Way back in the late 1970s, William Miloski was apprehensive about the future of Miloski’s Poultry Farm, a property now worth millions to developers. Almost 50 years later, the next generation of poultry-farming Miloskis says Granddad can rest easy — they aren’t going anywhere.
“I plan on dying here,” says Mark Miloski Jr., gazing into the distance at his family’s 30-acre turkey farm in Calverton, where there’s nothing taller than the tree line and the poults have the run of the wide-open space. “Somewhere over on that field—that’s the plan, anyway. My goal is to get it to 100 years and then we’ll take it from there.”
From the Ground Up
Brought up on the multi-generational farm, Mark Jr., 36, is a college graduate who took to the family poultry business full time at 20. His father, Mark Sr., began hand-shoveling manure there when he was 17. His grandfather, William, or Will, the family patriarch and farm’s founder, only retired once “his legs stopped working.” He lived on the farm from the early 1940s until his passing in 2013.
Ironically, in 1977, The New York Times wrote a story called “Turkey Farms: A Vanishing Breed,” in which Will Miloski professed that while business was good, turkey farming was “on the way out.” He admitted that he would “continue as long as I can go. But I don’t know what’s going to happen when I die.”
Well, all three living generations of Miloskis — including 95-year-old matriarch Ann Miloski — still live modestly in three homes on the family’s vast property. The turkey farm, one of a handful on the East End, is thriving, with Thanksgiving turkeys starting at $7.25 a pound. And it remains a Miloski family rule: to work on the farm, you need to live on the farm.
Next door, on the other side of the narrow tree line, there are signs of development in progress — construction trucks, mountains of dirt. The neighboring property, according to Mark Jr., will soon be home to a big grocery store and a residential apartment building. It goes without saying the Miloskis have fielded some offers over the years.
“I ask for $35 million, give or take. I’m like, ‘We’ll start there,’” he says, only half joking and beginning to eerily echo his grandfather’s words back in the late ’70s. “What am I gonna do, sit in a mansion somewhere in Florida? This is where I’ll be and I’ll keep going as long as I can. I’ve got a good life. I’ve got a supermarket right there [at the Miloski roadside retail store] and I eat good. That’s my house. My mom and dad live back there. My grandma and grandpa live back there… It’s all I know.”
Adds Mark Miloski Sr.: “I told him when I pass away, he can do anything he wants, but he’s probably worse than I am now. He’s really into farming. And I’m telling you, the biggest thing is he eats good.”
Turkey Day specialists since 1946
It’s late August and the poults are chirping sweetly in the sunlight. They are still relatively small and huddled near each other, but getting fatter and braver by the day on a corn-wheat-soybean feed mixture.
In a few short weeks — turkeys grow quickly — the fields will be teeming with a couple thousand full-grown birds timed perfectly for a date with your Thanksgiving spread. Since 1946, it’s been a familiar scene at 4418 Middle Country Road in Calverton.
Though they started as duck farmers, nowadays the Miloski poultry farm sells just about anything associated with chickens and turkeys — think soups and salads and pot pies, but also wings, burgers, sausages and livers. Most importantly, particularly for those customers who’ve been buying their Turkey Day bird there regularly since the 1960s, Miloski’s all-original retail poultry store is known around Long Island for selling high-quality, freshly butchered birds, straight off the farm behind the store.
Mark Jr. equates his family’s product with going to a high-end steakhouse for beef rather than McDonald’s. “I feel like, especially because it’s one time a year and you’re with your family, you want to eat the best food. And that’s the main thing here, turkeys,” he says. “Our customers come from all over—we’ve had customers here 50, 60 years that I’ve known my whole life.”
The turkeys at the farm roam free and live comfortably, coming and going at will from their shelters. They don’t usually venture into open spaces until they are old enough and big enough to avoid predators like hawks and owls.
“I keep the door open and they get out in the sun… they mostly chill all day,” says Mark Jr. “They start off yellow like chickens, but once they get these white feathers they don’t need much [artificial] heat anymore. And once they get bigger, they’ll be out all over the pasture and they’ll sleep outside all night.”
Tending to the turkeys — as well as the chickens, the retail store and assorted farm jobs— is a lifestyle the youngest Miloski seems overwhelmingly content with. He literally rolls out of bed in the morning and gets to work.
Everything but the Feathers
About two weeks before Thanksgiving, Mark Sr. and Mark Jr. will get down to what can only be described as the business of processing and packaging turkeys for eager holiday customers. Miloskis doesn’t accept advance orders anymore, and they don’t make deliveries. “These are still free-range birds, so I can’t guarantee you a 12.5-pound turkey, it might be 13,” laughs Mark Jr., “and some people really like a 13-pound turkey.”
Modern equipment and refrigeration notwithstanding, butchering the turkeys is done much the same way Will Miloski did it, and the father-son team of Mark Sr. and Mark Jr. personally see to those duties with a been-there, done-that attitude.
“The most ethical way to do it is to slit their necks, hang them up upside down, and within a minute they’re gone,” says Mark Jr. “We’re old school, all done by hand except the machine that takes their feathers off.”
“My father, he taught me how to do everything,” says Mark Sr. “I still remember my mother wouldn’t let me go into the processing room until I was 13, but after that it was just an everyday thing.”
Of a Feather
Born in 1924, Will Miloski bought out his mother’s share of the family duck farm in 1946 and soon after built a thriving retail-size turkey and chicken farm. He then asked his girlfriend, Ann, his future wife of 65 years, to marry him. “Her father wouldn’t let her get married ‘til she was 18, and she was 16, so they had to wait ‘til 1948,” says Mark Sr.
Eventually, Will opened the store and bought the adjacent property behind it. In 1967, he and Ann moved into the house where she still lives. In 1987, in a passing of the torch, Mark Sr. purchased the sprawling property from his father for a dollar. “And he made me pay him,” adds Mark Sr. “He said, ‘You always have to live on the farm.’ I had two brothers and they moved up here and we all worked the farm together.”
Ann told her son long ago that he was free to sell the farm at his discretion. While he’s never had any interest, his son Mark Jr.’s singular dedication to the farm has mostly taken that choice out of his hands.
“That’s why there’s not that many farms anymore being passed down to the next generations,” says the elder Miloski. “I wouldn’t do it [keep the farm] if he didn’t want to do it. I would’ve gotten out; I’m aging out. I wouldn’t have been able to keep it because you couldn’t afford to pay your taxes and upkeep on it. Not that I’m complaining about taxes. I love to pay my fair share, but you can’t pay it without working it.”
And work the land his father did. Mark Sr. recalls past Thanksgivings when Will Milsoki would keep the retail store open until 6 p.m. and then go straight to the slaughterhouse with his son to kill turkeys. “That means you’d work till 2 or 3 in the morning and then you’re getting up the next day at 6 or 7 and you’re doing that for four or five days straight,” he says.
Of his father, Mark Sr. reflects, “He was jolly and he loved to talk to people. I remember people trying to get out of the store and he was still talking to them. He loved to talk and he loved to fish.”
The Farmer’s Dilemma
As land becomes more valuable and the price of necessities like feed and utilities continues to rise, many other area farms have turned to private developers and agritourism. Not Miloski Poultry Farm. Their poultry business is booming. And, as Mark Sr. is fond of saying, the Miloskis have never been bored, and they always eat good.
At 68, Mark Sr. still does a full day’s work, often starting at 5 a.m. by checking the turkey fences. He likes to do repair work around the farm, too. “I usually fix things,” he says. “The reason being is because I fixed everything once already, so I knew how to do it already. If you do it once, then it’s easy.”
Photos by Jeremy Garretson
Some of the same concerns Will had in 1977 — the rising cost of feed, ballooning taxes, utilities and labor — are still concerns for the Miloskis. It’s one of the reasons your Thanksgiving bird now costs $7.25 a pound. And much like Will predicted almost 50 years ago, Mark Sr. says that Long Island farming is going to continue to struggle. “One of the reasons is that a farm on Long Island can’t compete with a farm in Pennsylvania because everything’s cheaper there,” he says.
He’s already told Mark Jr. that he, too, is free to do as he pleases with the 30-acre property once he dies.
“I never had another job or anything, never thought of doing anything else. Who else has 30 acres on Long Island? I’m not giving it up,” Mark Jr. says. “Everyone wants to live here, and we do live in one of the nicest places in America. It’s still beautiful out here, it really is.”
