While most of us are only just beginning to turn our attention to present buying and food shopping for the festive season, one family have been thinking of little else since spring.

For the past six months, the Candy family at Woolley Park Farm, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, have been working round the clock to ensure their 8,000 birds are fat and healthy in time for Christmas.

And now a team has been drafted in to begin hand-plucking each turkey, goose, duck and guinea-fowl so they can be finished by hand and hung to develop a sumptuous flavour.

For Roz Candy, 27, the traditional dry-plucking method may be time-consuming but is a huge part of the high-quality promise to which the family has adhered for almost a century.

Woolley Park Farm was set up in 1921 by her great-grandfather Walter Candy as a turkey-farming and then taken on by her grandparents Geoffrey and Patricia Candy. Although Geoffrey died recently, Patricia still handles telephone orders.

The farm was then handed on to Roz's father, Russell, who branched out into geese, while hoping one of his three daughters would grow up with a keen interest in farming.

For Roz, however, that curiosity came a little later. She was working in an office two years ago when she got the brainwave of branching out into non-seasonal dry-plucked birds, a niche product for the higher end of the market.

She returned to her roots and set up another arm of the company, maize-fed, free-range or free-roaming chickens, duck and guinea-fowl.

As with the 6,000 turkeys, the birds are all dry-plucked, making the farm one of only four producers nationally that still employs the technique all year round.

"It is labour-intensive but well worth it," said Roz. "Most other poultry is now wet- plucked, so it's thrown into a big tub of hot water and plucked by mechanical fingers.

"While it's in the water, it absorbs the liquid like a sponge which degrades the quality of the meat and allows bacteria to build up."

Keen to keep the quality, the family has not moved away from dry-plucking and each year employs the same team to strip its turkeys of their plumage.

"I basically grew up on the farm as my mum and dad lived a field away from my grandparents," she said. "I went away to uni and then went travelling but it wasn't until I got away from it all that I started to realise it was more than just mud.

"I realised I couldn't just waltz back into the farm without having anything to offer and then I came up with the idea for extending the business and building on the unique selling point of dry-plucking."

Now Roz dreams of expanding the business further and educating more consumers about the benefits of the techniques they are using.

She said: "All my birds are provided with the kind of life I consider they deserve, and the natural processing they need in order to taste like real poultry used to before mass production was introduced."

Now the farm is supplying birds to households across a wide area with half of its wholesale business going to suppliers in London.

Orders have been pouring in for several weeks and plucking starts at full tilt on December 1, with 30 people working 14-hour days.