Talking Turkeys

Every year in the middle of July, second-generation farmer Richie King drives down to New Jersey to pick up crates of turkeys. Eight hundred baby turkeys.

Just a day old, the cargo of tiny birds “never shuts up” the whole way back, said Mr. King. When they arrive at North Sea Farms, he splits them up into two barns and keeps the chicks in a warm 95 degrees. The next two weeks are critical, as the birds are most prone to disease then. Slowly, Mr. King gets them used to the outside, where they love the sun.

And from there, it is fairly smooth sailing for the turkeys until the dreaded end of November when the birds are readied for the holidays. It is a hectic week on the farm, with four helpers processing hundreds of birds. Almost synonymous with Thanksgiving, North Sea Farms is one of the few farms on the East End that raise turkeys and chickens.

“Sometimes you just do what you do well,” said Mr. King, who runs the farm with his wife, Robin. The family branched out into turkeys in the late 1990s after more than three decades of raising chickens. Over the years, they have also tried raising Muscovy ducks, but they felt that it was better to stick to what they know.

The summer is the busiest season for the farm, but the holiday push accounts for a significant amount of their business.

“You get down to this point and you’re worried, but then it’s the last few weeks and they all sell,” Mr. King said of the first few weeks in November. This year he is happy with the number of birds that made it until November, as he lost around 20, a handful of which drowned themselves.

“These birds never saw rain,” said Mr. King, who described how the birds, shocked after a dry summer, stared up into the storm, which caused some of them to drown. He had heard of that happening, but had never seen it before. With a laugh, he admitted that turkeys are not the smartest animals.

“If I sell 200 chickens a week in the summer, I’m lucky to sell 50 now,” Mr. King said. However, the farmer isn’t worried. In the past 10 years, he said, he’s witnessed a big interest in local food, and he counts private chefs as some of his best customers.

“I don’t think people trust big companies,” said Mr. King. “People don’t know where their food is coming from.”

Nestled next to Noyac Road, North Sea Farms owns and operates just 10 acres of land, but from the array of products they sell—chickens, homemade sausages, eggs, specialty vegetables, flowers, pumpkins—one wouldn’t know it. The secret is in their motto.

“It’s hard to have land. A lot of the rented land is now houses,” said Mr. King. “That is why we are ‘a little bit of everything.’”

The farm was never large enough to make a profit wholesaling potatoes. So it diversified, raising dairy cows, chickens and vegetables until 1975, when they opted out of dairy thanks to increased USDA regulations that affected many South Fork dairy farmers’ bottom lines.

“If we were allowed raw milk and cheese, who knows what would have happened,” said Mr. King.

In addition to its roadside farm stand, North Sea Farms’ eggs are available at Catena’s Market, Tim’s Market and Sean’s Deli, all located in Southampton.

Although his bread and butter—raising chickens and turkeys—won’t change anytime soon, Mr. King is experimenting with a few new crops, including kalettes, a kale-like vegetable that grows like a brussels sprout.

The chickens and turkeys are given hormone-free, corn-based feed and as many vegetables as possible. “They like it, it is a good food source” Mr. King said.

Although in general the two types of birds tend to enjoy similar foods, the turkeys were recently afraid of an oversized pumpkin, while the chickens devoured it immediately.

“They couldn’t believe this big thing was in their yard,” Mr. King said. The pumpkin was supposed to be a “guess the weight” pumpkin, but when its bottom fell through, Mr. King tried to feed it to the turkeys. Some of the birds began to eat the squash, but only after a few days of eyeing it suspiciously.