Canada already celebrated its Thanksgiving this year, and they ate less turkey.
In the wake of new high path avian influenza outbreaks, turkeys were hard to come by and it was not just a lack of Canadian-raised birds.
The country’s food inspection also mandated that American poultry could not cross the border without official documentation.
The owner of a meat store in Alberta spoke with NAFB saying that he had no fresh turkey to sell this year and sold out of frozen birds weeks before the holiday.
“I think you’re seeing kind of the perfect storm affecting the turkey supply. I’ve started to see larger companies who normally don’t deal with smaller local places reaching out, looking for local turkeys to fill their gap, and that’s just causing a strain. There’s only so many to go around,” Tyler Metcalfe with Adrian’s Meats explains. “We had one farmer that contacted us, that we normally buy turkey from, and they said that they did have an avian flu outbreak in their barn earlier in the season. But because of that, they were unable to grow new turkeys.”
Another Canadian turkey producer says that he could only ship 20 percent of his orders, and calls the situation worse than the 2015 outbreak.
