Some of the staple Thanksgiving dinner food is grown on a farm here in Central Texas.
Often times, though, we don’t think about where our food comes from.
On a farm down the road in Rogers, thousands of just days old turkeys are raised.
"We had this farm, has been in our family for almost a hundred years, and we were looking to diversify what we were doing with our farming and our cattle operation,” said farm owner Darrell Glaser.
That was when Glaser and his wife decided to raise turkeys.
"From the turkey side, it was producing the turkeys, producing the litter, using the litter as fertilizer for our cattle operation and making the system work kind of this big one unit,” added Glaser.
Since 1994, Glaser’s farm has put dinner on millions of dining room tables.
"Since we've started, we've raised almost 15 million birds on this farm. As a reference that would give you enough turkey to put Thanksgiving dinner in all the households in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kansas, New Mexico and Nebraska,” said Glaser.
Every year, four batches of 120,000 turkey chicks cycle through the four houses.
"After every flock, we clean out all of our litter, we wash our houses, we disinfect--and then we start brand new every time, so what we try to do is create the healthiest environment possible for the bird,” said Glaser.
In each house, 84 heaters help keep the chicks warm, which is crucial when they’re young.
"When they're little they actually like the temperature between 89 and 100 degrees,” said Glaser.
Feeders and water lines spread throughout encourage the turkey chicks to eat and stay hydrated.
"They're naturally attracted to green and that's why our cups are green. What we use on this is we have a pump that we put in our feed line that as we put the feed in it sprays green on it, and that gets a little bit of green coloring onto the feed. That's a way we help them to start eating when they're babies,” concluded Glaser.
After the turkey chicks reach six weeks old, they're ready to be transported to the next farm until they’re ready to be processed. Glaser and his team spend about ten weeks cleaning the houses to get them ready for the next batch of turkey chicks.
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