North Carolina turkeys have been a staple of Thanksgiving dinners around the country for decades. A few, however, have been lucky enough to receive the presidential “pardon,” a tradition celebrated on the White House lawn for more than 70 years.
Reports of which president started pardoning turkeys run the gamut. Some say it was Abraham Lincoln. Others say it was John F. Kennedy, who in 1963 said, “Let’s keep him going,” and began “unofficially” sparing a fortunate tom or a hen (male and female turkeys). The White House Association states that it wasn’t until President George H.W. Bush pardoned a lucky tom in the Rose Garden in 1989 that the ceremony became official.
Several of these lucky birds have hailed from North Carolina. In 1992, Bruce Cuddy, longtime North Carolina turkey farmer and former president of the National Turkey Federation, traveled to Washington, D.C., from Marshville with one of his turkeys for Bush to pardon.
“I remember traveling through the Charlotte airport carrying a live, big turkey, and people staring at us like we were crazy,” his son Brent recalled.
We caught up with Bruce Cuddy, owner and operator of Cuddy Farms, to learn more about the big business of turkey farming. Today, Cuddy Farms sits on a beautiful, rolling piece of land in Albemarle and is responsible for the production of about 13 million turkey-hatching eggs annually. But in its heyday in the 1980s and ’90s, Cuddy Farms, formerly located in Marshville, was not only North Carolina’s top turkey breeding company, but it was the largest turkey breeding company in the country.
The origin of Cuddy Farms actually began in Ontario, Canada. Mac Cuddy, Bruce’s father, founded the company in 1950 after serving his country in World War II.
“My dad came out of the war, went to work selling land to war veterans, ended up buying a farm with pigs and turkeys and row crop, and liked the turkey part of the business,” said Bruce Cuddy. By the 1970s, the Cuddys recognized the importance of a U.S.-based operation and selected Marshville as home. The small town in Union County, known to most as the town where country music star Randy Travis was born, provided a more temperate climate for hatching turkeys, a closer proximity to consumers, and affordable land and labor.
Other major players had operations in the state, but Cuddy Farms continued to pioneer and lead the way.
“In the ’80s and ’90s, we processed turkeys and also supplied whole birds, specializing in deli meats at one point,” Cuddy said. “We had about 2,500 employees in the early ’90s and were hatching about 800,000 poults — or one-day-old turkeys — a week.”
Between North Carolina and Minnesota, which leads the nation today in turkey production, more than 70 million turkeys are produced annually — and that’s just in those two states.
“Turkey is one of the healthiest meats besides fish,” according to Cuddy. “It’s more expensive to grow than a chicken. Plus, a turkey takes at least double the amount of time to grow to a market weight than a chicken.”
Healthy or not, Americans have a voracious appetite for the bird.
