Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: I'm skating onto thin ice here (as befits such a warm May day) by even mentioning a highly controversial product: foie gras. I can readily imagine a deep split in our customer base and readership between those for whom the rich luxury of a pâté based on fattened goose liver is a transcendent experience, and those who are convinced that production of fatty goose and duck livers through forced feeding is inhumane. I'm going to try to skate right through that one. I've followed the efforts of the Humane Society to shut down Hudson Valley Foie Gras (first, on the grounds that it is adulterated food; more recently, with greater success, that it violates the Clean Water Act). Before I researched it, I had found something repugnant about any forced feeding. Now that I've read a little more, my position has shifted to "still queasy, but reserving judgment." But why am I contemplating the topic at all? It's all a matter of fattening the goose. At Turkana, we have the turkey-chicken-guinea fowl side of our poultry production down to a successful formula. We are satisfied with our product. But waterfowl, both ducks and geese, continue to frustrate. They generally end up smaller than we and our customers would like. Over the past three years, we've tried several different feeding regimens and are still in search of an ideal one.
The fundamental problem, as far as I can determine, is that geese, in particular, far prefer eating grass to eating grain. They also drink a lot of water. Indeed, pick up a gosling and it feels like nothing so much as a fuzzy hot water bottle. Humans, on the other hand, far prefer eating fatty, meaty birds that were fed on grain. You've all heard about the virtues of grass-fed beef, and, in the case of cattle, we're happy to restrict their diet and let them take two years to get to market size. But you rarely hear about grass-fed poultry (pastured, yes, but never purely grass fed), because, it seems, without grain, the birds would not get to an edible size within a reasonable time. Indeed, I deduce from a history of foie gras I found on a Canadian website, that the reluctance of geese to eat what we want them to in order to become the product we want them to be was a well-recognized dilemma for centuries before anyone even thought about producing a pâté de foie gras. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all force fed their geese. The ancient Roman practice was continued in medieval Europe by Jews (who had comprised 15% of the population of the Mediterranean basin in Roman times). The Jewish goose farmers were not trying to produce fatty livers, but simply wanted more fat—schmalz—as a cooking medium. The fatty livers that resulted from the force feeding of geese in the last weeks of their lives were a happy byproduct of this practice. Now, the livers have become the reason for it.
Naturally, we’d rather fatten our geese without force. Even if I thought it were a humane way to feed them, Even if I thought it were a humane way to feed them, who wants to grab 35 geese three times a day and crank feed down their throats? Hence the search for a feed program that would get them to ingest grain voluntarily. Our research to date has been frustrating, because it is so full of contradictory advice. Remarkably, even the "scientific" cooperative extension programs of the various states do not seem to agree with one another. The website of Virginia Tech recommends starting geese on a very high protein turkey starter feed, although we were told early in our goose raising days that such a high protein content would adversely affect their wing development. The Minnesota and Missouri cooperative extensions, in contrast, recommend lower protein chick starter feed in pellet form, because the geese apparently like pellets. Unfortunately, we can find neither local nor organic pellets we have confidence in. A couple of the websites I consulted had truly unusual suggestions, such as a dog food mix. Thinking about goose enthusiasts led me to consult our Hungarian cookbook, because goose is such a big part of Hungarian cuisine. (In America, where herbicides have replaced geese as weed control mechanisms for many crops, goose consumption is miniscule.) The cookbook reported that Hungarian farmers mix a grain mash feed with vegetable oil, which the geese apparently love and which makes it easier for them to swallow (remember, they have very long esophagi). I think we're going to try that, but are having trouble deciding what the proper oil should be. Perhaps a neutral polyunsaturated oil such as canola. Certainly not extra virgin olive oil, which I could see driving up our prices into the $50 per pound range.
My current favorite solution is in a book that we recently found, Successful Duck & Goose Raising, by Prof. Darrel Sheraw. He suggests that the best overall feed for waterfowl is whole wheat, which is high in protein and rich in nutrients (way better than corn on both counts). Wheat is the preferred fattening medium in Canada for pigs, and Dr. Sheraw suggests that wheat, in combination with grass, could be a perfect diet for geese either on its own or in combination with oats. We've been trying the whole wheat out on our little goslings (above), and they do indeed seem to gobble it up. So the plan for this year, as it now stands, is to give them options—mash plus oil, whole wheat kernels, and, of course, grass, which we intend to inter-plant with clover in the areas they graze, perhaps with whole corn cobs thrown in during the last several weeks. Whether this will do the trick we shall see come fall. In the meantime, if others of you have hit on magical solutions that don't involve sticking long tubes down their very long throats, we welcome you to share your knowledge. —Mark Scherzer
