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Low turkey prices don’t deter fans of pricey heritage birds

By Hannah Rodriguez, The Seattle Times
Published: November 23, 2018, 1:34pm

This Thanksgiving, Washingtonians were among Americans on the consuming end of a strange dynamic that’s been taking hold in turkey prices. Thanks to President Donald Trump, it’s getting even stranger.

To sum it up: The turkeys most of us ate this year are cheaper than they’ve been in at least a decade. But so-called heritage varieties, higher-end breeds of the animal that are allowed to live relatively normal lives before their slaughter, are getting a lot more expensive.

That’s because food prices, particularly over the past three years, have either remained the same or grown at much lower rates than normal, according to federal government data. Meanwhile, Americans are enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in almost a half-century and seeing steady growth to their wages, meaning more of them can afford to splurge on that special Thanksgiving turkey. The result has been a boon to heritage-turkey farmers, including a couple right here in our state.

In Washington, heritage and organic turkeys are the business of small, independent farmers, and there are no commercial turkey farms licensed through the state, according to Hector Castro, a spokesman for the state Department of Agriculture. The majority of turkeys sold in local grocery stores are imported from other states, he added.

Take Micha and Andrew Ide, a wife-husband team who moved here from California. They took up animal farming over the past six years, buying late last year a 30-acre plot in Orting — a little town about 40 miles south of Seattle — where they started raising those heritage turkeys, along with chickens, pigs and lambs. They feed their animals organic, freshly milled, nongenetically-engineered grains, give them room to roam and keep them away from pesticides and antibiotics. The pampering goes on for about eight months, double the time it takes to raise the more prevalent broad-breasted variety.

“I recognize not everyone can afford a heritage turkey, but our animals are raised ethically and so the food is going to be better for you and taste better,” Micha Ide said in a phone interview. “We are spending a lot more on feed than a turkey from a factory farm.”

At $9.50 per pound, an Ide’s heritage turkey is almost 10 times more expensive than the broad-breasted one consumers would find at a Seattle-area Costco. The price also compares with $7.50 per pound in 2017, a 27 percent surge. Regardless, their entire supply this year was sold out by July.

Compare that to broad-breasted-turkey prices in grocery stores around the country, where they averaged $1.46 per pound this year, according to Jayson Lusk, who teaches agricultural economics at Purdue University.

Lower turkey prices are part of a bigger trend of low or stable food prices, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index. Prices of the food we cook at home are up just 0.1 percent over last year, compared with a 20 year average of 2.1 percent.

That’s where Trump comes in.

Remember those tariffs the Trump administration levied on imports of Chinese steel and aluminum last spring? Well, China responded by imposing tariffs on U.S. agriculture exports. That flooded the U.S. with products like soybeans — the same ones that feed turkeys on commercial farms — that would have otherwise been exported, driving animal-feed prices down. In some cases, farmers were forced to let their crops rot because it was cheaper than paying for storage.

Cheaper animal feed encourages more overall farm production. Within the past decade, the agricultural industry itself has also gotten more energy efficient, contributing to lower prices for consumers, Lusk said.

But it’s not just the niche heritage-turkey farmers who are benefiting from higher demand that’s driving up their prices. At Hogstead Farm in Marysville, organic farmer Luke Conyac has seen increased interest in his turkeys compared with previous holiday seasons. Although he is mainly a pork farmer, Conyac is already sold out of turkey for the season.

“I had to turn a lot of people away so I will probably do more next year, but it depends on what the interest is,” Conyac said.

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