PALMER — Thanksgiving is still more than a week away, but the big rush is about to start at Triple-D Farm & Hatchery.

Anthony Schmidt has between 600 and 700 turkeys ready for the big day. Well, the birds huddled against the chill don’t know they’re ready for the big day, and that’s probably best.

In the past, Schmidt said he butchered about 450 turkeys for the holiday, but he always sold out.

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“People would call on Thanksgiving and ask if I had any turkeys left,” he said. “I tell them mine’s in the oven and we’re about ready to eat.”

So he’s hoping a few hundred more birds will fill the orders he thinks might come in. He couldn’t pin down how many turkeys are spoken for,  but he estimates between 250 to 300 are already sold, including about 30 customers who pick up their birds and then order another for next year. Schmidt said most of his customers come from the Valley and Anchorage, but he also gets people from Fairbanks, Valdez and a few from the Kenai Peninsula.

Still, pre-orders are down from last year, he said, blaming the recent economic problems facing the nation.

Those problems have hit home for him on the turkey farm as well.

“I’ve got about 50 tons of feed in them from babies straight through to now,” he said, but feed prices have doubled since a year and a half ago.

“We’re watching the economy,” Schmidt said. “We don’t know whether to expand, or what. We’ll have a better feel for it next spring. I like turkey in my diet, but I don’t want to eat it every day.”

He’s already suffered some unexpected losses.

Schmidt has about 500 birds at a site off Inner Springer Loop and this past summer while the fireworks went off at the nearby state fair, the birds spooked and piled on top of each other, killing some 200 of them. That was the first time he’d kept turkeys there.

“Next year I’ll have to have somebody out there to keep them from piling on each other — at least until the fireworks are done,” he said.

The money days this year will come Nov. 24 and 25 when people pick up their orders.

Anthony and a crew of about 16 will start butchering the birds Wednesday. Working from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., he hopes they can get it all done in three to four days.

“Those are long days,” Schmidt said as he gave a tour of the facility where the turkeys, chickens, pheasants and other fowl are processed.

He’s been working at the farm for the past 12 years and has lived in Alaska for 25 years.

But it was his work on farms in the Yakima Valley of Washington state that got him thinking about raising birds for meat.

Not in a good way.

“I grew up working on farms, doing chores,” Schmidt said. “In high school, I worked on a poultry farm. Back then I said I would never do this. I guess that’s when you learn you should never say never.”

Contact T.C. Mitchell at valleylife@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.