The farming family putting turkeys on Yorkshire dinner tables this Christmas

“My father, David, used to grow a lot or turkeys at Horsforth,” says Rory.

“We pulled away from them when we came across here in 1997, but a chance conversation with a good friend, Paul Kelly of Kelly Bronze Turkeys, brought us back seven years ago, growing top-quality, free-range outdoor Bronze turkeys."

Avian Flu precautions meant Rory’s outdoor reared birds were brought inside at the end of October.

“They’ve been inside since then,” says Rory. “We get them in July at 6-7 weeks old and rear them through until the second week of December.

"We dry hang them in fridges, which helps with the maturity of the meat and that really does make a lot of difference to the quality.

“We went back into turkey production to add additional income when Will finished his studies at Harper Adams in 2018.

"We’ve a great set up with state-of-the-art fridges, good mechanisation and we’re certified producers. All our turkeys are hand-plucked.

“Anyone can buy a frozen turkey from a supermarket and people will make their own choice, but we know what we are selling is a quality product,” says Will.

“It’s the right amount of fat and marbling in the bird that makes turkey more succulent and tasty. That’s what we specialise in providing through well-cared for birds that are fully mature and have largely lived outside for nearly six months.

"Whether you buy a 5 kilo or 10 kilo turkey from us, they are all the same age.”

Having two farms, as the Kemps have always retained Springfield Farm in Horsforth, means they have two outlets for Christmas.

“We sell around 50/50 between the two farms,” says Rory. “Everything is sold retail, customers order online, pay a small deposit and everyone then comes here or Horsforth on December 23 or before lunchtime Christmas Eve, pay the balance and pick up their turkey.”

Turkeys are a part of the overall farming picture for the Kemps on their 700 acres at Barton-le-Street where their farming has become more geared to livestock and grassland than arable crops in the past 13 years, along with a PYO business in both Barton-le-Street and on their 80 acres at Horsforth.

“Glebe Farm was a wholly arable farm until 2012 when my father died,” says Rory. “That’s when we brought the 30 suckler cows he’d had at Horsforth here to Barton, and that brought about our first 50 acres of grass.

"We’re now around 450 acres of grass and we’ll be calving 185 sucklers from April 12. We’re now predominantly a grassland farm with the expanded suckler herd.

“Our stock is Stabilisers and Aberdeen Angus. Everything is homebred with the exception of bulls, which we buy from high health status farms. We are looking at marketing our own homebred grass-fed beef in future,” says Rory.

‘We’ve kept reducing arable cropping and increasing livestock numbers and currently it looks like we’ve done the right thing because the price of beef is pretty good and price of cereals pretty poor.”

Rory says the decision to go wholeheartedly into cattle also came about when Will returned.

“The main issue was we had a lot of blackgrass that was becoming resistant on the heavier land,’ says Will. “That meant our only option was to go into grass and have cattle on it.

"We live in ‘Rye’-dale, which kind of tells you it’s an area that should be growing grass.”

Rory and Will’s arable cropping includes winter wheat, spring barley, spring beans and fodder beet.

“We have Dawsum and Skyscraper as winter wheat varieties across around 100 acres for the 2026 harvest,” says Will. “Our spring barley will be Diablo, and our beans Fuego.

“Our land varies from fairly wet on the northern side going towards the River Rye in the Vale of Pickering and limestone to the south up into the Howardian Hills.”

Will says he’s looking forward to seeing what comes from the new version of SFI that is meant to be coming in 2026.

“A lot of what we may do depends on what we can get out of that. We’re already in an SFI arrangement and all grassland is a herb rich mix. We also have land in stewardship.”

The PYO operation includes strawberries and raspberries at Barton-le-Street and is run by Rory’s wife Diane.

“I run the Horsforth PYO,” says Rory, alongside their other son Joe who lives there and handles all the day-to-day work.

“We start by selling tulips in the spring, wildflowers then strawberries, raspberries, back to wildflowers, sunflowers, pumpkins and we are currently selling Christmas trees. Springfield Farm is where we started with PYO in 1984.”

Rory says that he and his sons are the third and fourth generations of the Kemp farming family.

“My father David took on Springfield Farm in 1952 and we bought Glebe Farm in 1997. Dad set up a dairy herd which was quite productive.

“I was looking for somewhere to relocate it in the mid-90s because we’d outgrown the farm at Horsforth, but as a result of being able to sell our milk quota for a decent sum, and our dairy herd, coming out of milk on May 10, 1996 we were able to buy Glebe Farm where I’d worked as a student in 1981-82 and came here to what was then a 480-acre owned farm and we rented other land.”

Rory has attended the two main farmer demonstrations in London as well as in York and says he has his own take on the family farm tax proposals.

“My version is that (at the moment) I’m going to live forever and that will mean I will live until the next Government when hopefully it will be put right for the next generation as Diane and I are about to become grandparents before Christmas, as Sioned, Will’s wife, is looking forward to their first child.”

To order your turkey visit: https://www.kemps.farm/