LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Bill Bevans is a turkey guy.
He finds the fat birds with the ugly bald heads endlessly fascinating, and they have kept a roof over his family's heads and food on their plates, although he doesn't eat his own birds.
"Why would I do that when they are all dressed up and ready to go at the grocery store?" he asks.
Bevans produces hundreds of thousands of turkeys on two properties, one north of Waverly and the other south, but the market for the birds has reached a limit, he told the Lincoln Journal Star.
So for the first time since his father, Lloyd Bevans, began raising turkeys on land he bought in the early 1960s, the Bevans farm will produce chickens, too.
As recently as 2007, Nebraska produced enough turkeys to be counted among the nation's top 15 states in providing the traditional Thanksgiving centerpiece.
But by 2009, it had all but fallen off the map.
The Nebraska Turkey Growers Cooperative has dissolved and its Gibbon processing plant, which once employed 400 people who cranked out 65 million pounds of frozen, fresh and smoked meat a year, was foreclosed on, sold, foreclosed on again and finally demolished last year.
In 2008, feed costs soared and the plant hit some production snags despite a $3 million upgrade paid for by the producer-owners. Being independent producers meant they were responsible for all production costs for the Norbest label, and the financial strain turned out to be too much.
Today, Bill Bevans is one of only three large-scale turkey producers in Nebraska. Trucks visit his farm every five weeks to ship birds he grows in rows of long, tin-covered barns to the West Liberty Foods processing plant more than 300 miles away in eastern Iowa. West Liberty is a major supplier of sliced deli meat for the sandwich franchise Subway.
The other two Nebraska producers contract with a Minnesota company, just as far away, he said.
Bevans no longer owns the birds he raises.
It's a different model than the one he knew and took pride in when he was one of 12 members of the Turkey Growers Co-op.
"We're still proud of the birds we produce and the company we produce them for. But it's different than having our own group owning a processing plant and marketing and seeing it in stores," he said.
But his livelihood is more secure. Not being invested in every step of the process has its advantages, including being less vulnerable to the whims of the market.
The Bevans turkey legacy began with an FFA project.
A high school student in the 1930s, Lloyd Bevans built a brooder hut and bought about 400 birds to raise.
He worked with his dad, Warren Bevans, and the project grew into a business. At first Lloyd rented land from farmers, usually for the price of the fertilizer the turkeys left behind.
He would build a temporary fence to confine the birds, moving it about every 20 days, Bill Bevans said.
In the early 1960s, Lloyd and his brother Dick bought the ground along 148th Street about a mile south of Waverly and started raising about 60,000 turkeys a year.
"Which was a lot of turkeys at the time," Bill said.
When Bill Bevans got to high school in the 1970s and joined FFA, he also raised a few turkeys and gave hogs a try.
"After my experience feeding hogs I decided turkeys sounded like a much better deal," he said.
He has been raising turkeys ever since, except for a few years when he went to law school in California and worked in an attorney's office. His dad had a law degree, too, and as a young man wasn't ready to settle down to a life on the farm.
But Bill Bevans had a calling.
"I guess I just have feathers in my blood."
He could be the final generation.
His three sons and one daughter don't plan to follow in his footsteps.
His middle child, 22-year-old John, helps out on the farm and says it's a good business but too stressful.
"Even when we're on vacation, I've never seen my dad on vacation. He's always worried about the birds," John Bevans said, standing outside a 250-foot long barn he had just prepped for an incoming flock of turkey poults. "That is the sort of stress I could do without."
Bevans doesn't like talking about the death of the Norbest label and the Nebraska Turkey Growers Cooperative. That time was "totally devastating" and "a nightmare," he has said.
He's just as excited about turkeys now as he was for that first FFA project, but the lack of a local processing plant makes growing his business difficult. The turkey industry is saturated, he said, and any expansion for growers is likely to happen closer to a processing facility.
So when Tecumseh Farms, producer of Smart Chicken, approached him recently about raising chickens he ran some numbers.
At first, switching to chickens seemed a "tough pill to swallow," but Bill Bevans sees the benefits: more income and diversifying his operation.
He has applied to the Lincoln/Lancaster Planning Commission for a special permit to build six barns with a capacity for 138,000 chickens on the 78-acre farm his dad started.
Bevans said the chicken barns will be built on the hills behind his home and replace some worn-out turkey barns his dad built in the 1960s. His turkey production will continue, with the majority of those in a cluster of barns north of Waverly.
His application will go before the commission Oct. 29.