Direct Sales or Distribution?

It’s an article of faith these days that selling your farm products directly to the consumer is the only way to go. Ah, if it were only that simple!

The nice thing about selling direct is that face-to-face sales build trust and loyalty, provides direct feedback, and eliminates the middleman, allowing you to keep all the money. All well and good, but it’s awfully labor-intensive, especially if you live a long way from your customers. Farms, you have probably noticed, are way out in the country, and you’re a long way from your neighbors, let alone your customers.

We started with direct sales of free-range eggs at the farmer’s market, then added a couple of local supermarkets. A farmer’s market takes about seven hours, including travel time. To deliver to three local stores takes us about two hours. Each channel gets about half our output.

Obviously, it would be a lot easier to add a couple more stores than farmer’s markets, and stores are open year-round, while farmer’s markets aren’t.

Wholesale prices in our neck of the woods run about 2/3 to 3/4 of retail prices, so eggs that retail for $4.00 bring $2.67 – $3.00. Because it takes less time to stock a supermarket than attend a farmer’s market, selling to stores often give you a higher hourly return in spite of the lower prices.

I’ve never sold through distribution, but I knew a guy who did. He had 1,200 free-range hens and sold all his output to high-class restaurants in Portland, 90 minutes away. After a while, he signed up a distributor to handle his eggs, picking them up at the farm and delivering them to his customers. Because the distributor was already headed that way and already handled most of these accounts with their other products, they could do this very cheaply. Time-consuming trips to Portland were thus eliminated, freeing up time for farming and living.

The fact is that high-grade produce grown in small quantities simply doesn’t make it into big cities. It’s all snapped up by gourmets in the nearest large town. It doesn’t start spilling over into big cities until production exceeds what the closer towns can handle.

Of course, big cities are where most of the money is, so overcoming distribution issues is one path to higher profits. Distribution is nothing to sneeze at. Another possibility is direct sales via mail-order. This is a problem with eggs, since they’re fragile, but is practical with other products. The main issue is that the product needs to have a high value per pound (so shipping doesn’t dominate the costs) and be of extremely high quality, so gourmets will make it worth your while. And the gourmets have to find out that it exists, too, one way or another.

Thirty Years of the HP 41C Calculator

Classics never go out of style. I still use the same type of programmable calculator today that I did thirty years ago.

It seems hard to believe, but thirty years ago I plunked down $299 for an HP-41C calculator, which had just been released by Hewlett-Packard. I was a penniless college student at the time, and for the life of me I can’t remember where I got the money.

I was living in Corvallis at the time, attending Oregon State University. The HP-41C had been designed across town at the Hewlett-Packard campus, and many of my classmates were HP employees.

The 41C was seriously programmable, had the then-revolutionary ability to display text, was indestructible, and had a nearly infinite battery life. Friend used its alpha display functions to create cheat sheets, but I never bothered. Setting up handy programs before midterms was a lifesaver, though.

Karen also had a 41C, which died about ten years later when her backpack fell off the luggage rack of her motorcycle and was run over by a motorist. Much later, my original 41C developed a crack in its display and became generally flaky. So we bought several of the slightly newer model, the 41CV. We got them used on eBay. They’re still going strong in spite of being around 20 years old. They stopped making the calculators in 1990, sad to say.

I use these calculators at the farmer’s markets, and people are constantly noticing. “Hey, I worked on that project!”

To commemorate these durable bits of local history, I’ve created a T-shirt, available through Zazzle.com below. Keep those 41C’s running!

The Ideal Roof for a Chicken Coop.

I’ve been meditating on the ideal roof for a chicken coop. It ought to have the following properties:

  • Easy to install.
  • Cheap.
  • Lasts forever.
  • Strong.
  • Rainwater doesn’t cause mud in front of the house.
  • Chickens don’t roost on top.

Also, if you live in the suburbs, it should be gorgeous enough to keep your uptight neighbors from deciding that the world is ending.

Galvanized Steel Roofs for Chicken Coops

One of my "low houses" with walls just four feet tall.
One of my “low houses” with walls just four feet tall and a simple galvanized metal roof. There are no rafters. The roof is attached to the three horizontal purlins at front, middle, and back. 

Most of my houses have shed roofs made of galvanized steel roofing. The configuration is a “shed roof,” which just means that it’s higher and the front than at the back, so rainwater pours off at the back of the house where is causes less trouble.

I prefer using the cheapest corrugated roofing, which is readily available from lumber stores like Home Depot, but you can get metal roofing in all the colors of the rainbow, with baked-enamel coatings that last forever, and in shapes that are less industrial than the corrugated ripple.

My roofs are just metal, with no plywood decking underneath, and no insulation. This is appropriate for highly ventilated houses with enough airflow that the inside temperature and humidity are about the same as outside. You don’t have to worry about condensation in such a house.

Nails vs. Screws

In the old days, corrugated metal roofing was held on by nails banged through the high points of the ripple and into purlins. These don’t hold very well, and were replaced by roofing nails with rubber washerss. The nails are hammered through the low points of the ripple and the washers keep them from leaking. These have more holding power.

But all these are going the way of the dodo, because roofing screws have three times the holding power of roofing nails. So use roofing screws and get yourself a good, powerful electric drill or screwdriver for installing them.

Open-Front Houses

Fresh-Air Poultry Houses - chicken coop design
Fresh-Air Poultry Houses

In a tightly closed chicken house, you’d want an insulated roof, but you’d have to be nuts to build a tightly closed house. Ventilation is the magic bullet for chicken health. (You’ll want to read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, one of the classic poultry books I’ve reprinted, for complete information.)

No Rafters

My houses have purlins but no rafters. The sheet metal is nailed directly to the purlins with roofing nails or roofing screws, meaning that they are supported only every four feet. This has worked well for me.

Framing

The purlins should be up on edge for stiffness, not laid flat, and bolted to the studs with ¼-inch carriage bolts, not nailed. (Some of my early houses with nailed-on purlins had their roof torn off by high winds.)

One thing I’ve learned, though, is that if the metal roofing sticks out very far in front of or behind the house, it’ll flap in the wind and work itself loose. So when you have plenty of overhang (which is a good thing), you need to add a 2×4 at the very lip of the roof, under the roofing. Naling the roofing to this 2×4 keeps the sheet metal from flapping  in high winds.

Slope of the Roof

One problem I haven’t solved is that of keeping chickens from roosting on the roof. Chickens like sleeping as high in the air as they can, and that means the roof. My roofs have a shallow slope and they can sleep anywhere on the roof they want without sliding off. A steeper roof is clearly called for! I haven’t yet done any experiments to discover the critical angle where the chickens slide off.

Traditional shed roofs often call for a one-in-four slope. A house eight feet deep would have a roof that slopes down two feet front to back: perhaps with a seven-foot height in front and a five-foot height in back. But even my flattest roofs haven’t collapsed under moderate snow loads, in spite of my lightweight framing.

Other Roofs

Any kind of real roofing will work fine in a chicken coop: asphalt shingles, cedar shakes, roll roofing, built-up roofing, etc. I’ve never built a structure using any of these, so I can’t provide details.

Before galvanized roofing became widely available, most coops seemed to have either fancy shingle roofs or lowly tar-paper roofs. I don’t recommend simple tar-paper roofs because they don’t last long enough to be worth the bother. Roll roofing, which is much heavier, is probably okay.

Lots of people use temporary roofing such as tarps for their chicken coops. This is fine for summer pasture houses, and in fact my wife Karen developed a tarp-covered cattle-panel hoop house for pastured broilers. But the tarps on these hoop-coop roofs tend to develop holes during the course of a single season and are iffy as winter housing even in our mild Oregon climate.

Water Well Woes

You won’t believe how little water our well gives us — one quart a minute. That’s 440 gallons a day, which is enough if we don’t want to water the lawn with it. We have a 1500-gallon tank (these things are surprisingly affordable and lightweight black plastic affairs that a single person can roll off a trailer and into place), so we have plenty of water, until we run out.

We didn’t run out, but it started smelling bad. This is the other bad thing about wells in Oregon’s Coast Range — sulfur in the water, and the sulfur-loving bacteria that go with it. Not a health hazard, but unaesthetic.

So we mixed a jug of bleach with a bucket of water and poured it down the well, and followed it with some vinegar. Recirculate lightly every half hour (the pump is on a timer), wait 24 hours, and pump the well dry. It’s called shock chlorination. If you have a well, you probably know all about it.

Yuck! Not only did we get the usual greenish-brownish gunk, but some reddish stuff as well. That’s too many colors for something that’s supposed to be crystal clear!

No doubt everything will return to normal again. It always has. I’d fire my water company, except it’s me.

What’s the Difference Between Brown and White Eggs?

In the bad old days, eggs in the big cities mostly came from the Midwest. Farmers would collect eggs and leave them, unrefrigerated, until they felt like going into town. They’d sell the eggs at the general store or the feed store, and the merchant would hold them, unrefrigerated, until he had a large enough lot to ship to an egg wholesaler.

The eggs would work their way towards the city, unrefrigerated, by slow freight. Eventually, they’d arrive in the store, where they would be set out, unrefrigerated, for the consumer.

This method was so horrendous that, in the summer, baby chicks would hatch during shipment! In the South, particularly, many people simply didn’t eat eggs in the summer.

By the way, the traditional American farm breeds all lay brown eggs.

There was a good market for reliably fresh eggs. Such eggs needed a short distribution chain so there wasn’t time for anything bad to happen between farm and consumer. The solution was to raise them on farms close to town. Land close to town is expensive, so the tendency was to crowd the hens and use breeds that tolerated crowding well. This was usually the White Leghorn, which was everybody’s favorite chicken for non-free-range uses, including coops on sailing ships. Leghorns lay white eggs.

So white eggs quickly came to mean “fancy eggs,” while brown eggs meant, “plain old farm eggs.” If you lived in farm country, where it’s easy to obtain fresh eggs because of the short distribution path, you’d eat brown eggs and wonder why anybody ever bothered with those sissy white eggs. If you lived in a big city, it would be just the opposite.

Another advantage of white eggs is that they show stains easily, meaning that snowy white eggs are a reliable sign that you are taking pains to produce a first-class product. On the general farm, it was awfully hard to produce eggs that clean, but brown-shelled eggs could hide the problem pretty well.

It took a long time for refrigeration to level the playing field. A lot of eggs were still moving by unrefrigerated freight in the Fifties. It’s this lack of quality control and freshness, not lower costs, that allowed factory-farmed eggs to take over. The guys with the refrigerators won because they never gave you a hideous surprise.

These days, almost everyone refrigerates their eggs from start to finish, except a few hippie-dippy producers who think that their political correctness shields them from the need to worry about quality. The reasons that white eggs were considered superior no longer apply. But the preference lingers. Let’s face it: eggs don’t have a lot of mindshare with most people, so they buy whatever they were used to growing up.