When you live in a small town, it doesn’t take much to make the local news. In our case, it’s even easier, because our local newspaper runs a weekly “Yesteryear” column, featuring headlines from milestones years prior. As a history guy, I always seek them out (right up there with the police report and the obituaries), but two in [...]

Brooding days are a lot of work. It’s fresh in my mind because we just started (brooded) our spring flock a couple weeks ago. The work of starting poults is made all the more challenging because we’re doing it in intense heat in our brooder barn, with our air temp close to 100 degrees to keep the baby turkeys [...]

It’s the season of opening barn doors and chasing turkeys out to range! There’s probably no time on a farm that captures the eternal optimism in agriculture better than spring. No matter what happened last year, new seeds get planted each spring. Despite the muddy boots and surprise late season snowflakes, there’s an excitement to the season as we [...]

One year ago, we wrote our first COVID response statement after a hasty team meeting the morning after Minnesota’s school closure was announced.  Like everybody, we knew the world was about to change but had no way to sense the twists-and-turns we were in for.  I remember I started our statement with “we are all in this together.”  I’m [...]

In the grand scheme of things, the world doesn’t really need our Ferndale Market turkey.  The flocks we grow in a year are a rounding error in the billions of pounds of turkey grown annually, much of it by global meat companies.  The early pandemic processing plant worries showed many consumers just how concentrated the control in the meat [...]

Happy New Year from the team and turkeys at Ferndale Market! I love to recap and celebrate at the end of each year. I learned from an early boss that no process is complete without celebrating the accomplishment, and I agree. Although this year’s toasts are masked and socially-distanced, the wild ride of 2020 is all the more reason to [...]

On the first morning of our very first attempt at drive-through TurkeyFest, our website crashed.  We’d built our plan over the past many months and countless conversations, and it all hinged on solid technology. We needed to see each order online and know when each customer would arrive so we could have orders ready, bring them to the right car, [...]

The empty boxes are piling up high in the back room, so Thanksgiving must be just around the corner!  Beginning mid-summer each year, we start saving empty boxes of all shapes and sizes to assist with turkey carryout during the Thanksgiving season. Because dressed turkeys tend to be heavy and awkwardly shaped, we give a lot of used boxes [...]