City-dwelling poultry lovers have created a growing market

Bill Bezuk, former manager at REI and Barnes & Noble, is opening The Eugene Backyard Farmer. Photo by Brian Davies/The Register-Guard

Chicken Revival

By Diane Dietz
The Register-Guard
Apr 18, 2010

Excerpt:

After 20 years in retail, Bill Bezuk didn’t need a market analysis to recognize a business opportunity.

Then-store manager at Barnes & Noble — after long management stints at The Sports Authority and REI — Bezuk was positioned to detect a topic of growing interest among his customers.

“It seems like every day or so we had people coming in and looking for books like The Backyard Farmer and how to raise chickens and organic gardening,” Bezuk said.

To Bezuk, 45, who was ready to try something new and something hands-on, selling chickens to city folk seemed like a lucrative niche.

So he pushed his “business casual” wear to the back of the closet, put on a bluework shirt and carpenter’s pants and began turning an old auto shop at 5th Avenue and Washington Street into a novice-friendly chicken supply shop: The Eugene Backyard Farmer.

He hopes to ride the urban chickenkeeping wave for four or five years, experiment until he perfects the merchandising formula, and then launch a chain.

“The timing is right for this,” he said. “The trends are obvious. It seems like everybody I know has chickens or knows somebody who wants chickens. Or wants to get chickens.”

Hatcheries confirm the trend that Bezuk detected.

Beginning in 2007, the demand for chicks in urban areas has increased as much as 20 percent a year, growers say.

“Historically, any time the economy has been bad, poultry has always been good,” said Bud Wood, president of the Iowa-based Murray McMurray Hatchery.

Murray McMurray is a leading shipper of retail-bound chicks, hatching 1.7 million annually.

Wood said he can’t stay ahead of the demand. “Right now, if you call in and place an order, it would be four to six weeks out before we could fill it,” he said.

In Oregon, Woodburn High school teacher Peter Porath started a hatchling wholesale operation, Oregon Peeps, after he lost his job in 2007. He sold 12,000 chicks his first spring, and he’s on pace to deliver 45,000 this year, he said.

Salem chicken activist Barbara Palermo said the chicken fervor is driven by economic fears.

“People are getting laid off, losing houses and losing jobs,” she said. “They want to hang on to what they have. A lot of them remember their grandparents telling them, ‘It’s chickens that saved us during the Depression.’ It’s much the same situation now.”

Backyard chicken raising may resonate with the public’s economic anxieties, and it’s certainly a hobby with a return. However the return is more likely to be nutritious than monetary — after the cost of equipping the urban flock is factored in.

“If you look at how much an egg costs you, it’s not break even,” said Mike Lengele, owner of Diess Feed and Seed on West 11th Avenue, who sells chicks by the hundreds through the spring hatching season.

See the rest of the article here.