RAISING TURKEYS IN DETROIT

In This Detroit Suburb, Some Neighbors Are Real Turkeys

Fowl Farm Has Raised Birds for Decades, as Sprawl Grew Around It

 

This is a busy time of year at Roperti's, a turkey farm near Detroit. Birds have been raised here since 1948.

LIVONIA, Mich.—Roperti's Turkey Farm doesn't market its birds door-to-door. But sometimes it just works out that way.

One morning a few years ago, Karen Todorov was getting ready to leave for work when she spotted a pair of turkeys in her backyard looking at her. Recognizing them as fugitives from Roperti's, she called the farm to report the escape.

That Thanksgiving, Ms. Todorov paid a return visit to the farm, which lies just across a chain-link fence from her backyard in this Detroit suburb. "We have been buying them there off and on ever since," she says. (click below to read more)

Roperti's began selling turkeys at its farm here in 1948 with a flock of about 50 birds along a stretch of Five Mile Road, back when farms dominated Livonia. Since then, Livonia has grown into one of Detroit's busiest suburbs, and Roperti's has grown with it, coexisting with the region's suburban sprawl. In an area that now has sidewalks, street lights and a half-dozen subdivisions of upscale colonial homes just outside of Detroit city limits, Roperti's raises about 4,000 birds a year.

The turkeys arrive each August from a Holland, Mich., grower when they are about nine weeks old. From August to November, they are kept in a fenced-in yard that runs right up to the sidewalk on Five Mile, allowing the turkeys and the everyday jogger, dog walker or driver a chance to take a gander at each other.

"I fatten them up. They get to run around and have a good time and play," says owner Christine Roperti, 66, who takes phone orders for weeks leading up to Thanksgiving from a makeshift call center in her kitchen and back porch. On the porch, in a glass case, is a stuffed fox, once caught in the farm.

Play time ends each year on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. The turkeys are shuffled out of the yard, slaughtered, cleaned, dressed, bagged and refrigerated in a 15-step, 40-person weekend operation that includes Ms. Roperti, her husband, her two sons and her daughter-in-law.

Christine Roperti

Much of that work takes place in a white barn behind the house. The slaughtered turkeys are put through a feather-stripping machine, then to the "review room," where workers go over each bird with a keen eye and a pair of needle-nose pliers.

The neighbors, by and large, have adapted. "It helped when we finally got air conditioning for those days in August when it can really smell," says Rose Warmann, who has lived less than a block from the farm for 42 years.

Ms. Roperti's father, Tom, a onetime auto worker at Ford Motor Co., bought the six-acre plot in 1942 to set up a dairy farm. He switched to turkeys in 1948 on the advice of a friend.

Ms. Todorov, 64, says Roperti's reminds her of the late-1940s and 1950s, when Livonia served as the produce aisle for the then-fast-growing Motor City. "Livonia had a lot of little farms sprinkled throughout the area, and people from Detroit would take a Sunday drive out to the country and drive up and down the dirt roads out here, buying fresh tomatoes or corn," says Ms. Todorov, whose grandfather kept a small farm nearby. "The farm is really a nod back to those days."

Livonia today is a town of nearly 100,000 people, with housing subdivisions, malls and warehouses spread across its 36 square miles, and two major Interstate highways coursing through it.

There have only been a few occurrences of the birds showing up outside the fence. Ms. Roperti recalls one such instance when she was 17 years old. The local high school called her father to retrieve one of his turkeys after a student nabbed it and set it free in the gym during a Sadie Hawkins dance.

Ms. Todorov, who has lived in a subdivision behind the farm for 25 years, says that when the pen is crowded, the turkeys are oddly silent. "After Thanksgiving, you can hear the remaining turkeys, and they're happy, because they think they've made it," she says. "But you know that they're only being saved for Christmas."

Longtime real-estate agent and developer Larry Henney built the nearby Deerwoods complex of about a dozen upscale houses with the subdivision ending about five yards from the turkey farm fence. Mr. Henney, a customer of the farm, says he was up front with prospective buyers about the gobbling neighbors and what goes on in the barn.

"Some folks it bothered, and some folks it didn't," says Mr. Henney, who finished the subdivision in 2006. "But in most cases the wind travels from the west to the east, so there really isn't any smell."

He says his work crews took special note of the turkeys one day during construction when they had to take down a tree. "It was that time of year, and the yard was loaded with turkeys," he recalls. "So when we knocked down the tree, it shook the ground and scared the turkeys so much that they literally passed out."

They popped back up about 20 seconds later. "It was amazing to see," he says.

Yvonne Curis lives in one of the Deerwoods houses and sees the birds up close when she goes out to the cul-de-sac to check her mail. "It's better having the farm there than a rowdy bunch of neighbors," she says. "It also gives you a little taste of the country even though you are in the city."

She refuses, though, to buy a bird from the farm. "I don't want to look at an animal that I know is going to be killed and eaten," she says. Instead, she says she recently bought a "19-pound Butterball" at the grocery store.

On Monday, customers who ordered ahead will begin lining up at the barn, picking up their bagged bird and cooking instructions.

The turkeys range from 18 pounds for a hen to as much as 40 pounds for a tom, and sell for $3.29 a pound.

Roperti's rarely ships its turkeys. But each year, Ms. Roperti sends one off to her sister in Florida. In exchange, she gets an annual shipment of filet mignon, homemade gnocchi, crab claws and key lime pie, all of which she serves at Thanksgiving.

"All my family works here and we really don't want to see another turkey," she says.