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Order your turkey now or you won’t get one for Christmas, say farmers

Published 11:56 27 Sept 2021 BST

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Is Christmas dinner the same without turkey?

If you want a hulking turkey for the dinner table this Christmas, you may have to get your orders in to farmers as soon as possible, warns one turkey farmer. The Traditional Farm Fresh Turkey Association (TFTA) chairwoman, Kate Martin, said that supermarket shelves are more than likely to be turkey-less this Christmas while local farm shops will probably be less affected, reports the Evening Standard. “This year, it’s looking like there is a national shortage of turkeys when we’re talking about supermarket shelves, rather than buying direct from your farm,” Martin told the PA news agency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSz2PBJMFGY Some poultry farms have already received five-times more orders than they received in 2020, says the TFTA, who represent the producers of high-end free-range turkeys. Martin continued: “This situation with turkeys is caused by the fact that European labour is no longer available to us, and they are skilled workers who have been coming to us for years.” While farm shops and private breeders may be unaffected, Martin is reasonably confident that supermarkets will be pretty barren come December. https://twitter.com/BTNStu/status/1442427937538596866 “Come Christmas, if you leave ordering your turkey from your local farm supplier, you are going to be out of luck," she added. While Martin says that local farmers use local labour, she confirms that huge companies rely on labour from the EU, hence why Brexit has caused shortages across the UK in everything from Coca Cola to Nando's. https://twitter.com/marawest29/status/1442403854717370376 Martin then continued: “People are now missing a whole host of their workforce that they have been training and investing in over the last however many years, and those workers are no longer available for us to use on a seasonal basis – they will go find work on mainland Europe instead.”