle. Their diet is also supplemented with grain and protein – like his goats, pigs, and chickens. Whereas the protein they eat today comes in the form of soaked and cooked legumes such as soybeans and black beans from nearby organic farms like Janie’s Farm or Ackerman Certified Organic Farm, the turkeys used to get protein from fish meal. While the birds who preferred grain or balanced their intake of the various foods were fine, the turkeys who gobbled up a lot of the fish meal had a slight marine tang when eaten.
Now that they’re no onger pescatarians, that’s not a problem – and Mint Creek’s turkeys are coveted for Thanksgiving feasts. “People every year freak out about it because of how good these turkeys are and how different they are,” says Pete Ternes, the co-owner of Middle Brow, a Chicago brewery, winery, and pizzeria that serves as a pick-up point for Mint Creek turkeys. Both Middle Brow and Ternes’ father’s company buy Mint Creek turkeys for some of their staff every year, Ternes says. “Everyone across the board” – from “new immigrant families and South Side Irish” at his dad’s company to “Gen X hipsters and 22-year-old Zoomer college kids” at Middle Brow – “is like, ‘Holy f-----g s--t!’” – a powerful endorsement for the birds.
Mint Creek raised around a thousand turkeys this year, the majority of which are a heritage Black Spanish breed that is descended from birds raised by the Aztecs in what is now central Mexico, where turkeys were likely first domesticated. Years ago, Carr tried to convince customers to buy legs of lamb as the centerpiece for their Thanksgiving table, but found it a hard sell.
“Everybody wanted turkeys!” he says ruefully – so he began raising the birds. They’re available to pre-order by breed and size, and can be picked up frozen or fresh in the days before Thanksgiving throughout Chicago and the suburbs. (Mint Creek also runs a community-supported agriculture subscription, is at some farmers markets in the Chicago area, and offers delivery of its meat and eggs.)
It’s not just smaller animals like turkeys that take on the characteristics of their diet. Grass-fed cattle such as the ones at Mint Creek produce leaner beef with a special flavor; Harry and his daughter Raya, who grew up on and still helps out with the farm, sometimes hear from South American customers that Mint Creek’s beef is the only kind they’ve found here that reminds them of the prized grass-fed beef of their homelands.
“Their approach leads to I’d say the best meat in four states that we source meat from,” Ternes says. “Given Harry and the whole Carr family’s philosophy for their animals, it’s almost as if they’re treating them like humans, and that kind of stood out to us.”
And flavor is not the only benefit of livestock that are raised as they are at Mint Creek, where everything but the chickens and some of the pigs are regularly moved over small plots of land in a system known as rotational grazing. This mode of agriculture is also good for the planet.
Rotational Grazing and Soil Health
Driving through the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin can be shocking for Midwesterners from further east or south: It’s strikingly hilly. Unlike in the flat expanse of corn and soybean fields surrounding a place like Mint Creek Farm, there are craggy ridges, high roads, and steep valleys; glaciers didn’t flatten the topography during the last ice age. While the landscape makes it difficult to plant long rows of crops, it’s conducive for a prominent dairy industry.
When a heavy storm dumps rain on the region, it can wash roads down those hillsides, forcing dairies to reroute their milk trucks down other, distant rural roads. “We’ve had some years when we’ve had such severe storms that I can look left and right and see ‘Road closed.’ ‘Road closed.’ ‘Road closed,’” says Margaret Krome, whose family has a cabin in the area. “Why? Because the land was not covered,” she explains. “There is no soil health.”
Krome is the policy director at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in East Troy, Wisconsin. Harry Carr and his wife Gwen took part in the Institute’s now-discontinued “take your farm to school program” early in their mid-life career switch to farming, and continue to maintain its focus on healthy ecosystems at Mint Creek. “Animals are just a really good way to bring the land back and improve the fertility,” Carr says. In other words, to improve the health of the soil.
This is important not just to protect places like the Driftless Area from the erosion that can occur during bad storms, which are projected to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change. Healthy soil doesn’t just prevent wash-outs when there is too much rain; it also holds water when there is too little, as in a drought like the one Mint Creek has been experiencing for the past several years. Healthier soil is more fertile and cycles nutrients through a system, in turn producing crops with higher nutrient value. It’s also better at holding nitrogen and phosphorous, which is present in many fertilizers, preventing those elements from leaching into water supplies and causing toxic algae blooms and dead zones with little aquatic life.
Rotational grazing such as that practiced at Mint Creek can improve soil health and restore land that has been denuded by years of aggressive plowing, monoculture crops that remove nutrients without restoring them, and chemical spraying. Evidence of such degradation is physically obvious on the fence line of one of Mint Creek’s two farm plots: the land dips some two feet due to decades of unmitigated soil erosion. The plot, which the Carrs bought in 2003, was previously conventionally farmed cropland – but it was performing badly and losing money. “It was just really abused,” Carr says. “You’re not going to see much topsoil” if you dig down into the land, he adds. “It was gone. Whatever’s there we’ve added.”
There are four principles of soil health, and rotational grazing can help with all of them. One is to maximize biodiversity. A farm like Mint Creek already has biodiversity: it’s full of a variety of grasses, legumes like clover, and other plants. The Carrs seeded their newer plot of land with alfalfa and clover when they first bought it, but they don’t plant much anymore. “Basically, the method of whatever comes up actually does work,” Carr says, particularly because the act of animals eating, digesting, and expelling their favorite plants automatically re-seeds those plants. The livestock “eat whatever comes up. We just keep the animals moving, [and] they provide the fertility,” Carr says.
Furthermore, livestock “carry microorganisms in the guts, and they take nutrients from feed and bring it back down into the soil,” Krome explains.
As Mint Creek’s various species rotate over the pasture, they each eat different plants, and then move on to allow those plants to recover. Conventional grazing practice leaves a single species free to roam over a large pasture, leading the animals to eat the most nutritional plants, which allows less beneficial plants to flourish in their place. A farmer therefore has to continually seed new forage and potentially spray against plants they don’t want. A native Illinois plant like ragweed is generally considered undesirable, since cows and sheep don’t like it. But it’s dealt with at Mint Creek by the goats, who love to eat it and benefit from the high protein content of its seeds. (Not having to re-seed land also saves money on a seed bill or any spray treatments crops might require.)
“The reason the plains were so fertile is because the buffalo were grazing the grass,” Carr says. “Even if we weren’t eating [livestock], they provide a vital metabolic function in the earth for the regenerative cycle of the planet.” While it is true that plant-based diets in humans are less hard on the environment in general, a rotational grazing system can reduce the carbon footprint of meat and benefit the environment. Krome cites long-term research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggesting that “well-managed grass-based systems, that is to say, grazing systems, can sequester carbon.”
As Carr puts it, livestock “get a bad rap. It’s not the cow, it’s the how. If you raise them in a feedlot, they’re hard on the climate and the environment. But if you keep moving them around like we’re doing, they’re actually replicating what the buffalo did.”
Another principle of soil health is to minimize disturbance, which also helps diverse plants flourish. Carr doesn’t have to plow in order to re-seed or plant new crops, while the continual rotation of the animals over small plots of land prevents the soil from being torn up by them.
The final two principles of soil health are to maximize soil cover – Mint Creek’s pasture is never completely devoid of plants because the livestock are rotated – and maximize living roots, accomplished by a diversity of plants and continual maintenance of them via grazing.
Rotational grazing “rings every bell” for soil health, Krome says, providing a model for regenerative agriculture. “I think any land in the Midwest that is not performing well, [through] applying this model would be able to relatively quickly get renewed,” says Carr. He notes the number of farms near Mint Creek taking part in the United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program, which provides rental payments to farmers to prevent erosion by planting cover crops on land instead of using it for production. Carr is also restoring the soil, but still producing from his land.
“We’re getting a lot off this land compared to other models,” he says – including plenty of turkeys.
Stubborn, Unruly Turkeys
Turkeys might remind you of dinosaurs, with their scaled legs and three-pointed clawed feet, their pebbled heads and thick spray of bone-like feather shafts. Or maybe they look like Renaissance aristocrats decked out in finery: puffed-up presentation, vivid red and blue coloring, extravagant snoods (the name for not just their dangling wattle but also a historic head-covering), shimmery accents speckling their feathers like jewelry. They chatter in near-unison, thrusting their vibrating heads forward to gobble together like a crowd cheering at a soccer game. And, like some of the more boisterous members of such a game’s audience, they sometimes get into fights with each other, bumping into an antagonist with a proud chest, holding their head high on their long neck, and hopping off the ground to flutter their wings with bluster. Most have broken tail feathers, like flaunted battle scars.“I don’t exactly speak fluent turkey,” Carr says, raising his voice to be heard over the waves of jabbering as a turkey pecks at the license plate of one of the battered SUVs used to get around the farm at Mint Creek. But he does point out that their heads get bluer when they’re excited, while his daughter Raya warns that they make a beeping “radar” sound when they’re getting aggressive – a common occurrence this year.“I’ve never run away from turkeys as many times as this year,” she says with an embarrassed laugh. “They were really following me around and intimidating me and displaying and pecking my boots.”
On a visit to Mint Creek in October, the turkeys are less aggressive than stubborn. The sun had set the previous day before the turkeys had been fully moved to a new paddock, so the lightweight electrified fencing used to rotate all of Mint Creek’s animals across the land hadn’t entirely cordoned them off. As Raya and Harry try to move them into the paddock and finish setting up the fence, the birds refuse to cooperate, despite light shoves from behind. They’d rather loiter around the car like unruly hooligans. Even when they do move as a whole flock, it’s not quite in the direction the Carrs want. Loba, the Great Pyrenees rescue dog that lives with the turkeys to protect them from coyotes in the night, also isn’t helping: She plops down to scratch her ear right in the gap in the fencing through which Raya is driving the turkeys.
The lawlessness of the turkeys might have contributed to the early departure of a farmhand from Mint Creek, Raya says with resignation. “I don’t like to cast doubt on animal intelligence,” she says, “but they will eat something that’s a little hot for them without thinking about it.” Which means the workers at Mint Creek have to be sure the beans they have cooked over an open fire in a big black cauldron after soaking them overnight are cool enough when they bring them to the turkeys. (They’ll also accidentally drown if their watering tubs are filled too high, and the chickens are even worse – although Raya opines that the heritage breeds of both poultry seem to have a bit more sense.)
The turkeys typically follow the sheep across Mint Creek’s land, although they stay in a paddock for about a week at a time, whereas the sheep move almost every day. “With rotational grazing, you’re always trying to let the different groups graze symbiotically,” Raya says. The turkeys’ waste has more nitrogen in it, and they eat bugs and even parasites that might afflict the larger animals. It’s another benefit of rotational grazing, particularly with multiple species: there’s less opportunity for disease.
“With rotational grazing, you’re always trying to let the different groups graze symbiotically,” says Raya Carr. Poultry eat insects and parasites that could afflict other animals. Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW
“If you ask managed grazing farmers why they graze, a very common early message will be, ‘It saves me so much money on my vet bills,’” says Krome. Harry has learned enough over the years that he rarely has to call out a veterinarian for issues, and Mint Creek uses various natural medicines as well, such as garlic as a dewormer.
Unlike the sheep, cattle, or goats, the turkeys get to travel with some equipment. A few roosts – simple triangles on wheels – move with them to offer shelter at night, as does a hopper filled with grain to supplement the grazing and cooked beans. The turkeys (and other Mint Creek animals) also eat okara, fibrous scraps that are a byproduct of processing soybeans into tofu. Jenny Yang of Phoenix Bean in Chicago sends truckloads of okara to Mint Creek, turning something that otherwise would be thrown out into nutritional animal feed. Yang gets many of her soybeans from nearby Janie’s Farm, but can’t use split ones – so Mint Creek takes those as feed, as well as unusable grain left over from making flour at Janie’s Mill.
When Harry collects the turkeys for “harvesting” – a gentler, euphemistic term for slaughter – he wakes up at 3:00 am and picks the birds up one by one to pack them into a truck. He needs to be on the road early to the two-hour-distant meat locker that kills and processes them before heading up to Chicago with them.
The birds can weigh 40 or more pounds, and Harry is a wiry, lean man. By the end of the collection he’s soaked in sweat. “And they flap their wings; you feel like you’ve been through World War III,” he says with a chuckle.
This year the turkeys are especially large, since they were hatched slightly earlier, in April – an over-correction from last year, when they were on the small side. If you’re excited about a big bird, Harry warns that it might not fit in your oven – it might be worth trying an alternative method of cooking such as on the grill or smoker.
Despite how exasperating the turkeys are, the Carrs seem relaxed, just as they do when the whole flock of sheep escapes from a paddock by way of a leaning section of fencing. Unlike the turkeys, the sheep are easy to herd – especially if the farmhand who recently sheared them walks behind them. They’re still wary of him. But in the moments after an escape, the sheep are still excitable, so they’re left to cool off for a while.
After finally corralling the turkeys, the Carrs return to their vehicles to drive out of the paddock – but the turkeys refuse to let them. It takes repeated honking and a slow roll forward to break free. Finished with the turkeys, the Carrs head off to put the sheep back in their paddock and water them.
That night, particularly loud coyote howls echo across the windy plain. Raya sets off in the empty darkness to check on the animals. Only one turkey has escaped its paddock and the safe patrol of Loba. Raya picks it up and places it back in the enclosure, then drives back home to leave the animals to be animals.
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