ERLANGER, Ky. — Depending on where you live, it may be more difficult to find a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving and frozen turkey inventories are down 24 percent according to government analysts.

“My turkey stock is down this year, mainly due to the price of feed…not just for my birds but for all my farm animals,” said Josh Warren, who raises and sell turkeys on his farm in Blaine, Ohio, just west of Wheeling. I have to watch my bottom line this year. I just won’t carry as many turkeys this time around.”

Folks in these parts rely on Warren for their Thanksgiving bird, but his stock is limited. He says his inventory is down 25 percent this year.

Farm manager Dan Tewes of Tewes Farm in Erlanger, Ky., said his ‘turkey season’ is running about normal. Tewes said his family came to northern Kentucky in 1944. He and his wife have run the farm since 1988 with the help from his brother.

“Folks come to this farm and enjoy selecting a turkey from three or four that are dressed out in the size range they want,” Tewes said. “People enjoy doing it this way, and this year it might be a necessity. Who knows?”

The reason why it could be a necessity: kinks in the supply chain might mean people will have a harder time finding a turkey at the store if they wait too long this year. And while there’s no turkey shortage at Tewes Farm, he’s expecting his supply to go quickly.

“I can’t feed everybody, so if there is a shortage, I am not going have enough turkeys for everybody,” he said.

At about $3.50 a pound, Tewes said his turkeys are on the expensive side, but he added he put close to $100,000 into them.

Jason Bindel, owner of Bindel Farms in Medina County in Ohio, bought his crop of turkeys last December and they’ve been feasting on grain and grass at his farm since they were babies this past summer.

“It’s been going pretty good,” Bindel said.

Bindel sold out of the 80 turkeys he raised by Halloween this year. He said that’s much sooner than he did two years ago and the years prior. He was able to avoid stock shortages because he buys his turkeys locally and early. He also runs a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program with up to 40 members in it who purchase turkeys every year. He also tends to the turkeys and processes them himself, so he doesn’t have to worry about a labor shortage affecting his production.

“In particular, grain prices, you know, the commodity market, grain’s 30 percent higher now than it was a year ago,” Bindel said. “This year I’m not increasing prices. I’m still selling them for $3.75 a pound. Next year, I will increase the price.”

According to Jayson Lusk, head of Purdue University’s Agriculture Economics Department, prices for turkeys are looking to be about 12 percent higher this year than they were last year. Lusk cites rising feed prices, labor shortages and increased wages affecting turkey and other meat products.

“There’s several factors going on,” Lusk said. “There’s just lots of extra costs in the system that have to go somewhere, and that somewhere is the prices we pay as consumers.”

Indiana is the fourth largest turkey-producing state in the country, producing about 20 million turkeys a year, according to Lusk. Despite the increase in meat prices, there isn’t any expectation of a turkey shortage, and the prices are likely to settle out.

But other states will feel the shortage pinch. Michael Goldberg, the executive director of the Veale Institute of Entrepreneurship at Case Western Reserve University, says there are a “number of issues that are facing the food supply chain at the moment, things such as not enough workers to harvest crops on farms, shipment backlogs from overseas and higher costs of transportation domestically.

“It’s a ripple effect,” Goldberg said.

Many grocery chains are already increasing prices this year because of the supply chain issues.

“It might be more economical to buy a local turkey from your farmer’s market than to battle it out at your local grocery story for Butterball turkey that’s shipped from somewhere else,” Goldberg said.

According the Wall Street Journal, turkeys were more than 60 percent out of stock by the end of October, 30 percent lower than the same time last year.