Meet Peanut Butter and Jelly: The 2021 National Thanksgiving Turkeys
Many of those who celebrate Thanksgiving will choose to serve turkey as the traditional main course to friends and family. Since George H. W. Bush’s first term as president of the United States (1989), each year the current president will formally pardon a set of turkeys and present them as the National Thanksgiving Turkeys at the White House. These special turkeys then get to live out their lives closer to where they were raised with the guarantee of never being the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving meal.
In 2021, The National Turkey Federation Chairman Phil Seger selected turkey grower Andrea Welp from Jasper, Indiana, as the home of that year’s Thanksgiving Turkey, and from there, our story begins. The grower will then socialize a flock of turkeys and evaluate which two may be the most docile and well-behaved for the presentation at the White House. The turkeys names are then selected by a local elementary school and then transported to Washington D.C. where they get a luxury stay at the Willard Intercontinental Washington D.C. Hotel and they were officially introduced as Peanut Butter and Jelly.
Our team had the chance to visit Peanut Butter and Jelly this past week in their retirement at the Purdue Animal Science Research and Education Center (ASREC). At about two and a half years old, the turkeys are healthy and were playing in the leaves when we visited.
We spoke with Jason Fields, the caretaker of Peanut Butter and Jelly as well as the manager of the Poultry Unit at the Purdue ASREC. When asked about the turkey’s life at the farm Fields shared,
“They have their own enclosure and we lock them up every night [for their safety]. If the weather gets too extreme we have air conditioning and heat for them in there too.”
The Turkeys greeted us as they do many visitors to the farm and we were given the chance to give them some blueberries for a snack.
“We have to manage their diet to make sure they don’t grow too big too fast and give them plenty of exercise and plenty of fresh air” Fields added. “It’s very unusual because it only takes about 17-18 weeks to grow out a turkey to be butchered for consumption.”
We asked about Indiana’s Turkey industry and were impressed when Fields shared, “The Poultry Industry is huge in Indiana and Turkey specifically, we are the fourth-largest producer of Turkey in the United States so about 20 million birds per year.”
This year’s National Thanksgiving Turkeys, Liberty and Bell, pardoned by President Joe Biden earlier this week are from Wilmar, Minnesota. Taking part in this tradition is an honor for the growers selected and a great way to educate and inform the public about this area of agriculture.
