It's Thanksgiving week! We're marking the occasion by taking on questions that may come up during family celebrations of the holiday. And while many of these questions might be asked by children, they're important enough that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service keeps track of them.
Let's start with a very basic question: How many turkeys are there in the United States?
The answer to that question comes in two parts, because there are two distinct portions of the population of turkeys in the U.S. There are farm-raised turkeys, which are mainly raised in 13 states, and there are wild turkeys, who live throughout most of the continental U.S.
We'll start with the population of farm-raised turkeys, because their numbers are so much larger than the population of wild turkeys. In 2024, an estimates 205 million turkeys have been raised on U.S. farms. That number is down from 2023's estimated 219 million farm-raised turkeys and is well below the record number of 302.7 million turkeys that were raised on U.S. farms in 1996.
The following interactive chart presents the number of farm-raised turkeys for each year from 1970 through 2024:
It's harder to count the population of wild turkeys in the U.S. because their numbers have to be inferred from data collected by hunters and conservationists, where for every wild turkey they see, there are many more they did not see. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports there are an estimated 6.5 million wild turkeys in the U.S.
That puts the total population of turkeys in the U.S. at 211.5 million in 2024. Since about 97% of these turkeys were raised on farms, those birds are the ones you'll most often find at the center of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
References
U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service. Livestock Historic Data. [Online Database: Survey - Animals & Products - Poultry - Turkeys - Production - Turkeys Production Measured in Head - Total - National - US Total - 1929-2024 - Annual - Year]. Accessed 14 November 2024.
Susan Morse. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wild Facts About Turkeys. [Online article]. Accessed 24 November 2024.
Image credit: Turkeys being raised on a turkey farm by Scott Bauer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (3 February 2013) on Flickr. Creative Commons CC by-SA 2.0 Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 Generic Deed.