Though Thanksgiving’s still a few weeks off, this week marks the start of the "Kelly Turkey" harvest. WMRA’s Christine Kueter checked out the flock in Crozet and filed this report.
[sound of a tractor and a gobbling turkey flock]
This is what Heritage Glen Farm sounded like last week. Starting this week, though, it got a lot quieter.
JUDD CULVER: Right now? Uh, I guess I’d use the word manic. I mean, controlled chaos.
Harvest season’s begun. With his wife, Cari, Judd Culver is the owner-operator of a 106-acre turkey farm at the foot of Calf Mountain in Albemarle County where just a few days ago about 5,000 turkeys strutted around.
CULVER: It’s three weeks, right? Basically, we’re getting ready to start plucking on Monday. So we’ll pluck, all week, the 5,000 turkeys, and then, the second week, we will pack all week, which basically is, like, get them into the box, the way that they’d be presented if you were going to buy one, right? And the third week is shipping. And the fourth week is Thanksgiving! So yeah, it’s a lot of moving parts. You know, all we do is move things around and clean things.
It’s also a different breed of turkey farm. Compared to commercial breeders who stuff tens of thousands of birds into a single barn, the Culvers’ five strains of heritage breed turkeys live almost entirely outside, foraging in woods and fields. They sleep together to keep warm. Their wings and beaks don’t get clipped. They also stick around longer than your average bird.
CULVER: So, one of the differences here is we grow our birds to sexual maturity, right? So that means you have a lot of fat, right? You have a certain amount of fat content, and fat tastes good. So we grow our birds to 24 weeks of age. Turkeys hit sexual maturity at 18 weeks of age, so they start laying down a bunch of fat probably at 16 weeks of age because they’re prepping to try to make babies, right? And, so, we’ve got many weeks there to lay down a really nice layer of fat. I just checked a couple the other week to see how they’re doing, and there’s like a quarter inch of fat on them.
KUETER: How can you tell, do you pinch them?
CULVER: Yeah, I just look underneath their feathers. Yeah. I can tell.
The Culvers’ birds get processed differently, too. Each is plucked by hand. Then they hang in cooling containers for a week, resulting in what Culver says is a moister, more tender bird that doesn’t need brining. Kelly Turkeys—a U.K. brand that arrived in Crozet a dozen years back, when the Culvers began their farm—are the darling of celebrity chefs such as Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver. They were called the “Rolls-Royce of turkeys” by The Times in London.
But the birds’ price point is steep. Kelly Turkeys cost about $15 a pound, which means a typical 15-pounder fetches north of $200, compared to a conventionally raised turkey of the same size, which costsabout $21.
So why the soaring difference?
Turkeys are what economists call “loss leaders:” heavily discounted items grocery stores use to attract shoppers, who fill up their carts with other stuff that makes the store money.
CULVER: Commercial turkeys are perfectly safe and good protein. You know, they feed our nation. And a lot of my friends help run those companies, right? But it’s just not the same thing. We’re just producing something a little different, something a little special for Thanksgiving, and we only do it for Thanksgiving. Our point is, if you’ve got a $40 bottle of King Family Vineyard wine on the table, why do you have a $20 turkey on the table?
High prices don’t seem to be ruffling too many feathers, though. The last two Novembers, the Culvers completely sold out.
CULVER: Black Friday’s like my favorite day. I wake up and I stay in my pajamas. I do make mimosas and I make breakfast. That’s all I do that day. And then we basically have December, January, February and maybe the middle of March off. . . . By the middle of March, we start getting the farm ready. And then the eggs arrive middle of April. They hatch middle of May, and we’re off.
Even those who don’t splurge on a Kelly Turkey can visit the Culvers’ farm. But you’ll have to wait until spring to see the birds, save the two toms Culver pardons most years.
CULVER: You can just show up! Like, the farm’s, like, you can drive up this road and pull in here. . . . You can totally get out and see the birds. And people do it all the time.
According to the USDA, Virginia is the nation’sfifth largest turkey producer where more than 14 million turkeys have been harvested so far in 2026. The Culvers raised about 1,000 toms and 4,000 hens in 2026 who range in size from 10 to 32 pounds. Female and male birds taste the same, Culver says, though it’s the females are far likelier to flutter over the fenceline.
CULVER: The toms don’t go over, they’re lazy. It’s always girls. They’re hilarious. They fly out, then they look in and it’s like, “how can I get back in?” Well, you flew out, man. Like, fly back over!
