The United States will raise about 199 million turkeys in 2026, and most of them belong to a short list of companies, two of them household names. Turkey is organised like chicken, with the company owning the bird and the farmer owning the barn, with one difference: in turkey, farmers also own some of the plants.
The scale
USDA's September forecast has 199 million turkeys raised in 2026, up 3 percent on a revised 193.5 million in 2025, the low year. Minnesota leads at 34 million, then North Carolina 29.5 million, Arkansas 21 million, Indiana 20 million, Missouri 16 million, Virginia 14.5 million and Iowa 11.5 million.
Plants slaughtered 189 million young turkeys under federal inspection in 2025 at an average of 31.9 pounds live, 6.1 billion pounds of live weight, for 4.84 billion pounds ready to cook, 5 percent under 2024. USDA expects 5.13 billion pounds in 2026.
Who owns the processors
USDA counts birds, not companies. The names come from company filings and the trade press.
Butterball is the largest and the one everyone knows. It is 52.5 percent owned by Seaboard Corporation, a listed Kansas company that also runs the pork packer at Guymon, as a non-controlling stake, with the balance held by the Maxwell family's group that sold Seaboard its half in 2010. Butterball runs three primary plants and two further-processing plants across North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas, with capacity near a billion pounds a year, about 7,100 staff, and a head office at Garner, North Carolina. Seaboard's filing says Butterball is disproportionately dependent on its North Carolina plant. It closed its Jonesboro, Arkansas plant in February 2025.
Jennie-O belongs to Hormel Foods, the listed Minnesota company, which raises most of the turkeys it needs itself. In April 2026 Hormel completed the sale of its whole-bird business, the Melrose, Minnesota plant, the Swanville feed mill and the grower contracts, to Life-Science Innovations, which renamed the plant Legacy Turkey. Hormel kept the Jennie-O brand and the ground turkey, deli and bacon lines. Butterball and Jennie-O were the two largest in the last public ranking.
Cargill was third in that ranking and has since left. It shut its Springdale, Arkansas plant in August 2025, the site going to Tyson in December, and in March 2026 confirmed the sale of its Dayton, Virginia turkey operations, the Shenandoah Valley's largest, to Pitman Family Farms, a California family poultry company.
Farbest Foods, Jasper, Indiana, owned by the Seger family since 1998, raises more than 600 million live pounds a year and was fourth in that ranking.
Perdue Farms is private and family owned; it cut the second shift at its Washington, Indiana turkey plant in October 2025, about 300 jobs, citing changing demand and shrinking flocks. Foster Farms, owned by Atlas Holdings since 2022, ended fresh turkey at Turlock, California in May 2025. Cooper Farms, Oakwood, Ohio, has been family owned since 1938. Prestage Farms processes turkey at St. Pauls, North Carolina.
The farmer-owned plants
This is where turkey differs from chicken. Chicken has no farmer-owned integrator of any size. Turkey has three.
West Liberty Foods in Iowa was formed in 1996 by the Iowa Turkey Growers Cooperative and still describes its growers as owners. Dakota Provisions at Huron, South Dakota was formed in 2004 by 44 independent growers, many from Hutterite colonies, who still govern it, and ships more than 200 million pounds a year. Michigan Turkey Producers is a grower cooperative founded in 1998, supplied by 53 family farms, harvesting about 5.3 million toms a year.
Most birds are still raised on contract. The National Turkey Federation told Congress in 2011 that about 80 percent of turkeys were raised under production contracts with family farms, and the USDA Census shows the contract share rising from 64 percent of turkeys in 2002 to 72 percent in 2022. The difference from chicken is who holds the other end of the contract: in these three cases, the growers themselves.
How concentrated it is
The last public figure put the four largest processors, Butterball, Jennie-O, Cargill and Farbest, at 56 percent of all turkey pounds processed in 2021. Cargill has since sold its plants and Hormel has sold its whole birds, so the top of the table is being rearranged, and no public share exists for 2025. Turkey is less concentrated than beef, which sits at 85 percent for four firms, and the plants are spread from Minnesota to the Carolinas.
What moves the supply
Two things, and both are outside the processors' control.
Bird flu. Turkeys live longer than broilers, so a barn is exposed for more weeks. APHIS counted more than 3.8 million commercial turkeys lost to highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2025. In 2026 the losses were 1.2 million meat turkeys in the first four months, none from late April to July, then 119,300 in August and 544,900 in September, with a new Iowa flock confirmed on October 28. The avian flu article follows the cases.
Mexico. About 8.7 percent of US turkey production was exported in 2025, 420 million pounds, and 79 percent of it went to Mexico, which buys mostly dark meat and mechanically separated turkey. USDA expects 461 million pounds in 2026. Mexico is the market that sets the price of a turkey thigh.