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So how do we get more of them? Well you might ask. The sperm must be artificially extracted from live male turkeys by a person, a professional turkey sperm-wrangler if you will, and artificially introduced to the hens, and that is all I’m going to say about that. If you think they send the toms off to a men’s room with little paper cups and Playhen Magazine, that’s not how it goes. I will add only this: if you are the sort of parent who threatens your teenagers with a future of unsavory jobs when they ditch school, here’s one more career you might want to add to the list.

When our family considered raising turkeys ourselves, we knew we weren’t going to go there. I was intrigued by what I knew of older breeds, especially after Slow Food USA launched a campaign to reacquaint American palates with the flavors of heritage turkeys. I wondered if the pale, grain-fattened turkeys I’d always bought at the supermarket were counterparts to the insipid vegetable-formerly-known-as-tomato. All the special qualities of heirloom vegetables are found in heirloom breeds of domestic animals too: superior disease resistance, legendary flavors, and scarcity, as modern breeds take over the market. Hundreds of old-time varieties of hoof stock and poultry, it turns out, are on the brink of extinction.

The Price of Life

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Industrial animal food production has one goal: to convert creatures into meat. These intensively managed factory farms are called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The animals are chosen for rapid growth, ability to withstand confinement (some literally don’t have room to turn around), and resistance to the pathogens that grow in these conditions. Advocates say it’s an efficient way to produce cheap, good-quality meat for consumers.

Opponents raise three basic complaints: first, the treatment of animals. CAFOs house them as tightly as possible where they never see grass or sunlight. If you can envision one thousand chickens in your bathroom, in cages stacked to the ceiling, you’re honestly getting the picture. (Actually, a six-foot-by-eight-foot room could house 1,152.)

A second complaint is pollution. So many animals in a small space put huge volumes of excrement into that small space, creating obvious waste storage and water quality problems. CAFO animals in the United States produce about six times the volume of fecal matter of all humans on our planet. Animals on pasture, by contrast, enrich the soil.

A third issue is health. Confined animals are physically stressed, and are routinely given antibiotics in their feed to ward off disease. Nearly three-quarters of all antibiotics in the United States are used in CAFOs. Even so, the Consumers Union reported that over 70 percent of supermarket chickens harbored campylobacter and/or salmonella bacteria. The antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that grow in these conditions are a significant new threat to humans.

Currently, 98 percent of chickens in the United States are produced by large corporations. If you have an opportunity to buy some of that other 2 percent, a truly free-range chicken from a local farmer, it will cost a little more. So what’s the going price these days for compassion, clean water, and the public health?

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STEVEN L. HOPP

The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy keeps track of rare varieties of turkeys, chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle that were well known to farmers a century ago, but whose numbers have declined to insignificance in the modern market. In addition to broader genetic diversity and disease resistance, heritage breeds tend to retain more of their wild ancestors’ sense about foraging, predator avoidance, and reproduction—traits that suit them for life in the pasture and barnyard rather than a crowded, windowless metal house. Many heritage breeds are adapted to specific climates. Above all, they’re superior in the arena for which these creatures exist in the first place: as food.

Heritage livestock favorites are as colorfully named as heirloom vegetables. You can have your Tennessee