Farm of the Week: Yorkshire farming family prepare for 'plucking party' as Christmas looms

Jim and Angela farm in partnership with son John across around 200 acres and have cattle, sheep, turkeys and geese. They also grow cereals, some of which is fed to their livestock, plus some fodder beet, but this time of year is always about the festive season fast approaching.

Angela says that keeping geese and turkeys has been a family tradition dating back to what she believes must now be around a century ago.

“Jim’s grandma is the one who started it when her children were young, as another income for the farm where they were at the time in Oxspring near Penistone, and we are still supplying some of today’s generations of the same families we supplied then.

“This year we have 320 turkeys and 185 geese. It’s the number we got to last year and a number that I decided we could cope with in terms of looking after them and the shed space. We are well-placed here for people in Sheffield, Hope Valley and Derbyshire and some of our birds go quite a way. One lady picks her turkey up and takes it off to Scotland. We had a goose down to Bristol last year.

Angela says that her number of geese is staying pretty firm and that there are those who prefer goose, which was the original Christmas bird on the table.

“We are one of the few that do goose and that means we get quite a few customers who will travel an hour or more to get to us to pick one up. We also supply a couple of butchers a little further away from us, but pretty much all of the others will go out of the farmyard and farm shop gate.

“We’ve no problems with selling them. We’ve already got orders for most of them, but with the cost of living crisis you don’t know whether that’s going to affect us at some stage or not, so what we try to do is keep them to as reasonable a price as possible. I’m not being greedy.

“They’re hard work and need to be a decent price because of the time we take and inputs we give to produce them. The price varies on the weight.

“When they come to us as day-olds they are in two big circular pens made of plastic with walls that are two to two and a half foot high and with a heating lamp over them. They are kept inside for the first fortnight and the sooner they can get outside the better. The reason for a circular pen is that they can sometimes all pile on top of each other in a corner, if they are spooked by say a fox being close, and you can lose a few that way.

For those who have never tasted goose Angela says it is midway between turkey and duck.

“Goose is a richer meat than turkey, but not as greasy as how duck can be. Some people have goose and don’t ever have it again, some come for years.

The annual event that will take place over two days this week is what Angela describes as their annual plucking party, attended by neighbours, friends and family, including daughters Helen and Ruth, that generally sees around fifteen of them preparing the turkeys and geese ready to be sold through Angela’s farm shop, with an order book already pretty much heading towards full.

“I always make sure that everyone who comes gets a good dinner with meat and potato pie and roast beef usually on the menu. We feed them well. It’s a full-on two days as we prepare the turkeys one day and the geese the other. It’s best for the birds’ welfare that all of one species is done in a day. If you start leaving some of them for the next day they understandably get upset. We don’t want any stress.

“It’s like a production line with them. John and then Jim handle the processing of them. John is fully licensed to do so, and then the rest of the team sets to work. We start around 8.30am each day and if we’re lucky we are done by about 5.30 to 6pm. It’s turkeys the first day, and geese the next.

Angela runs the farm shop that has become more of a business since around the time of Covid lockdowns.

“We had been doing it in a small way with the poultry and then somebody we were supplying meat went under. We had quite a few people who had been customers of that business, who found us as they were wanting to continue buying our beef and lamb.

“Our first go at processing a beast took about six months to sell out of the freezer and so we weren’t particularly going crazy. We’d just got the second one in when Covid hit and that beast lasted just three weeks.

“We’ve not really been just as busy as that first couple of months during lockdown but we now do a beast for the shop every three or four weeks, a lamb every week and some local pork. Everything I sell, my whole ethos is that I have to know where it has come from. It’s all about traceability. I’m not just a shop keeper who is going to sell anything. I have chicken from Soanes Poultry in East Yorkshire; pork is locally sourced, and eggs from Elliott’s Eggs also over in East Yorkshire.

“We do all our own butchery and the shop is open on a Thursday afternoon from 1 until 4.30pm, from 9 til 4pm on Friday and Saturday; and 10am while midday on Sunday. We are not big fancy farm shop prices, just great quality and good value. We can afford to keep it a bit cheaper as we haven’t a butcher stood behind counter all the time. I do most of the serving in the shop.

After the Christmas poultry rush, it’s lambing time in January and again in April, with calving also part of the equation.

“We never stop,” says Angela. “We lamb 150 of our 500 ewes at the end of January, with the rest from 1 April. We are mainly Mules, Texel-cross and Suffolk-cross. The lambers at the end of January are generally the Suffolk-cross that we’ve put to the Beltex tup. We use the Beltex, Texel and Suffolk tups on the rest.

“Our cattle are Stabilisers, which we started with around six years ago, and British Blue cows that have been dairy-bred, put to the Aberdeen Angus bull and we have an odd Angus cow. There are 25 cows in our suckler herd. We don’t sell anything as stores. They all go at between 18-24 months and most are going through the shop at the moment, with the odd spare going to Bakewell livestock market.