It's August. Time to Talk Turkey.

Believe it or not, if you want a locally raised turkey for Thanksgiving, now's the time to order. Kim Denney of Chestnut Farms just sent out the following email to her meatshare members:

We raise turkeys once a year - for Thanksgiving for our CSA members. The turkeys are raised in fresh air and sunshine from birth to plate. Over the years we have become more and more adept at predator control and use an automatic light and radio to keep foxes, coyotes and fisher cats away. We have also learned to have a smaller, but still comfortable dance floor. Last year our turkeys danced across nearly five acres of pasture. This year we will offer them a space of about 1 acre and move them more frequently. We have also planted field peas in an experiment of turkey self-feeding. The peas are higher in protein than grass so we shall see if the grain consumption declines as a result.

The turkeys go for $75/bird, regardless of size, which I thought was interesting, and they're only available to CSA members. However, there are lots of other places around Boston that offer locally raised turkeys. There's a good list available at http://www.mass.gov/agr/massgrown/turkey.htm. A slightly better resource for free-range, organic, heritage birds can be found in Yankee Magazine. And Local harvest has a good search engine that yielded these results.

Here's a little more information on some of the farms.

• Bob's Turkey Farm in Lancaster lists having Broad Breasted White turkeys, famously too stupid to reproduce. The web site also implies that they are fed antibiotics for the first four weeks.
  
• Stillman's Farm in Lunenberg practices conscientious farming and raises free-range birds. They offer broad-breasted white turkeys at $65 for a 10-15 lb. bird and $80 for a 16-22 lb. bird. They also offer a few, small heritage breed turkeys: $100 for a 6-15 lb. bird. They have convenient pickup locations throughout Boston and Cambridge.
• K&M Farm in North Andover has much better prices for organic, heritage birds: 10-12 lbs $65.00 14-16 lbs $75.00 18-22 lbs $110.00. This farm also offers Indian game bird, cornish hens, and rabbits, which, I think, merits a visit sometime soon.
• Stone Pony Farm in Westford offers a small number of organic, free range, heritage turkeys.
• Many Hands Organic Farm in Barre raises broad breasted whites organically and sells them for $4.50/lb. They're quite far from Boston, though, and do not deliver to the Boston area.
• Green Meadows Farm in Hamilton raises free-range, organically fed Bourbon Red turkeys. No word on how much they cost or how to order them.
  

If you don't have a Chestnut Farms meatshare, it looks like Stillman's Farm and K&M Farm are your best bets. If you can't drive up to North Andover, Stillman's is the place to order your bird.