Hatching
We raise Bronze turkeys, a heritage breed that came about by crossing wild turkeys with European domesticated birds in the 18th Century. With a dark plumage and a beautiful coppery-metallic sheen, their colouring closely resembles their wild ancestors. Bronze Turkeys are a traditional slow-growing breed which thrives living outdoors amongst grassland pasture.
We hatch our Turkeys from April through to the beginning of June. During the first four weeks of their lives our Turkeys spend their days snuggled up in barns bedded down with straw, in order to feather up ready to be moved outside onto fresh pasture.
Properly Free Range
Once our turkey chicks have feathered up they are moved outside where they spend the summer ranging freely on grassy hillsides, actively developing strong bones and muscles. When we say 'properly' free-range we mean it!
Our bronze turkeys have plenty of space in which to thrive, they are in a healthy outdoor environment where they build up natural immunity and can freely exhibit all their natural instincts including dust-bathing, displaying and calling to their flock - all making a magnificent sight!
Natural Diet
Our free range Bronze turkeys are fed a totally natural diet, free of artificial additives and chemicals.
Our turkeys diet is made up of straightforward cereals (whole and rolled oats and whole wheat), grasses, nettles, fodder beet, kale, cider apples and even oyster shells for our contented birds to grind in their gizzards.
Our Turkeys have a small amount of soya in their starter feed (fed between hatching and up to 3 weeks of age. After this period our turkeys go on to only eat whole crop and forage as detailed above), this is very important at the early stage of the development of our birds as they need to be strong and robust for their life of free ranging outdoors. If we were to remove this small amount of soy from their diet it would significantly impact the welfare of our birds and increase their mortality rate. We continue to explore ways of reducing, removing and replacing soya from all of our monogastric animals diets, however for now, we believe that using a very small amount of responsibly sourced soy in our turkey chicks diet is unavoidable.
Not only is the diet we provide our turkeys with really important to their health and the wonderful taste of the finished bird, it's also incredibly important for our turkeys welfare. We grow our free range turkeys slowly allowing them to reach maturity naturally over at least 6 months. We are not pushing our birds to lay down fat at an unnatural pace. Food such as fodder beet, kale and apples also are also really important to keep our birds entertained. It's incredibly important to the welfare of turkeys that they have interesting things to peck and eat, this creates a contented flock.
Family Farms
We work with three incredible farmers in Devon who rear our Properly Free Range turkeys to our exacting standards. Our talented, likeminded farmers work to our standards to ensure every Turkey reared is of exceptional quality and has been produced in a way you can have complete confidence in. We work closely with our farmers to ensure we are treading as lightly as possible on the land and producing delicious nutritious food for your table.
Each of our Turkey farms are wonderfully nuanced, creating truly special artisan produce. We passionately believe in better farming, with a 360° respect for the environment, farmer, animals and you, the customer.
Traditionally Hung
Once our Turkeys have reached natural maturity they are humanely slaughtered by hand. Every bird is fully stunned before slaughter. Our birds are then plucked by hand and hung in the traditional way to develop the incredible depth of flavour and texture that we are famous for.
Pipers Farm Properly Free Range Turkeys are delicious, nutritious food, grown without the routine use of antibiotics, in harmony with nature.