Using traditional methods, Buchanan’s Turkeys in Kilrea rear some of the tastiest free-range bronze and white turkeys in Ireland. We travelled north and met up with founder Jonathan Buchanan to find out what makes their award-winning, premium produce different from any other turkeys on the island. While we were there, we also checked out Buchanan’s Farm Shop.
Buchanan’s turkeys are all slow-growing breeds that were saved from near-extinction by the Kelly family from Essex. They work with eight different strains of turkeys, which are all hatched on the first week of June, giving them the oldest flock of turkeys in Ireland for Christmas.
This results in a turkey that is mature with good fat cover and fat marbling through the meat. The turkeys are processed on the farm in Kilrea, which keeps stress to a minimum.
What Buchanan’s do with the turkeys is like turning the clock back by 100 to 150 years or more. The turkeys are dry plucked and hung in the coldstore to allow them to dry-age – just as you would do with good beef.
Everything at Buchanan’s Turkeys – from the taste of the meat to presentation – smacks of high quality. “Our processing and dry-plucking is an old-fashioned art form which is dying out, and we also try to use those old-fashioned skills in our farm shop as well,” founder Johnathan Buchanan notes. Said farm shops sells locally-sourced beef (from Lakeview Farm Meats), pork (from Grants of Londonderry) and lamb and mutton products. The lamb comes from their own farm, where they mainly run a Texel flock which gives a lovely juicy high-quality meat. Lamb is hung in the maturation chamber to dry-age for a minimum of 14 days. Buchanan’s also make a YoYo burger – their take on a lamb burger, using a blend of Greek spices.
Reflecting on the genesis of the business, Jonathan reveals. “I’ve had turkeys since I was 11 or 12, going back to 1990. My father had bought me some 6×4 garden sheds and we started to raise pheasants for gun clubs and some partridges. He saw that there was an opportunity there to do something with the runners and feeders after the summer, so he bought me my first 20 turkeys and it grew from there.
“We gradually grew up to 200 birds for one order but that butcher let us down and didn’t take those birds. So we made contact with other butchers who wanted us to rear for them for Christmas and grew up to a peak of 1,400.
“However, we have since reduced our numbers to 650 as we were producing a very labour-intensive commercial turkey where margins weren’t sufficient to operate a sustainable business. The bulk of what we produce now are free range and around half of them are sold at the farm gate direct to customers.”
First and foremost is the quality of the bird. Regularly winning Great Taste awards has been instrumental in helping Buchanan’s Turkeys get their name out there into the public eye and the endorsement of celebrity chefs like James McIntosh, Jenny Bristow, Paul McIntyre and Trish Deseine have also helped greatly.
High animal welfare and natural diet play crucial roles in ensuring that turkeys from the Buchanan farm in Kilrea taste better than any other. “We take in one-day-old turkeys in Week 22 – the last week of May / first week of June – and we run with the natural season, with natural lighting etc. We feed them with Thompsons feed and supplement that by harvesting our own oats. We take them to full maturity and they are slaughtered at 24-25 weeks.”
The whole process is carried out in-house on the family farm and the finished turkeys can be collected there or ordered online for delivery by courier – in insulated packaging and a special presentation box – all over Northern Ireland as well as into the Republic and mainland UK
Buchanan’s also have an agency for Farmgate Hatcheries in Essex, for whom they take in 3,500 day-old chicks in Week 27, which are reared and sold on to other poultry farmers across Ireland when they are four-six weeks old.
All in all, it’s now an all-year-around enterprise which is providing a living for the Buchanan family. “This year we farmed 18 acres, so it’s micro farming and we’ve had no subsidies or grant assistance. We’re completely self-sufficient and self-funded,” says Jonathan.
With the emphasis very much on quality rather than quantity and the business steadily sustaining itself through reinvestment of profits, the success story of Buchanan’s Turkeys / Buchanan’s Farm Shop is quite remarkable. On every level, this operation epitomises what traditional farming is all about.
Buchanan’s Turkeys,
26 Killymuck Road,
Kilrea,
Londonderry,
BT51 5UD.
Tel: 028 79401640
Web: www.niturkeys.co.uk
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Buchanans-Turkeys
Taken from Irish Tractor & Agri magazine Vol 4 No 9, November/December 2016
