The rush and busyness of getting ready for Christmas can make the day itself an island of calm. If it’s like that for most of us, imagine the relief of sitting down on Christmas Day to a meal of turkey for the Nichols family, having spent the previous 24 days hard at word supplying thousands of turkeys for other people’s tables.
Demand for turkeys is uneven in the extreme. About half the many thousands of turkeys produced by Nichols Poultry throughout the year are sold during December, and half of those are sold as whole birds.
Robert Nichols manages the farm and business started by his parents Mike and Mary when they emigrated here with their family from the UK in 1982. Like his parents, Robert and his wife Jo and three daughters have a house on the property at Sassafras near Latrobe. His brother Andrew farms at Sisters Creek, where he hatches chickens for the Sassafras farm, and his wife Carolyn runs the Naturally Nichols food business.
Turkeys, however, are hatched on the mainland and arrive as day-old chicks, to be raised on rations, a large part of which are grown on the farm – more than 2000 tonnes of grain a year is produced for feed – and at the other end of the operation, Nichols Poultry has its own delivery vehicles covering the state.
What the Nichols chooks and turkeys don’t get to eat is important too – no growth hormones, no antibiotics and no GE feed and no animal feed. Also, when a turkey or chicken is processed it is cooled by icy jets of air, rather than the usual practice of being dipped in cold water. This means Nichols birds shrink very little when they are cooked, because they are not releasing absorbed water, and also, when they are frozen, added water does not form icicles that break down the flesh.
However, few of the Christmas turkeys are frozen. If people want a fresh turkey, that is what they get. Holding the birds in a chiller where no oxygen is present does give some flexibility to the process of having so many turkeys ready on the same day.
About six extra staff are added to the roster of 25 for December, and Robert says they manage to get it all done in “reasonably sociable hoursâ€.
They do not completely empty out of turkeys after Christmas, but sometimes it’s close. The year Ansett collapsed, Nichols was left short of turkey chicks and by December 25, only 12 remained to wonder at why they now had so much space to themselves.
“It was scary for us to see so few,†said Robert, who does not want to get that low again. “But you can’t be a turkey processor and not sell a turkey at Christmas – to hell with January I reckon.â€
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