The Return of The FarmED Podcast

Dec 11, 2024

We’re very excited to launch the first episode of a brand new series of The FarmED Podcast. After trialling podcasting for a while now, we’ve taken a break to create a brand new podcast studio in the eco buildings here at FarmED and we’ve got a great line-up of guests over the coming months. Hosted by our Public Engagement Coordinator and resident entomologist, Alex Dye and FarmED Co-Founder, Ian Wilkinson, these discussions will offer ‘hopeful conversations around farming, food, nature and the environment.’ At this crucial moment in time, when biodiversity loss and climate change is at the forefront of everyone’s minds, we hope these entertaining and important exchanges of knowledge with specialists in their field will offer thought-provoking ideas and inspiration.

Find the podcast on your preferred platform or watch on YouTube.

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The first episode is a Christmas Special, featuring the inspiring Chris Rumming from Lydiard Turkeys. 

Chris Rumming talks to Alex about high welfare turkeys, different breeds (White vs Bronze), game hanging, turkey anecdotes and how farming turkeys has helped Chris to make connections with customers and help them to connect with their purchasing of food through selling direct. Plus, you’ll hear how farming turkeys has given Chris the financial freedom to do environmental work. There’s also some tips on how to decipher turkey ‘chatter’, how to entertain a turkey, and of course some recipe tips for a perfect Christmas turkey roast! 

We hope you enjoy listening and wish you all a Merry Christmas! 

Coming up Next: Episode 2 of The FarmED Podcast (January 23rd 2025) will feature Abby Allen, Farms Director at Pipers Farm and author of The Sustainable Meat Cookbook.

Programme Notes 

About Lydiard Turkeys: Lydiard Turkeys and pop-up farm shop, is run by Chris and Lindsay Rumming on the family farm near Swindon. They are passionate about high animal welfare, great tasting meat and nature friendly farming.

​The Farm is home to approximately 100 mixed breed beef cattle, 50 rare breed Oxford Down sheep and, for 6 months of the year, 500 free range Bronze turkeys for Christmas.

​The turkeys arrive on the farm at a day old at the end of June. For the first couple of weeks they are housed under heat lamps until their feathers fully develop. They explore the great outdoors from around three weeks of age, starting in a small paddock close to their house. Once they are big enough they move into the fruit orchard. Chris believes that giving turkeys twice the required outdoor space leads to a happy stress free turkey.  At night they are shut into a large airy barn safely away from foxes.  They are bedded on straw that is made as a by-product of the wheat grown on the farm.  First thing in the morning the turkeys are let out into the paddocks but can come back into the barn to drink and eat. They are fed on a cereal based diet supplemented with any horticultural disasters or over production from the polytunnel! 

The Turkeys are at the farm for at least 25 weeks; this means they are more than twice the age of a fast growing commercial turkey when they’re slaughtered.  

The excellent processing facilities on the farm mean the turkeys do not have the stress of transport before slaughter and the ability to carry out every part of the processing on the farm gives complete control and traceability.

Visit their website here, or follow them on Instagram.

If you want to learn more about pastured poultry, why not join the Pastured Poultry Course at FarmED on Thursday, 30 January (12:00 - 17:00). 

Pastured poultry can be a great regenerative enterprise. In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore the challenge of selecting, feeding and housing pastured poultry for meat and eggs in a high welfare and regenerative context.

Full Transcript

Hello and welcome to FarmED. For the FarmED podcast, I'm your host Alex and I'll be your farmhand today, tilling the fields of conversation to bring us a nice ripe crop of chat. Today I'm joined by Chris Rumming of Lydiard Turkey's Fame. We're going to talk about turkey farming and all wonderful things about that. So, hello, how are you? Very good, thanks Alex.

Yeah, having an alright trip here? Yeah, nice to have a bit of snow, gives us a bit of a festive feel for the conversation, doesn't it? Yeah, it does, yeah. It is quite appropriately Christmassy, in the sense that it's snowy outside, you've got a nice Christmas jumper on, one of us looks like a bit of a plonker, and as is customary for Christmas, one of us is ill, but I won't tell you who, I'll let you figure that one out. So, from what I understand about your farm, and turkey farming in general, you don't farm turkeys the whole year. It's sort of about, do they arrive in about June? Is that right? Well, basically what I'm saying is, talk me through your year of turkey farming. 

Yeah, that's correct.The actual business of breeding the turkeys is a really complicated and specialist area. So most turkey farmers like myself that grow anything from 100 to a couple of thousand, wouldn't actually have a breeding flock. Most of us would buy in day-old chicks and we rear them from that process onwards, which means, yeah, the turkey farming cycle is about six months of the year. Having said that, I order my chicks in February or March, so I'm thinking quite a long time ahead. And then, yeah, the day-old chicks arrive in end of June,

And then the fun really does start from then. So they arrive in June, is that unique to your farm? Is that how it's done? I suppose you've got to think about what makes a difference between a pretty bog standard turkey and a top quality one is the age of it at slaughter. So my turkeys will be about 22 weeks old when it gets to Christmas, which means you've got a fully mature bird which has got loads of other benefits which I'm sure we'll go into later. A supermarket turkey will be much younger, so at slaughter, which means they'll actually be hatched and moved on to farms much later in the year. So yes, so it's only the people producing sort of really top quality ones that would be starting off in June. Okay, so that's taking into account a bit of animal welfare as part of that, is that right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think a turkey should have a good, long, slow growing, natural life, in contrast to a more intensively reared one, which would have a shorter, faster, harder life. So yeah, I want my turkeys to just sort of plod along at their own pace, growing naturally and slowly. And that allows them to make the most of the forage in the paddock and the grazing.

It's just a really nice life for them. And you mentioned before there were some, there were benefits as well to this. What would those be? So by having a turkey that's over 20 weeks old when it's fully mature and ready for Christmas it means it's had a much longer life outside. So my turkeys will go outside as long as the weather's decent from three or four weeks old which again is much younger than most birds. But I feel that if they go outside from a really young age then going outside is completely natural to them. If you keep them inside a shed for half their life and then open the doors they're not they're gonna be scared to go out. So yeah let them out for a really young age and then it gives you plenty of time for growth. Turkeys will grow skeletally first, they'll put all their bone on first, then they'll put their muscle on and then they'll finally put their fat on. So by having a turkey that's fully mature means you get the fat. If you have a more intensively fast-growing turkey they'll have some of their muscle but they won't have any fat on them. When it comes to cooking the fat is the most important bit. Okay, so the turkeys that you buy in then, are they the same breed, same varieties as is grown around the country for Christmas turkeys?

No, probably not. So a lot of the people that grow the best quality ones would be buying them from one or two of the same people. And then the more intensively grown ones would be genetically quite different. But most of the bronze turkeys in this country all come from one supplier, a guy called Paul Kelly over in Essex. And him and his father in, I think it was like the late 1970s, basically drove around the country and bought up all the old bronze turkey flocks because all the commercial growers have moved over to white turkeys. The white turkeys genetically were far quicker growing. And because they were white feathered, you don't actually have to finish them so well to have a decent looking turkey. If you've got a turkey with black feathers and you pluck it a bit half-heartedly, they look terrible. Well, with a white one, you can get away with it. So those, that and the speed of growth were the two main reasons why everybody all of a sudden went over to white turkeys. But they'd neglected to spot that the old-fashioned black or bronze ones tasted a lot better. So anyway, Paul and his dad drove around the country with a little old lorry and bought up all these old remaining flocks. Everybody thought they were mad, everybody thought they were wasting their money, but anyway they bred them all together for a few years and basically grew them out into different strains. And now they're the family that supply most small turkey growers like myself with all their chicks. So I'm gonna ask a very stupid question that should be obvious. Bronze turkeys and white turkeys, is it just as simple as the color? Is that the main thing?

Yeah, they're the same species, but they're just a different breed. And interestingly, within the bronze turkey and the white turkey breeds, the bronze turkeys have again been separated out into breeds. So just sort of natural selection, if you want small growing turkeys, you want to keep breeding together your small growing turkeys. If you want big turkeys, you're going to keep breeding the biggest ones together. And that actually works out very helpful because it means I can order turkeys of different breeds. They're also bronze, but they're different strains of bronze turkeys and they will finish different weights. So it means if I know that my customers are ordering mainly six kilo turkeys, I can hopefully buy in those chicks that are gonna grow to six kilos.

So you've mentioned your customers there. What's our greatest leading question is going to be? So you've raised your turkeys on your farm. You've got them already prepared for Christmas and you send them off to a supermarket, do you? No, absolutely not. I wouldn't want to do that. See what I did there?

Yeah, very good. So what we do, we process them all on the farm ourselves and we sell them all to customers that come to the farm to collect them. We have one or two collection hubs but essentially we are selling them all ourselves through our website direct to the end users. That allows us as a farming business to maximise our margin on the turkey so we can sell them at retail price. Any other way it would not be economically viable to do. I mean we're only doing 500 so it's really important diversification for us as a farming business but because we can sell them direct if we were selling them into any sort of wholesale or other market it wouldn't stack up. Would that mean if you were to do if you were say to provide for supermarkets and that sort of those sorts of demographics would that change the way you have to farm the turkeys from day one? Yeah a commercial sort of supermarket style turkey farmer would be, yeah, would you be using different genetics or different types of chicks much later in the year, much more intensive, wouldn't be much fun. I want to do the exact opposite of that. I want to maximise my margin out of each turkey. I want to give them a fantastic life because for me that's what motivates me to farm. I want to farm with nature, not against it. And by having a slow-growing, free-range bird, that just goes hand-in-hand with how I want to farm.

So you're selling direct to your customers then? Is that quite an important part of it? Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. For the business model, and it's also steered the rest of our farming enterprise a little bit. I mean, I started off just with 40 turkeys, which is fairly easy to sell direct because you can normally badger 40 of your friends and family to buy a turkey. Once you start doing a few more hundred, then you're going to get into a bit of marketing. But yeah, we've enjoyed selling directly to public and interestingly, it sort of led us down the route of actually retailing more of the stuff we produce on the farm in the terms of sheep, lamb, mutton and beef. So we now retail all of that direct to our customers. But having the Turkey customer base was a really good sort of springboard to getting us into selling those other products. And is there anything else that as a smaller producer you can do as part of your business? Yeah, we can use more traditional methods of processing. So a supermarket would have to, what they call wet process. So basically the turkeys are slaughtered and on the same day they would be put through effectively like a washing machine full of rubber fingers and warm water and it knocks the feathers off. And then they'd be blast chilled ready to go straight out as retail. Which is very efficient but it's not the way to give you the best product.

It does sound a bit like a Wallace and Gromit contraption as well, doesn't it? Things rolling around and bouncing through different systems. Yeah, it would probably look a bit like, what's the Wallace and Gromit with the sheep shearing gadgets and machines. It would be a bit like that. So what we do is much more the old-fashioned traditional way. And we do a process what we call game hanging, which is the same way as you would process a pheasant or a partridge or something, you would kill it, you would pluck it, and then you would leave it to hang for anything from a week to three weeks. And that allows the flavor of the bird to develop and the texture to improve as well. So that's a really important point that you can do as a small-scale producer, but it's much harder once you start to get it into bigger scale. So your turkeys on your farm, they're... So I've been to a few different parts of the world and met various... well, a few turkeys. I won't name them on the podcast because, you know, they want their anonymity. But they can be quite colourful sort of characters, can't they, turkeys? They're quite... they have a bit of a reputation for being a little bit aggressive, maybe, sometimes?

Yeah, they can be. They squabble amongst themselves quite a lot, so... But turkeys are really interesting characters to work with, because they make a continuous sort of chattering communication noise. So you can tell they're all probably just telling each other that everything's okay, there's nothing wrong, it's all going nicely. And you get used to that sort of background noise when you work around the farm, and then all of a sudden you can hear sometimes a change in their vocalisations. And having been around turkeys for quite a few years now, you can normally work out what's going on by the different sort of noises. Don't ask me to make the noises, I'm not doing that. But you can get an idea of what's happening around the paddock with the noises. Sometimes it will be like you say, it's aggression, so there'll just be two males fighting, in which case they grab each other by the wattle, which is like the fleshy coloured bit around their neck. And they'll basically just try and wrestle each other to the ground and you can you can sort of break them up if I'm in the sheds or top of the fees or shaking on them and they're doing this I'll sort of physically break them apart and they'll come straight back to each other they won't mind that I'm in the way they'll ignore me and go straight back to each other so you say yeah they can be a bit stroppy like that and they can they can also get aggressive when they're bored so I think it's really important to keep them entertained and stimulated. I can see you're going to ask me how you entertain and stimulate a turkey now. But basically that means just give them a really nice environment to be in. So as I was saying earlier on, getting them outside from a young age means they maximize their outdoor space. If they're outside foraging and looking around and exploring, they're not inside scrapping. When they are inside, they obviously have to come inside at night because we've got quite a few foxes where we are, right on the edge of the town.

So they come inside when it gets dusk and loads of straw bales. They like to get up really high because that makes them feel safe. So I've got big straw bales stacked in big tiered arrangements. And then if you look at it at night, they're all normally heading to the highest spots in the shed. So yeah, they're really interesting to work with. And do you have any amusing anecdotes you could regale us with?

Well I suppose it comes back really to the ecology of the turkeys I think, which is their sort of naturally inquisitive nature. One thing that I found quite amusing a little while ago, I dropped a piece of hosepipe on the floor, and they all gathered round in a circle around it, looking at this hosepipe, making a call which I'd never heard before, like a different type of vocalisation. I can only imagine they were shouting “snake!” to each other. And I'm thinking this is quite a few generations since these turkeys from Essex have seen a snake, but somewhere in their psyche they know what that is. Other amusing things is you can't really do any work in the turkey area because they're so inquisitive. Like if you were to go in there with your toolbox or something to try and repair something, they would first of all they'd gather around you and like literally jam themselves in around your ankles just because they all want to know what's going on. Then they'll proceed to peck you and then they'll proceed to empty your toolbox of all the items that you've got in there properly before trying to perch on it and then they'll probably fill it full of dung. So yeah working in the anywhere with turkeys not recommended. I've taken a few sort of photographers and stuff in with them and yeah they'll put their bag on the floor and they'll be running off with lenses and knocking stuff over yeah generally pretty unhelpful things.

A bit of an urban myth that I've heard so well I'll tell you as it was told me someone I used to work with swore on his life that this is true and it sounds like nonsense to me he once told me that he used to work on a turkey farm and he said that when working with turkeys if you whistle and hum at the same time apparently it will instantly kill any turkey so what sounds like a that's like a. I'm calling rubbish on that I think. I I'd like to apologise for any turkeys who are listening or the families of any turkeys who...Yeah, quickly, turn down the stereo. Sorry. No, never heard that before. They are prone to sort of suffering from noises that are unusual. So they'll be scared quite easily.

So any sort of loud noises or unusual noises will cause them to panic. So I would say, yeah, rather than dropping dead from odd noises, it would be more a result of any sort of panicking. So there could be a grain of truth in it, but I've never heard anything about that specific type of noise. Well, you think you wouldn't really need abattoirs, would you, if it was that simple?

Yes, but it would be a bit inconvenient. You might end up with a few too many dropping dead at the same time. So I'll probably stick to my current slaughtering system rather than that one. I wonder if the frequency would make a difference as well. This one was killed in a C minor, I'm not sure about this one. Let's move on from that. You brought in a lovely bit of kit just here.

Can you walk us through what that is? I suppose what I always think is that what I do on the farm is really important to getting you a really good quality turkey. And I reckon it's 50% of having a brilliant tasting turkey at Christmas is starting off with a really good quality turkey. As I was saying, it's older, it's got all that fat, it's run around for its whole life eating nice stuff so it's gonna be full of better flavors. So that's my side of things. When I sell one to the customer, they've still got to look after it in the cooking department. So that little gadget there I think is the most important thing involved in cooking turkey. So it's meat thermometer. So basically if you don't have a meat thermometer when you're cooking your turkey, I think you're only ever just guessing as to whether it's cooked or not.

And the classic one is that you check to see whether the juices are running clear and all that. But it's really difficult to tell and if you've got your granny around for Christmas, no one wants to poison her. So you end up putting the turkey back in the oven for another half an hour. And all you're doing, if it was cooked already, all you're doing is drying it out. So that little gadget, the probe, the spiky bit that you're holding, goes into the thickest part, the part of the breast meat. I could demonstrate on your hat, but as you're wearing it, I won't. As long as you don't demonstrate on my breast meat. Yeah, we'll go for that.

Yeah, so that'll go into the coldest spot in the center of the turkey. And then as you're cooking the turkey, the screen section is on the outside of the oven and those numbers will scroll up as the turkey cooks and the critical point is 65 degrees when your turkey or any Game meats like that gets to 65 degrees is cooked and completely safe

If it's been processed in a traditional high-quality way like like mine are if you're buying a supermarket turkey You might want to cook it a bit hotter but the main thing is is you're recognising that the internal temperatures that meat is getting to the correct point and then you can finish cooking take it out the oven. It's done. You just know it takes the guesswork out of it. Which will always result in a better eating turkey because you haven't overcooked it so that's top tip number one for cooking.

I suppose going back slightly the next top tip I'd say would be if you've got a really good quality turkey that's got loads of fat in it, what you should do is cook it upside down. So I don't normally use a turkey sat in the conventional way in a roasting dish with the breast meat facing upwards, but if you cook it the other way up what you actually do is you find that all the fats and the juices that are in the back of the carcass of the bird drain down to the breast meat as you cook it and it just keeps it really nice and juicy and it'll be extra tasty.

And then I suppose your third tip would be to just rest it. So a good quality turkey with lots of fat in it will cook faster than you think. So I would always recommend cooking your turkey well before you need it for Christmas lunch. And then you can take it out and while it's resting, you can cook all your other festive veg. And then that, if you rest your turkey for an hour, you don't need to wrap it up, keep it warm, it'll stay hot, and there will be loads of residual heat in there. And then if it rests for an hour while you're cooking the rest of the stuff, you'll have a good turkey. Great, do you have any little recipe tips on top of that? We do, or I say we, my wife does an amazing turkey and stilton and pie so that would be my number one for leftovers. I really like a turkey, brie and cranberry cheese toastie, that cheese toastie that is also my other top festive snack. And I think I would say to people don't be scared about buying a turkey. It's only a big chicken. They're dead easy to cook. If you've got three meats and ones it takes the guesswork out of it. And one thing we do is quite often the only spare turkeys we have are the really monster ones. So we'll cook a monster turkey. It's obviously too big for us to eat in one go, so we'll just carve one of the breast lobes off, straighten into the freezer, polish up the rest, and then you've got the rest for another week.

That's cool. So, we here at FarmED we're very interested in regenerative farming, sustainable farming. You've touched on a bit of that because you've spoken about animal welfare, looking after the turkeys and having them over a long period of time, looking after the animals. But from what I understand, you've also got an environmental streak to what you do and why you do it that way. Yes. What I do, I mean, I'm really passionate about the wildlife on the farm. Some might say I'm probably more passionate about the wildlife than the farming, but I'm absolutely sure that the two can work perfectly together. So, aside from the turkey business, as I mentioned, we're also doing 100% grass-fed beef and we've got a flock of rare-breed Oxford down sheep. And we manage those specifically to give us really good environmental outcomes, as in we do the daily moves, all the rest of it, which is so interesting because you get to observe the grass and the ecology and the interaction with the sheep and the cattle. And what I'm really trying to do is communicate to my customers that the way they buy their food directly affects the way we farm our land. So if they like what I'm doing with the ecology side of things, then treat yourself to a good turkey from me or leg of lamb or a joint of beef. And it's just trying to show people that there's that link between the way you want to farm and supporting those farmers. I mean, there's farmers all over the country that are doing really, really good things. All you've got to do is hunt them out and support them. And then, you know, you then we wouldn't need any other ways of financing sort of wildlife restoration if we were hopefully sort of encouraging those farmers by financially supporting them.

Yeah, and people do that with the turkeys. And when you buy the turkey, they always have, I'll give a little information leaflet, so it obviously tells you how to cook the turkey, but it also talks about the farm wildlife and what we're doing around the farm.

So it's just trying to tie that message into the way they buy the products. That's really wonderful. So as we sort of wind down, not only for the year, but for this episode of the FarmED podcast. What's one thing you would hope people can... what's a tip or something about turkeys that people don't know that you think they should know? I think what I would say and actually this comes back to a customer that we had pop into our pop-up farm shop the other day. I just sort of cheekily said to him have you ordered your turkey yet? And he said no I don't like turkey, I'm going for chicken. So I said to him, have you tried one of our turkeys? He said no. So I just have a little bit of a chat to him, but actually based on what I've said to you, about the fact that the age of the turkey makes such a difference. So the difference between a 10 week old turkey and a 22 week old turkey, it would be poles apart. So I think a lot of people think they don't like turkey or they'll only eat turkey at Christmas because they sort of think they have to. But perhaps those people have never tried a really good turkey. So if there was one thing I would say to people, especially with people that think they don't like turkey, just once treat yourself to a really good one and you will taste the difference. And just, yeah, go for it and re-learn turkey.

Re-learn turkey. That's a nice phrase. No, I like it. So you've picked up your turkey there, you've picked up and you said you know you want a really good turkey. Where can people find you if they want to look at what you do and get themselves a turkey? Yeah, so it's Lydiard Turkeys and we've got a really nice website which my wife runs and maintains and keeping it all up to date is no mean feat. So yes, you can check out the website and we also have a pretty good Facebook page and Instagram, which I mainly pack full of wildlife pictures and things like that. But yeah, the turkeys and the other farming sticks onto there as well. So yeah, that's where they can go and learn about it. But yeah, there's great local turkey farms all over the country. We don't mail order anything because we believe that actually, you should hunt at your local farm.

So I only want to supply people that live in a sensible radius around me. So if you're not near me, then yeah, go out and have a look. The NFU do a really good turkey finder website. So you can find those local farms and that's where you'll get a great turkey from.

Perfect. Well, that's a lovely way to wrap that up. And speaking of wrapping up, Merry Christmas. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the FarmED podcast, Chris. It's been really nice talking to you. No, thank you very much.

It was great fun. And thank you very much for tuning in. Join us next time for more wonderful regenerative farming related discussions and chats.