EAST MEREDITH, N.Y. - When the turkeys were just days old this spring, the electricity - and the brooding lamps keeping them warm - went out, so Craig Haney and his wife, Amy Kenyon Haney, packed the tiny birds into their car and blasted the heat on max.
* When wild animals attacked some of the turkeys this summer, the couple pitched a tent to sleep outside with them and ward off further carnage. And when it came time to kill the turkeys for Thanksgiving, they did it themselves, staying up until midnight plucking off the remaining pinfeathers with tweezers.
This is agriculture on a small, hand-crafted scale, far removed from the industrial-sized, assembly-line farming that produced the vast majority of birds that will star on Thanksgiving Day tables across the country tomorrow.
But a growing movement, on farms like the Haneys' 100-acre spread here, is reviving a more idiosyncratic turkey closer to what earlier Americans sat down to for their holiday feast.
They are called heritage turkeys, breeds that date to the 19th century when farmers in different parts of the country raised regional varieties of the bird.
As with other forms of agriculture, turkey farming increasingly consolidated into larger, more standardized operations, and nearly all the turkeys sold today are of a single breed, the aptly named "large white" that was developed because it grew quickly and has a greater proportion of the white meat that Americans prefer.
If the typical supermarket large white is a Hollywood starlet of the poultry business - big-breasted, a dime a dozen, maybe not so smart - the heritage breeds are grande dames.
A bit sassier, with more depth and a whole lot more history, old-fashioned turkeys such as the Bourbon red and the standard bronze are gaining adherents among gourmets and advocates of sustainable agriculture and greater biodiversity.
For them, the small-scale farm, where animals are raised in a more natural, free-ranging setting, makes sense on a number of levels - environmental, moral and, perhaps most of all, gastronomical. While many complain that regular turkeys can be bland and dry, the heritage birds draw raves for their richer flavor and meatier texture.
"For years I thought I didn't like turkey, but that was because I never had a good turkey," says Monyka Berrocosa-Marbach, who founded the Baltimore chapter of Slow Food, an international group that is trying to preserve heritage turkey breeds. "All the character has been bred out of them."
Slow Food - begun by an Italian angered that a McDonald's was opening in Rome - worked with about 20 farms across the country to produce heritage turkeys that were sold at a set price of $3.50 a pound.
The group estimates that several thousand heritage turkeys were sold this year - to individual consumers, stores, restaurants and chapters of Slow Food that held group dinners featuring the birds.
Heritage turkeys are part of a larger trend that looks to the past for more flavorful and less commercialized and processed foods - like the heirloom vegetable, they are part of what Berrocosa-Marbach calls "our edible history."
Saving the turkey breeds is considered particularly critical - one group, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, calls the turkey "the most genetically eroded" of all species.
The number of heritage turkeys sold in conjunction with Slow Food, though, is just a tiny fraction of the market. The National Turkey Foundation estimates that 270 million turkeys will be raised in the United States this year.
While the heritage turkeys are decidedly pricier than the supermarket variant - some stores in Baltimore were selling frozen ones for as little as 19 cents a pound this year - advocates say more and more people are considering the actual cost of such low prices and are willing to pay more in exchange for greater awareness of how the food was produced.
"There's so much going on in the world that you can't do anything about," Kenyon Haney says. "What you eat is something you can control. I just get really excited to sit down at a dinner table and know where everything came from."
For the Haneys and others, producing heritage turkeys fits in with their philosophy of raising animals to graze on grass and treating them with a certain respect, even if eventually they are to be killed for their meat.
It is a philosophy that has been gaining currency in recent years as some consumers become appalled at the large-scale farming in which animals are kept cooped up, fed an unnatural diet and pumped up with various antibiotics and hormones.
Books such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal and Matthew Scully's Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy have given pause, convincing some to turn vegetarian or, at least, to learn how food was raised before buying it.
"Wouldn't you rather, if possible, spend a little more money if it meant that the animal had the best life it could while it was alive and was raised by someone who respected it?" says Berrocosa-Marbach.
At a time when many people, if asked where their food comes from, would respond, "the supermarket," the Haneys' Skate Creek Farm seems like something from another time. Like Old McDonald's farm, with an oink-oink here and a moo-moo there, small clusters of animals keep a low-level hum going.
Icelandic sheep, whose massive wool coats make their legs look as skinny as spindles, gambol over from one barn, while snuffling pigs root about next door. The pigs are also heritage breeds - Tamworth and Berkshire, red- and black-coated respectively - that are prized by restaurateurs.
There are also veal cattle, not caged up to produce the milky-white meat prized by gourmets and abhorred by animal rights activists, but allowed to meadow-graze.
There are only a handful of turkeys left, several white ones akin to those commercially raised and a few of the heritage birds - a bronze and a Bourbon red among them - that eat grass and organic feed. The rest have already been killed and are on their way to customers.
"They're nice to have around - they're colorful and they make a lot of pleasant sounds," Haney says. "And the toms are sort of comical."
And they can be unpredictable. Kenyon Haney laughs, recalling how she often came home this year to find several turkeys that had flown the coop, roosting atop the chimney of the house or in one of the trees.
In contrast to the bulbous, commercially raised birds that are so top-heavy they can no longer fly or mate, these seem more like the noble bird that Ben Franklin favored over the bald eagle to serve as the nation's symbol.
Still, these are domesticated birds - not wild turkeys like those that occasionally wander in from nearby woods. The heritage birds will fly a bit, but they always return home.
"I thought maybe some of the wild turkeys might join our flock, or one of our turkeys would leave and join the wild ones, but they haven't," Kenyon Haney says.
The Haneys bought the farm two years ago, after deciding they should put their growing interest in good food and sustainable agriculture into actual practice. Kenyon Haney, the daughter of nearby dairy farmers, had been working at Brewery Ommegang, a Belgian beer producer in nearby Cooperstown, marketing the beer to chefs and restaurants, while her husband was working in agricultural history at the Farm Museum in the same town.
With the help of Haney's father, they run the farm themselves - everything from raising the animals to selling and delivering them.
On this stark day just before Thanksgiving, Haney was taking some freshly killed turkeys to the renowned Alain Ducasse restaurant in Manhattan, where a single diner can spend hundreds of dollars on a single meal.
The couple was bracing for the rush of nearby residents who would be coming to the farm in the remaining days before Thanksgiving to pick up their pre-ordered birds.
By Thanksgiving, the couple would be thrilled to eat their own dinner - a conventional turkey - at a relative's house. Having to turn away would-be customers after running out of the 75 or so heritage turkeys they raised this year, they didn't think they could save even one bird for their own meal.