Turkey farmer John Zimmerman may be thousands of miles away from his Minnesota flock on a work trip, but he is carefully monitoring the the birds that might become your Thanksgiving dinner on his smartphone – as well as the robot taking care of them.
“We’ve got it down to a pretty good science,” Zimmerman, who raises 150,000 birds of varying sizes per year, tells The Independent. “I can control my barns from here in DC – technology has come a long way.”
Zimmerman is in the nation’s capital for the event that puts his industry on the map every year: the pardoning of the Presidential turkeys at the White House. This year, as chairman of the National Turkey Federation (NTF), he has had the honor of raising the two lucky birds, Peach and Blossom, and presenting them to President Joe Biden.
But although those VIPs (very important poultry) were handraised, Zimmerman says that the industry is swiftly moving on from most traditional, manual farming practices.
“We’re pretty tech savvy,” he says. “If we can use technology to improve the lives of our birds and our farmers, we’re going to do it.”
Minnesota is the top turkey-producing state in the U.S., with some 600 farms producing around 46 million birds a year – the majority of which will head to dinner tables in time for Thanksgiving. Zimmerman himself has been in the game for decades, having first started by assisting his father on their family farm in Northfield, before taking the reins in 1999.
From his phone Zimmerman can monitor and adjust just about everything back at the farm, from the heating and ventilation systems, to lights and the feeding systems. “I can turn on fans, turn off fans, turn on lights, turn on feed systems, or let the computer make all those choices anytime,” he says.
Fusing tech and turkey farming shows no sign of slowing down. Zimmerman says he is currently trialling a robot turkey farmer that he hopes can be used to make labor more efficient and also improve the welfare of his livestock.
The robot – called the Wild Goose Chaser – was originally designed to deal with the growing problem of Canadian Geese, which cause millions of dollars of damage a year, according to Digi Labs, a Minnesota-based company that created it.
Along with other farmers, Zimmerman started talking to Digi Labs to explore the use of the Goose Chaser for other poultry purposes.
“It’ll travel up and down the barn and has different environmental sensors on there,” he tells The Independent. “So you get a map of your barn; temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, ammonia gas and whatnot, it can tell you if there’s any birds that have died and where they are.”
“It can tell you if the birds are more or less active day to day and if they’re hanging out in one end of the barn versus the other – things like that.” Though the technology is still in its infancy, Zimmerman hopes that it could be used in future to detect if a bird is sick ahead of time and assist with their removal from the flock.
“The intent is to reduce manual labor, but it’s really an animal welfare device – an extra set of eyes and ears and a nose in the farm 24/7 – to monitor the environment to make sure that that environment is perfect to raise those turkeys in,” he says.
One flock that was not monitored by robots or phone apps however were the ones that travelled to D.C this week. The birds being prepped for pardon were raised in a tight pack of 40 (rather than the usual thousands), and as such require a more manual rearing process – hand fed and watered and, according to Zimmerman, provided with a playlist of polka music, AC/DC and Metallica.
“I told many people that it was more work to raise those 40 birds than to raise 40,000 in a modern barn,” Zimmerman says.
“You had to go up there and physically be with them and check them, and load feed and move water, you know, all the manual labor we used to do as kids. I will say – I don’t miss it.”
However, technological advances should not be at the expense of the values of good hard work. Zimmerman is determined that his 9-year-old son Grant, who attended Monday’s presidential pardoning, will know those values, should he choose to enter the industry too.
“When we were kids there was much more manual labor with the feeding and the care of the birds, and that’s not a bad thing. I think you learn a lot about valuable lessons from that, but we’ve automated some of that,” he says.
“It’s a better time management thing, where you can address the more pressing concerns quicker because you have all the information at your fingertips now. So yeah there’s still a lot of work, it’s just a different type of work: more cerebral and less manual.”
Zimmerman will, of course, be eating his livestock on Thanksgiving but he wants to remind everyone that the last Thursday in November isn’t the only appropriate time: “You can eat turkey any day of the year,” he says.
