Saving Rare Breeds

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That New York Times story — and the birds' subsequent popularity with members of Slow Food USA, an organization of food lovers across the country attempting to connect "ecology and gastronomy" accelerated a wave of attention launched in 1987 by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC), a nonprofit conservation organization headquartered in Pittsboro, North Carolina. (See "How You Can Help," below.)

In 2000, the conservancy became the first U.S. recipient of the Slow Food biodiversity award. The ALBC's executive director at that time, Don Bixby, nominated four traditional American heritage turkeys — Bronze, Narragansett, Bourbon Red and Jersey Buff — to Slow Food's Ark USA, a program that seeks out and promotes endangered regional foods.

The Bronze was nominated because of its identity with Thanksgiving. The Narragansett, named after Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, was the first turkey variety developed in the United States. The Bourbon Red was developed in and named after Bourbon County, Kentucky; the rich red color of its plumage resembles the whiskey for which that county is better recognized. The Jersey Buff was a mid-20th century product of New Jersey. In 2001, these four varieties of heritage turkeys officially "boarded" the Ark USA.

"All were commercially viable until the turkey industry moved indoors in the 1960s, and the industry switched to Broad Breasted White turkeys," says Bixby, now technical program director of the Conservancy. Today, Reese of Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch is looking for growers to help him raise enough heritage turkeys to meet the demand for the birds he can now sell at $4 a pound, and other people who raise old-time turkeys are revving up their operations, too.

The dramatic increase in the popularity of heritage turkeys among consumers is only one of the latest developments in a 27-year effort to conserve a number of endangered livestock and poultry breeds. The ALBC has led the movement, supported by private breeders such as Reese and Glenn Drowns of Calamus, Iowa, who focuses on the preservation of poultry, including turkeys, through his Sand Hill Preservation Center.

Censuses taken in 1997 and 2003 have helped measure how threatened particular turkey varieties and other kinds of poultry are. Depending on the numbers, poultry are assigned a status ranging from "critical," (fewer than 500 breeding birds identified in North America) to "recovering," (breeds once listed as critical and now having more than 5,000 breeding birds in North America, but still in need of monitoring). Most of the turkey varieties remain on the critical list, although the numbers of some varieties are up significantly. As a species, the breeding population has increased threefold in the past five years, from 1,335 to 4,275, according to Marjorie Bender, the Conservancy's research and technical program manager. In a recently concluded Conservancy-sponsored research project, heritage turkeys showed better disease resistance and health than industrial strains under range conditions.

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