WHITE TOM turkeys are ugly. The long, floppy drip of cherry-red skin that dangles from their bills, fittingly called a "snood," swings like a cord of snot. Their caruncles, those fleshy lumps bubbling from their heads and necks that range in color from azure to violet, look like exposed brain. And their crimson wattles sag and cockle, yet somehow seem dense enough to resemble melted candle wax.

I can tell you that white tom turkeys — that is, male turkeys — are this ugly because I’m squatting at the bottom of a flight of cobwebbed stairs in a shed, gawking at about 200 of them. I’ve been sitting here among loose feathers at the Out Post Farm, in Holliston, staring down these birds’ beaks, for about 30 minutes. And the longer I stare at the turkeys waddling around this basement pen, the more unsightly and utterly alien they become. And the more they stare back at me, scrunched up and goggling at them behind a swinging mesh door, the more these animals don’t seem like something I’d ever eat.

But I just ate one. About a half an hour ago, I scarfed down a damn fine turkey sandwich made by Out Post’s owner, Adrian "A.J." Collins — tender hunks of cooked white meat with tomato and lettuce assembled on a mayonnaise-wiped bulkie roll. It was delicious. But at this moment, with the masticated fowl still rumbling around my stomach, I find myself contemplating the food chain, fascinated by these freaky faces, and wondering if these birds have any idea that I have just chewed up one of their relatives.

Probably not. Then again, the animals all seem to be yelping at me. One by one, over and over, again and again. Maybe they’re trying to say something. Maybe they want to talk.

Unfortunately — given that I’m here to write about a day in the life of a turkey farm — the turkeys seem to be the only ones with something to say.

TURKEY FARMERS in Massachusetts recoil from the media. Or so it seems days earlier, when I try calling more than half the farms in the state, and find most either uninterested in the press or downright elusive. Phone calls are shuffled from employee to employee, multiple messages are left for owners, and nobody wants to talk. To be fair, November is the busiest time of year for turkey farmers, and even in the off-season, the work on a farm is never finished. But the people I do manage to get on the line aren’t even receptive to a simple conversation with a reporter.

Like Douglas Owens III, owner of Owens Farm, in Norwood, who is at least kind enough to take my call, but clearly doesn’t want the attention. Owens, who sells about 1000 birds during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season — an output he describes as a "small operation" — says he already gets enough coverage. "Channel 5 is next door, so they come down," he explains. "Natalie [Jacobson] shops here. It’s a zoo this time of the year, so I don’t want any more press."

Then there is the soft-spoken manager of a Southern Massachusetts turkey farm. I ask for her thoughts on why local farmers don’t want to discuss their industry. She seems somewhat surprised by the suggestion, but near the end of our four-minute conversation, she withdraws when I ask her name, saying sharply that I don’t have her permission to use anything she’s just told me. When I suggest that she’s just proved my point, she cites something about media oversaturation and brusquely ends our exchange.

Even Out Post’s Collins is skeptical when we first speak. "What’s your angle?" he asks. Uh, a day in the life of a turkey farm. "It’s very, very boring here," he half-kids. "If you can write more than three sentences about this place, I’ll be surprised." But you’ve got to be doing something all day. "Okay, you can come," he says. "But are your readers going to drive down here and protest?"

Call me naive, but this isn’t a response I’d anticipated. Apparently, the fear of being targeted by animal-rights groups accounts for some part of the reluctance I’m encountering. Although Collins admits that Out Post has been targeted by animal-rights protestors in the past, all he will say is that it "got ugly."

FRESH TURKEYS, reads the roadside sign lodged in the grass outside Out Post Farm, a dappled-orange carpet of fallen leaves staked with lichen-encrusted trees. On the stippled lawn are a handful of picnic tables and a circular, thigh-high fence that on fair-weather weekends becomes a petting-zoo pen for a barnyard menagerie of donkeys, goats, and pigs. Across from this spot is Out Post’s country store — a rustic, barn-like structure with a wooden hayloft, a ribbed face, and a produce-packed porch.

It’s a little past 8 a.m. on a nippy Thursday, just after Out Post has unlocked its doors to the public. Inside, the small store is quiet. Apparently, I’ve missed the "crazy" truckers, a group of regular matutinal customers who dribble in before the store officially opens and pay for their muffins and coffee on the honor system. Behind the counter are four aproned employees: two middle-aged women with ponytails, a smiling teenage girl, and a brawny man who’s using a butcher knife to slice up raw, disemboweled turkey trunks arranged on a silver dressing table.

Tall, lanky, and sandy-haired, the 38-year-old Collins emerges in blue jeans, a denim shirt, and dusty work boots. I’ve just met him, but right away he offers to show me around. First, he brings me to the poultry-packed freezer below the front counter. "We make the guys out back into these products," he says, holding up a frozen turkey potpie with one hand. One by one, he picks up the fridge’s frosty items: solid turkey sausages, stacks of turkey burgers, icy turkey croquettes, cold containers of turkey soup and turkey chili, rimy dishes of chicken tetrazzini, and rock-hard turkey legs that seem dense enough to be used as cudgels.

"I suppose you want to see the turkeys?" he teases. We head out into the stinging November chill, following the dirt parking lot around the side of the house. Collins leads me up a sloped, stony path to a shingled, brick-red building with cardboard scraps blocking the windows. From 50 feet away, I can hear peeps, cheeps, and tweets — noises that sound more like parakeets than the guttural gobbles commonly identified with turkeys.

Collins slides the black-metal latch and pushes the door open. White bodies, pink heads, marble-like eyes — hundreds of them seem to be floating in the shadows, as far back as I can see.

I’m in awe.

"There’re two floors of them," Collins says plainly.

"Two floors? I’ve never seen a building of turkeys before," I whisper, fascinated by the idea of a houseful of live fowl.

"A building of turkeys, eh? I don’t think of it like that," Collins laughs, pulling the door shut and locking it before I’m done looking.

As the wind gusts, I’m bowled over by the stench — a commingling of manure and ammonia that could make a person weep. "They stink," Collins says, acknowledging the fetor. "Can you smell them?"

The smell shouldn’t be a surprise. On our left is an elevated turkey coop with a tin roof, wire walls, and a mesh floor. The way Collins and his staff have it rigged, the animals’ waste drops down through the floor and piles up underneath the cage; the staff regularly shovels it out and sells it as garden fertilizer.

"How many birds do you sell in a season?" I ask Collins as we amble around the back yard.

"Ah, I don’t know. Depends."

"On what?"

"On how much the phone rings off the hook."

"How many did you sell last year?"

He says something like "I dunno"; it’s obvious he’s shirking the question. As we continue walking around the farm, this vagueness seems to obscure every conversation we have. How big is the Out Post staff? "We depend on high-school kids." How many? Collins doesn’t offer a precise number, but instead tells me that three seasonal workers come up from Jamaica and live on the farm for the fall. Every time I go to scribble something down on my notepad, his face drops and he shuts up.

After we’ve seen one more turkey pen and a lone pig, he brings me to "the packing house" — or the slaughterhouse. It’s an empty, clean space with a wide, garage-type door. There’s nothing happening in here today, so there’s very little to see: large, square containers and a few thin, U-shaped metal hanging structures with grooves that I assume are used to hold up the turkeys’ heads. Collins says high-school kids help with the slaughtering process. "First, we electrocute them so they don’t feel anything, then we strangle them. And then we bring them in here." I ask how often slaughters take place, but Collins won’t give me a definitive answer.

"Nothing in farming is scheduled," he insists. "We just do it when the need arises."

In less than a minute, we leave. As he pulls down the rolling door, Collins frowns. "This isn’t going to come back to haunt me, now, is it?"