Where Your Thanksgiving Meal Comes From
Green beans are from Wisconsin, sweet potatoes are from North Carolina and other lessons in U.S. agricultural geography.
Made in Minnesota (or North Carolina, or Arkansas).
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North AmericaI’ll be cooking duck for Thanksgiving this year. That’s partly because we’re having too small a crowd for a whole turkey, but also because duck is great (here’s a hard-to-mess-up recipe). I know exactly where our duck will be coming from — a farm in Ferndale, New York. But as I contemplated our meal plans recently, my thoughts drifted to a for-me inevitable place: I bet the U.S. Department of Agriculture has data on duck production by state. Wonder where they raise the most ducks?
It’s Indiana, by a mile. The state’s 14.6 million ducks sold in 2017 came mainly from one producer, family-owned Maple Leaf Farms — “the first Duck Dynasty,” as a family member once put it. It’s located in Leesburg, about midway between South Bend and Fort Wayne, although it contracts out much of the actual duck-raising to nearby farmers. It also has a sister company, Down Inc., a down and feather bedding manufacturer. A lot of U.S. duck meat is exported to Asia, but Maple Leaf’s is chiefly for domestic consumption, although it now has breeding operations in China too. Oh, and the numbers here are a few years old because the most recent state data I could find were from the U.S. Census of Agriculture, which is conducted every five years.