According to the latest federal statistics, Minnesota is the nation's leading turkey-producing state. Nearly one-in-five of America's farmed turkeys — 44 million of them this year — hail from the North Star state. We handily beat out the second-biggest producer, North Carolina, which grew 33 million turkeys this year.

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Nationwide, turkey production is up 4 percent this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's especially good news after last year's avian flu outbreak, which killed 7.5 million turkeys.

Minnesota was particularly hard-hit, losing about 5 million gobblers to the epidemic. But Minnesota producers celebrated a flu-free 2016 this week at a news conference with Gov. Mark Dayton.

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Like the U.S. president, Minnesota's governor traditionally holds an event with an avian guest of honor at this time of year. But the turkey featured at Minnesota's annual event gets slaughtered and donated to a food shelf. Wasting a perfectly good piece of meat on a “pardon” is evidently not a Minnesota value.

This year's gubernatorial sacrifice was a handsome 30-pounder from a farm in Melrose, deep in the heart of Minnesota's turkey country. Melrose is in Stearns County, Minn., home to more than 2.4 million turkeys as of the 2012 USDA Agricultural Census.

In the USDA's map of American turkey production, central Minnesota stands out. There are also significant concentrations of the industry in North and South Carolina, northwestern Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri and part of California's Central Valley.

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On a per capita basis in 2014, Americans ate about 16 pounds of turkey from whole birds (like your Thanksgiving roast) and another 12 pounds from boneless cuts, turkey burgers, turkey jerky and the like. That's up considerably from say, 1980, when we ate on average 10 pounds of roast turkey and 8 pounds of other turkey products. Chicken consumption is up even more sharply over that period.

Some of that increase has come at the expense of red meat consumption — beef, veal, lamb and pork — which has fallen since 1980. That's a reflection partly of trends in health and dieting, as red meat has fallen somewhat out of favor due to health and environmental concerns.

Once Thanksgiving's over, Americans will have one more novelty poultry feast to look forward to by year's end: the Christmas goose.