BC Turkey Marketing Board says Thanksgiving stock should be plentiful for northern residents

With Thanksgiving less than two weeks away, now is as good a time as any to talk Turkey.

According to the BC Turkey Marketing Board, provincial residents including those in the north should have no shortage of choices in picking the right bird for their festive meal.

The live price for a turkey (the price paid to the farmer for turkeys they produce) in our province is $2.75 per kilogram, down one percent from last year.

Executive Director, Natalie Veles told Vista Radio the process of getting a turkey to the grocery store usually begins early in the summer.

“It usually takes about three months to raise a turkey from the first day at the poult to the day it goes the processor to go to market. All of the turkeys that come out in Thanksgiving were placed in barns around June.”

She added poultry farmers are already hard at work preparing for Christmas.

“About a month ago they are placed in barns for Christmas time but like I said, the producers are growing turkeys all year around so while they are a little bit busier this time of the year, and activity ramps up on the processing and retail side, it is a year-round industry.”

Like many industries who navigated through the rough waters of the pandemic and the subsequent supply chain issues that followed, Velles noted the province’s poultry market is recovering.

“It’s been a rocky couple of years for most of agriculture with turkeys bearing the brunt of that first with the pandemic and then a couple of big years with avian influenza. The last outbreak we had was last fall and since about February of this year, all of our BC Turkey farms are back in full production. That includes both hens who are for the whole bird market for Thanksgiving and Tom turkeys which are used for breast meat and other processed products all year around.”

“In BC, we have to bring in most of our feed for livestock from the central prairie provinces or from the United States – so they are also paying for increased freight. One side of that is increased input costs but the other side is we have been more impacted by the avian flu in terms of poult supply or egg supply from breeder farms in the United States as well as central and eastern Canada.”

BC’s poultry industry, which also includes chicken, egg and, hatching egg has 579 registered producers reaching 987-million dollars in annual farm gate sales.