Stonewood Farm Turkey

As the air gets crisper and the holiday season approaches, our minds turn to cozy evenings and warm gatherings with excellent food. Food is always a point of connection between people, but Thanksgiving obviously has special meaning when it comes to food and family. The Thanksgiving feast is an essential American tradition and we are taking the month of November to highlight the center of this holiday: turkey – specifically those from Stonewood Farm. Stonewood Farm turkey is something you can feel especially good about putting on your Thanksgiving table if you care about humane animal handling practices, food quality, and the local ecosystem. 

Stonewood Farm is a multi-generational family farm in Orwell, Vermont. Paul and Frances Stone purchased the farm—originally a dairy—in 1976. It remained a dairy farm for a little over a decade until the Stone family decided they would like to try something new. In 1987, the Stone family raised 300 turkeys and by good fortune they were able to pick up several accounts from a turkey farmer who was retiring. They quickly fell in love with turkey farming and in 1989 they made the decision to sell their dairy herd and build their own processing facility. The Stonewood Farm flock has now grown to over eight barns, each barn housing thousands of birds. The farm’s natural and sustainable growth clearly demonstrates that this business transition was the right decision and the Vermont community has benefited from this choice ever since. Peter and Siegrid Stone now run the farm and their son, Nathan, who we interviewed for this piece, will take over in time. 

From the beginning, the Stone family knew they wanted to farm in a way that respected the animals they were raising, whether it was cows or turkeys, and the land they were raising these animals on. Their turkeys are raised in large, open-air barns with mesh siding, rather than fully indoor battery cages with artificial lighting and restricted movement. There can be some contention when it comes to the naming conventions of poultry-raising methods, but these turkeys live in what is generally called a cage-free environment. The birds have full freedom to roam inside the large enclosure and interact with one another. 

The birds can’t be called free-range because they do not have the freedom to leave the enclosure, but there are some very clear benefits to doing things this way for both the turkeys and us, as consumers. You may be familiar with the avian flu, which has been a huge disrupter to the poultry industry in the last few years. Because the turkeys at Stonewood Farm do not have the opportunity to interact with wild birds, the farm simply has not had any issues to date with avian flu. This is actually pretty incredible given how widespread this concern has become recently, with farms having to decimate their own flocks to maintain control over the spread of the disease and the safety of the food they are producing. That’s a huge monetary loss and an unfortunately large loss of life that Stonewood Farm does not have to face because of the choice to keep their birds cage free rather than free range at this time. It’s a balanced compromise between the farmers’ investment, quality of life for the birds, and the health and safety of the consumers. Officials do still periodically come out to the farm to check the health of the flock, which was taking place during our visit, and they’ve received a clean bill of health each time. 

Stonewood Farm is able to keep full control over many other aspects of their business, to useful and sustainable effect, by operating in closed-loop systems. Since the farm handles every part of raising and processing the turkeys, transportation just entails herding the turkeys onto a transport to move from one building to another, rather than the potentially hundreds of miles they might need to travel in a larger commercial operation. This saves on costs and also increases the quality of life for the birds, as they face many fewer stressors. Care is taken even in this short transit to make the turkeys as comfortable as possible. The same bedding that is used in the barns is placed on the transport and in the entrance to the processing facility to create as familiar an environment as possible each step of the way. The farm also composts all of the birds’ old bedding and then spreads it onto their hay fields as fertilizer.

Once the turkeys are processed, any waste that is produced immediately goes into compost on the property, which is carefully tended to ensure that nothing unwanted enters any part of the surrounding ecosystem, like waterways. In operations that do not raise and process meat in the same facility, waste often sits at the processing plant waiting to be picked up by a separate waste management company. At Stonewood Farm, that waste is dealt with on the same day, with no risk of health violations. The processing facility was shiningly, stunningly clean when we toured. You would not know it was a meat processing facility, were it not for the equipment. 

Now is about the time the farm is gearing up for its main season of activity, preparing to send out thousands and thousands of turkeys for Thanksgiving. At peak production, the farm is sending out about 2,000 turkeys per day, which means about 30 people in the facility processing the birds. Each staff member has a very specific task to complete in processing, so this also means there are 20 to 30 pairs of eyes on each turkey and 20 to 30 opportunities to take a bird out of production for any reason. The inspection is incredibly thorough and the Stone family likes to say their standards are even higher than USDA standards. Nathan let us know that some of the people who have been working on the birds have been doing so since before he was born, which speaks to both the expertise of the people doing this work and the good atmosphere on the farm. 

It takes a lot of work to care for so many turkeys, but the Stone family and all of their employees are committed to doing things right. They are truly invested in the legacy of their farm and there is a reason the Brattleboro Food Co-op have been bringing us turkey from them for so long. If you are looking for the perfect bird to share with your loved ones this Thanksgiving, Stonewood Farm turkey is it!

Written by Sarah Galgano