FREDERICKSBURG, Texas – We are just days away from sitting down at the table and enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, however that may look for your family this year.
Ahead of the holiday, a Fredericksburg ranch is encouraging families to understand where their dinner comes from.
"We will catch the turkeys and put them in a big trailer," said Taylor Collins, owner of Roam Ranch. "And the families are going to come in the trailer and say 'That's my turkey. Something about that turkey looks amazing, delicious. I love the feathers and I want to keep him.' And so we'll pick that turkey out and we'll actually hand it to the family as a living bird and from that point on we're as hands on or hands off as they want to be."
This year 80 out of their 200 birds will go to appreciating families.
The turkeys, though, aren’t just delicious – what they leave behind is just as impressive.
"The life that they lived has created a positive return on our ranch and on our soil," said Collins. "So a turkey scratches it and helps break it apart and for any square foot in Texas there should be about 30,000 seeds in it but if it's compact those seeds don't have the ability to germinate."
That soft soil lets grass seed take root on a ground Collins and his wife are regenerating from a savanna grassland to pastures capable of raising livestock.
The two are first generation ranchers who were born and raised in Austin.
"These feathers, it's all carbon material that will get broken down and feed the biology in the soil and we're going to have more biodiversity, more growth, and more productivity," said Collins. "I mean, what they can do for the land is just incredible."
"We started having wild birds come into the flock," he added. "We're just creating an ecosystem where animals want to be a part of it."
He’s connecting nature back to the way it was.
"It just gives you a lot of hope that we can correct and we can fix a lot of the things that humans have degraded, and many times unintentionally, but nature is always going to work in a way to enrich its systems if you just step back and set the stage and allow her to do her job," said Collins.