Moroni and the turkey industry
Moroni, Sanpete County On US-89 / SR-132 The Norbest label
If one place carries the identity of this farm country, it is Moroni, a town of about 1,540 people on the San Pitch River northwest of Ephraim. Moroni is the small Sanpete County town most Utahns picture when they think of turkeys, and it has carried the informal nickname Turkey Town for the plain reason that the county's turkey processing plant sits there and has for generations. That is a local nickname, not an official title; the town that markets itself as the Turkey Capital of the World is Cuero, Texas. In Moroni it is not a slogan, it is the economy.
The plant runs today under the Norbest label and is owned by Pitman Family Farms, a California company that bought the operation in 2018 after it came through serious financial trouble in the years before. What Pitman bought was the successor to the Moroni Feed Company, a growers cooperative founded in 1938 that turned a scatter of small Sanpete turkey farms into one of the larger turkey brands in the country. In a normal year the operation has raised several million birds and put out well over a hundred million pounds of turkey, and for decades the plant has been one of the county's largest employers, with a second facility up the road in Salina.
You do not visit the plant; it is a working food facility, not an attraction. What the turkey industry gives a visitor is context for everything else on this drive. The long low barns you pass on the side roads, the feed operations, and the trucks on US-89 are all part of the same system, and the reason Sanpete County has long been described as one of the nation's top turkey-producing counties.
The details
Good to know
- Norbest is a brand you may know from a grocery shelf; the birds behind it are raised here in central Utah.
- The Scandinavian stone-town side of Sanpete, Ephraim and Manti and their Main Streets, is its own story on the US-89 Little Denmark page.
- Turkey is a fall table tradition, but the barns and the plant run through the calendar, not just November.
Alfalfa and hay on the valley floor
Both valley floors Fed by the rivers Cut midsummer
The turkeys get the fame, but the crop that actually covers the ground is hay. Almost every green field you see from US-89 or I-70 is alfalfa or grass hay grown for feed, cut two or three times across a summer and baled to carry cattle and sheep through the winter. Utah as a whole grows more hay than anything else, and these two valleys are a big part of the reason, with the flat, irrigated floor between the mountains doing exactly what it does best.
What makes it possible is water off the rivers. The San Pitch waters the Sanpete Valley and the larger Sevier waters the Sevier Valley, both feeding a web of canals, ditches and reservoirs that spread the runoff across the fields through the dry months. That is why the crop follows the river down the valley floor and why, in a place that only gets a modest amount of rain, the middle of the valley can still look green into October while the hills around it turn gold.
For a buyer this is not just scenery. The hay ground is the working half of the region's real estate, and the water that grows it is a separate, valuable thing that comes with the land. More on that below under living in farm country.
The details
Good to know
- The sweet green smell after a summer cutting is fresh alfalfa; the pivots and wheel lines are the irrigation at work.
- Big round and square bales stacked at the field edge in July and August are the winter feed supply.
- The reservoirs that hold the irrigation water double as fishing and boating spots; Yuba and Palisade are the nearby ones.
Sheep, cattle and the range
Valley floor and mountain pasture Fountain Green to Sigurd
Before the turkeys, this was sheep and cattle country, and it still is. The hay that grows on the floor exists to feed animals, and the mountains on both sides of the valleys, the Wasatch Plateau on the east and the Pahvant and San Pitch ranges on the west, give the herds and bands a place to graze through the summer. Cattle now outnumber sheep across most of the valley floor, but the ranch economy is woven through everything else here.
The sheep story is worth telling because it was once enormous. Fountain Green, at the north end of the Sanpete Valley, earned the nickname Wool City and once helped run the famous Jericho sheep pool of tens of thousands of animals out on the west desert. The town has held its Lamb Days celebration every July since 1930, born in the Depression when growers wanted to sell more lamb close to home, and it still runs with a mutton and sourdough dinner, a parade and a lamb show. It is the most direct window a visitor gets into the region's livestock heritage.
Drive the side roads in early summer and you will see the year in motion: new calves and lambs on the valley floor, then the trucks and, in a few places, the old-fashioned trailing of bands up toward the high pastures once the snow clears off the plateau.
The details
Good to know
- Confirm the current Lamb Days dates before planning around them; the celebration lands in July but the exact days shift.
- The high summer range sits up on the Wasatch Plateau, reached by Skyline Drive, covered on its own region page.
- Open range and cattle guards are real on the back roads; livestock can be on the pavement, so drive it slow.
How the turkeys got here
The 1920s and 1930s A Depression-era story
The turkey did not arrive by accident; it filled a hole three other things left behind. Through the 1920s the county was losing its footing: grazing rights on the public land were being cut back, the local sugar beet industry that had anchored a lot of farms collapsed, and then the Great Depression and a long drought arrived on top of it. Farmers needed a crop that did not need much water or much money and could use labor and grain they already had.
Turkeys fit almost perfectly. They drank little, they ate cheap local grain, and the valley handed them a free supplement in its huge summer crop of grasshoppers and crickets. Early growers proved it out one flock at a time; a Sanpete grower named Ray Tanner in Indianola started with about a hundred birds brought in from California and Colorado in the early 1920s, a hatchery in Manti began turning out poults, and within a couple of years he was shipping a rail car of turkeys. By 1938 the growers had pooled their birds and their bargaining power into the Moroni Feed Company, and the modern industry was born.
It is the region's best I-never-knew-that: the reason central Utah became turkey country is less about tradition than about a hard decade when a low-water, low-cost bird was the thing that kept the farms alive.
The details
Good to know
- The crickets and grasshoppers were a real economic factor, not a folk tale; free feed on the wing helped the birds pencil out.
- The cooperative model let small family flocks market together; that pooling is what grew the Norbest brand.
- The number of active turkey growers has fallen over the years, but the plant at Moroni carried the industry forward.
Seeing the farm country
US-89 and I-70 Free to drive Best late spring to fall
The honest way to experience this region is from the road, at the pace of a slow drive with the windows down. US-89 runs the length of the Sanpete Valley past Fairview, Mount Pleasant, Ephraim, Manti and on toward Gunnison; I-70 and US-89 carry you through the Sevier Valley past Salina, Richfield and Aurora. Late spring through fall is the window, when the fields are green, the bales are stacking up, and the mountains still hold snow on top.
What is open to a visitor is the landscape and the small towns, not the operations. Time a trip for a farm-rooted event like Fountain Green's Lamb Days in July, pull over at a seasonal farm stand or a small-town grocery, and take in the county fairs that fill the late-summer calendar in Manti and Richfield. The turkey barns, feedlots, hayfields and the Moroni plant are private working land, and that is the one caution worth flagging.
This is working private land, so read the fences.
The fields, barns, feedlots and the Moroni plant are private property and biosecure food operations, not stops. Stay on the public roads, do not enter fields or approach livestock barns, and watch for slow farm equipment and the occasional animal on rural highways, especially around harvest and near open range. The reward for driving it patiently is the whole thing, in view, from the pavement.
