November 26, 2011

Phil Crozier has lost count of the birds he’s had relationships with – turkeys that is. The man who is about to exit the turkey business after almost 50 years, provides  reporter SUE NEWMAN with an insight into his world and his birds.

It’s been a long relationship and it’s had its ups and downs, but Phil Crozier wouldn’t give up one minute of the years he’s spent making a living out of turkeys.
The blokes mightn’t be the most attractive birds around and the females mightn’t be much better, but when it comes to making your living from feathers, you can’t get much better than a turkey, he says. And he knows, probably better than any man in New Zealand, what it is that makes the birds tick.
Phil’s been a turkey farmer for nearly 50 years, starting out with two hens and one gobbler, peaking with a flock of 70,000. He’s now cut back to a more manageable 20,000 birds. Along the way he’s made money, lost money, won and lost markets, made hundreds of friends and eaten more turkey than he cares to remember.
But all of that could become just a memory shortly if Phil and wife Judith’s plans to sell up are realised.
When he started out, Phil was just a kid, a farm boy who raised a few ducks for pocket money. A friend of his mum’s gave him a couple of turkeys, suggesting he might make more money. With a gobbler added to his flock he quickly found himself with 100 little turkeys to sell. “I was just 14 then and discovered I had quite a lucrative wee business.”
He might have had a few early wins, but learning to raise turkeys commercially was an exercise fraught with disaster as often as it was with success.
“Every time a turkey farmer has a good day it’s time to start worrying because you know it’s not going to last,” he said.
But even in those early years, there were enough wins to keep the teenager interested, so interested that when he headed overseas as a raw 20-year-old he packed in 33 countries and managed to visit turkey farms in most of them.
When he returned home Phil decided it was time to get serious about turkeys and began to build his flock. Seven hundred birds the first year, with a goal of 7000. He hit that but stalled for a few years.
“It wasn’t until I met Judith and got married that I really began to do this properly,” he said.
And properly meant more birds, more sheds, bigger markets. Judith became the marketing arm of the business, while Phil focused on raising birds.
They’re easy birds to raise, likeable even. They’re tough and tolerate plenty of handling. The only thing they don’t like is getting wet. Leave them in the rain and chances are they’ll catch a cold and die.
Croziers Turkeys is one of just three turkey producers left in New Zealand, with food giant Tegel taking up 80 per cent of the market.
Phil’s operation has the free-range tick for its meat birds. Hens are kept inside during the laying season – can’t have the eggs dropped all over the farm – but they also spend a fair bit of their lives in the paddock.
Unlike many other areas of agriculture, anything associated with the poultry industry comes under one regulatory umbrella – poultry farmers, processors, egg layers, feed millers, there’s one set of rules that covers them all. That has also meant the poultry industry is one of the few that doesn’t have an imported element.
With almost half a century raising turkeys behind him, Phil says he’s loved every minute, the highs and the lows. Probably the most extreme example of fortunes that can wax and wane came when he won a national taste test for free-range turkey versus shed-raised turkey.
“That was a bit like winning the Olympics, the turkey Olympics, but the next day I had the inspectors here and they closed my processing plant down. It took months to get it back up and running again and then they told me, the updating that had to be done could have been done later, it didn’t have to be done immediately.”
That’s the turkey business.
And then there was the time when Tegel decided to get out of turkeys. At that stage, Croziers was the only supplier left in the country and it upped its output to meet national demand. A couple of years later, Tegel decided to come back and they did so with a vengeance.
“We were at loggerheads to keep our share. We lost that head to head and we lost virtually everything we had.”
But with tenacity, innovation and sheer dogged determination the Croziers hung in and rebuilt their business. Phil looks back and says the turkey business is in something of a time-warp.
“We’re not spending the huge dollars that are spent on dairy and cropping farms.”
In all those years, not a lot has changed – he’s still raising turkeys, hatching eggs and selling turkeys and turkey meat. He still milks turkey gobblers and inseminates hens every week. That keeps egg production churning.
The only things that have changed are the demand for further processing of turkey meat in addition to whole birds and a growing market for smaller birds.
It’s a short life if you’re destined for the oven bag, but if you can make it as a layer then you’ll hang around the farm for a few extra years. Left to run wild, turkeys would probably live to five or six.
He’s still a fan of turkey as a meat and says he can’t understand why it’s not eaten year round, compared to other meats it’s now in the mid-price range.
And he’s still a fan of the birds. Yes the gobblers can get a bit nasty and give you the odd peck, but generally they’re good natured, inquisitive and pretty friendly.
Yes, he’ll miss his turkeys when the business is sold, but he’s not looking beyond today at the moment.
After 49 years in the business, he still goes out for a walk among the turkeys when he gets home – whatever the time.
If he had to pick a perfect outcome, it would be for a buyer who wanted to continue the farm as an independent operation and who might have a bit of work for him so he can keep in touch.
Phil’s also a man with boundless energy and a little wistfully he suggests that instead of selling, it would also be easy to wind up production again.