Farmer forced to give free-range turkeys away to struggling families after bird flu sparked frozen supermarket panic-buying

Last year was his first year of farming after swapping from a corporate career. He started with 250 turkeys and sold them all and this year has reared 500 birds, complete with playing them classical music and getting them a pumpkin at Halloween, but sales of his free-range turkeys are down by 90 per cent compared with 2021.

However, he has teamed up with a local charity to distribute turkeys to families struggling to afford food this Christmas and is asking people to buy a £10 voucher to put towards the cost of the turkey.

He says many of his customers have admitted buying a frozen turkey because of the uncertainty surrounding the poultry industry and didn’t realise his turkeys were being reared and produced as normal following posts he made on social media this week highlighting the situation – which, he adds, other small scale producers have also found themselves in.

He said: “It has raised awareness and people are picking up on it but it is too late. I was hoping we might catch people in time for them to think again but once they have bought one, they are not going to buy another.

"All the news has been about turkey shortages. There is no shortage – there is an over supply. We are more worried about selling them than avian flu. Sales are way behind where they were last year, people have bought frozen and there is no market.”

Due to the costs involved with producing the birds he says it is impossible to keep them until next year so whether they have been purchased or not they “have to go somewhere”.

Mr White has been in touch with a charity local to his farm at Laneshaw Bridge on the North Yorkshire/Lancashire border and is hoping some of the surplus turkeys can be given to families struggling financially.

He said: “Now it is about hoping people want to help us out and help other people out who can’t afford a turkey. We have found a charity to work with to distribute them. If we can get this off the ground and get people something decent on the table then some good will have come out of it.”

The experience has made Mr White think differently about his business plans for next year and has called for a different approach to restrictions being imposed around avian flu.

The area he lives in was less affected than other parts of the country but restrictions are the same and impacting smaller businesses.

He added: “There is a need to reassess the risk. Look at somewhere like us, we are as far away from the coast as possible in both directions. We are fairly okay, it affected other parts of the country more than others. We need to look at the fuller impact of those (secure areas) and do more strategic planning.”

Earlier this week, the chief executive of the British Poultry Council spoke at an Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and called for risks to be re-defined.

Richard Griffiths said: “Risk must be expanded to include commercial viability. The conditions of this outbreak are unlike anything we have seen before. More farms have been affected and because of that the concept of ‘risk’ has changed. Contingency plans and measures must reflect that change. This is about our businesses, and ultimately our food security. We have to be able to feed ourselves.”