By Drew Harwell, Times Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
“They get kind of nervous this time of year, but don’t worry, they start to calm down in January,” said Frank Yager, 71, as he eyes a 2-year-old, male royal palm turkey at his Dade City farm. Yager has raised turkeys and other fowl for about 15 years.
DADE CITY — Every year, the turkeys start to pace.
The Rio Grandes, the Bourbon reds, the royal palms — they walk back and forth along the wire fences, looking out at the other cages at Frank's Finest Farm, moving like they know what's coming.
"Turkeys, they're more of a calmer bird," Frank Yager, 71, said Wednesday while tending to his farm. "They all get nervous between Thanksgiving and Christmas."
Frank knows turkeys. Not to mention quails, pheasants and guinea fowl. He has sold hundreds of hatching eggs from his farm over the last decade.
But his closest connection, he said, is to the turkey.
On Nov. 23, 1939, the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signaled Thanksgiving's new date by carving a turkey in Warm Springs, Ga., Frank was born in southern Illinois.
"My mom said I was the biggest turkey she ever had," he said.
He grew up in Illinois farm country, all corn, wheat, soybeans and oil fields. His mother, who raised him and his eight siblings, and his father, who ran a bar called the Royal Tavern, had always wanted a garden to call their own.
But Frank wasn't ready to plant, not yet. In his youth, in the '50s, he followed his brothers down to Dade City, where they had found work trucking frozen citrus concentrate. He began hauling 18-wheelers of vegetables out as far as California, trading CB radio chatter with fellow truckers like Walking Stick, who was tall and skinny, and Hacksaw, who talked all the time, on those long cross-American highways. Frank's call sign was the KW Man, for Kenworth, his company's truck of choice.
After his years of trucking and a stint selling Corvette parts by mail order, Frank found a plot and began to plant. It grew and grew. His farm now sits on nine acres on U.S. 301, between the Town & Country RV Resort and the Triple S Golf Ranch. There are barns for the turkeys, refrigerated trailers for the eggs, a large plot for the greens and off-ground cages for the other birds.
Frank sells the incubated eggs to farmers, who want to grow and resell them, and hunters, who train their bird dogs to their scent. All told, he guessed he has sold 900 pheasants, 400 guineas and 2,000 bobwhite quails (known for their strange call, "Bobwhite! Bobwhite!").
On Sundays, he and his wife, Shirley, drive their truck to the old Joy-Lan flea market to sell mustard, turnips, collards and whatever else they've harvested. Sometimes he'll take the birds out to auction in Bushnell.
But increasingly he's found business online, through Craigslist and eBay, where buyers from all over the country can bid on his onion sets and Bourbon red eggs from their desk chairs. He's gotten offers from Ireland and Italy to ship the eggs across the Atlantic Ocean, but he doesn't want the hassle. (One customer, who had asked for shipping to Alaska, complained when an egg was cracked.)
Many of the buyers for Frank's turkeys this year found him through Craigslist. Two trucks drove up from South Florida to buy about 15 of his biggest turkeys, priced at about $50 a bird. A family from Orlando drove over especially to get one for Thanksgiving.
Frank guessed he sold about 20 turkeys, nearly half his stock, for the holiday. They'll probably be fresh from the oven when he sits to the table in Brooksville, sharing a meal with his wife's family.
None of his turkeys will be on the menu.
"My wife won't eat a thing that touches the ground here," he said. "Guess it's because it was raised here, in our own yard."
Contact Drew Harwell at (727) 869-6244 or dharwell@sptimes.com.