Sanbornton farm is a go to place for people who want the freshest of Thanksgiving turkeys

SANBORNTON — Monique Labrecque has been raising turkeys for 21 years at Hermit Brook Farm and says that the popular perception of turkeys as less than brainy can be overstated.

"Turkeys aren’t dumb. People who raise them are,’’ she says with a laugh as she surveys the 300 turkeys she’s raised this summer, good-sized birds ranging from 15 to 30 pounds which will soon be on their way to homes around the state where they’ll be the centerpiece of the traditional Thanksgiving feast.

Labrecque has a legion of loyal customers who wouldn’t have anything but a New Hampshire raised fresh turkey for their holiday meal and she will be sending some of the dressed birds as far away as Oregon and Ohio.

She’s even shipped them to the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., where they’ve been enjoyed by members of the diplomatic corps from around the world.

Labrecque says that there still are a lot of people willing to pay as much as much $4 a pound for the fresh turkeys and prides herself on growing them naturally, with no hormones or antibiotics. Her white turkeys are pasture raised and fed high protein grains which produce juicy birds with a large breast.

"I started out raising them just for myself but people started asking for them and I raised 12-15 birds a year for a while. Word started to spread and I just kept growing more of them,’’ says Labrecque, who at one time raised as many as 500 a year, making her one of the largest fresh turkey growers in the state.

She says that in past years she enjoyed brisk sales to many local businesses who would buy her turkeys as a holiday gift for their employees.

"They’ve stopped doing that because they can’t afford it in this economy. One of my best customers closed down completely two years ago,’’ says Labrecque.

Raising so many turkeys is time consuming and costly she says as the maturing flock of birds now eat 200 to 250 pounds of grain every day. Every other day the enclosure where they gather to feed has to have a fresh layer of pine shavings.

And there’s always the threat of predators. She recently lost two of her turkeys to either coyotes or fisher cats.

Labrecque says that while she likes the idea of raising heritage turkeys, like Narragansetts, it’s not economically viable on a large scale because the birds grow so slowly and that’s why she sticks with her common white breed, which mature more rapidly.

In the past she’s also raised as many as 4,000 free range chickens in a year, but in recent years dropped that down to about 1,000. This year she raised only 500.

"I guess I was kind of a pioneer in raising free range poultry. A lot of people are doing that these days,’’ she says.

She and her partner Tim Dow also raise beef cattle and pigs for their own use and are now raising goats for commercial meat sales. They also sell pine shavings made with pulp grade logs from Dow’s logging operations as well as 130 cords of firewood a year. And she supplements their farm income by teaching Aikido at a Tilton martial arts center.

Labrecque and Dow now have a herd of 31 Boer goats with the young males being sold for meat after they’ve five to six months old.

"Ideally we’ll be raising three groups for market every two years,’’ says Labrecque, who notes that while goat meat is not a staple of the American diet it is actually the most eaten meat in the world.

This year’s crop of turkeys will be harvested starting the Friday before Thanksgiving, a labor intensive process in which the couple will be joined by her daughter and hopefully her son, a recent engineering graduate, as well as friends and neighbors.

The turkeys are put down with an electrical shock before they enter the processing center, where they’re bathed in 165 degree water, plucked by a mechanical device and then chilled in ice-filled vats before being wrapped and stored in a walk-in cooler.

She says that watching the process isn’t for the weak-kneed and recalls that several years ago when a CNN crew was filming at the farm, a female producer, who wanted to look in on the processing operation, fainted after the door was opened and she saw what was happening inside.

Labrecque says that customers will start arriving over that weekend to pick up their pre-ordered birds while others will be delivered by refrigerated trucks to places like Butter’s on Concord’s Main Street for customers who have also pre-ordered.

Labrecque says that in all of her years of raising turkeys she’s only had one complaint, and that was from a customer who cooked the bird for close to 24 hours.

"You can’t ruin a turkey unless you cook them too much,’’ says Labrecque, who will be cooking her own turkey in the oven of her wood stove on Thanksgiving.

"I like the wood stove for cooking. In fact when you’re outside you can still get the smell of what’s cooking. It’s a nice traditional way to cook a Thanksgiving meal,’’ she says.

CAPTIONS

Monique Labrecque is raising 300 turkeys at Hermit Brook Farm in Sanbornton. Her fresh turkeys have gained national attention and have even been served at the French Embassy in Washington. (Roger Amsden photo for the Laconia Daily Sun)

Some 300 turkeys are being raised at Hermit Brook Farm in Sanbornton, one of the largest fresh turkey operations in the state. (Roger Amsden photo for the Laconia Daily Sun)

Stanley, a Boer goat, is part of a herd of 31 goats being raised as meat animals at Hermit Brook Farm in Sanbornton. (Roger Amsden photo for the Laconia Daily Sun)