For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Food Safety page and our Factory Farms page.

The interwebs are aflame with news that Butterball, the nation’s largest turkey processor, has been beset with a shortage of “large, fresh” (i.e., 16 pounds and over) specimens for the nation’s Thanksgiving tables. The company has plenty of frozen monster-sized birds, it emphasizes, but will only fill about half of its orders to retailers for the never-frozen kind. Other industrial-turkey giants like Cargill have reported no problems fattening their birds.

What gives at Butterball, the supplier of one in five US turkeys? In a statement sent to me and other journalists, Butterball is vague about the reasons for the shortage, citing only a “decline in weight gains on some of our farms.” In other words, the turkeys that Butterball’s contract farmers raise aren’t growing as quickly as expected.

This is odd. If there’s one thing the modern poultry industry has mastered, it’s fattening millions of fowl extremely quickly. And turkeys have been getting bigger and bigger for decades. “[T]urkeys have increased in average weight annually for at least the past 40 years,” The US Department of Agriculture revealed in a 2005 report. The USDA added that the average weight of a turkey at slaughter jumped from 18 pounds in 1965 to an enormous 28.2 pounds in 2005-a 57 percent increase. By 2012, the average had inched up to a hefty 29.8 pounds. This is not an industry that’s typically plagued by size issues.

Butterball says it’s “continuing to evaluate all potential causes,” but it has so far declined to name any. Given the near-complete dearth of information, I’ve come up with a few highly speculative possibilities that may-or may not-explain the case of the missing monster turkeys. I ran them past a Butterball spokesperson, but received no comment. Like a nice slice of roast turkey-preferably from a bird raised outside on pasture-these ideas should be taken with a few grains of salt. But until Butterball divulges more information, speculation is all we have.