Ray Cooper is not the first small businessman to struggle to persuade retailers to grant him space for his unique product. An artisan craftsman of full-sized chicken coops made from recycled chicken barns, many of them a hundred years old, each of Cooper's coops requires a floor space equivalent of a California King-sized bed.
In other words, they are big, big coops. Think mini-van. Think tree house. Think, where do you put it?
"No, it wasn't easy at first," says the 52-year-old Cooper. "But then RiverTown gave me a chance and pretty quick we had a day when we sold two."
Cooper is an eco-Renaissance man who has dedicated himself to sustainable practices like keeping egg-laying hens. A soft spoken, yet energetic conversationalist, Cooper is passionate about recycling. He has recently become a vegetarian, lives within his means, hikes instead of driving when he can and is passing on his creative skills to his 22-year-old son and assistant, Kevin Cooper.
He doesn't want to be the Henry Ford of chicken coops, he says. Instead he wants to be a Green Michelangelo, rejecting staples altogether, taking the time to use screws instead of nails, and searching garage sales and thrift stores for vintage painted wood chickens to decorate the front doors.
He is also pack-ratting small stained glass windows that add sparkle, distinguishing these coops as rustic jewel boxes of barnyards.
"The windows can be a challenge because you don't find them small and when you do, you don't find them cheap," said Cooper with a grin.
A former handyman for his family's real estate business and milk truck driver, Cooper hopes to hone his chicken coop model, which maximizes the eaves for nest boxes and has removable wire grid floors, into the eco-Cadillac of coops.
They'll never be cheap, he says. But they'll be worth the cost to people who understand the challenges of lovingly collecting and rehabbing old, thick and wide redwood lumber. Cooper figures if he pays himself and his son $10 to $20 an hour, he'll be happy. That means he'll have to charge up to $1,000 a piece for the one or two coops he can fabricate each month in a small, cramped barn on a hill overlooking the Petaluma Outlets.
"I'm making them all from hundred-year-old, inch thick redwood, which I took down myself. These old barns lasted a hundred years and the coops will last another hundred years," he said.
He's so busy and entrenched in his creative labors, that he's yet to brand his coops. If you ask the folks at RiverTown who makes the coops, they'll write Cooper's name and phone number on your sales slip.
"Everyone is going back to the land and old ways. Chickens have never been more popular. More and more people are discovering them. If I can do work I'm passionate about and receive the fruits of my own labors? That's all I can ask," Cooper says.
2011年3月22日星期二
2011年3月14日星期一
City slickers play Old MacDonald
In the name of urban farming, there were a lot of ways BJ Hedahl could have transformed her
spacious, fenced backyard in Seattle's Wedgwood neighborhood: putting in an organic garden, a
beehive or a chicken coop maybe.
But no. Hedahl wanted ducks. Or rather duck eggs: richer, denser, with yolks bigger than your
chicken variety, she said.
Here on a recent afternoon were her four ducks, hopping out of the kiddie wading pool that's
plopped in the middle of her yard, each webfoot capable of producing about 300 eggs every
year.
As one after another waddled by, I couldn't help but do the math. That's a lot of quiche.
But these ducks aren't a lot of work, she said. "They're lower maintenance than chickens and
I think (the eggs) taste better." Hedahl now runs workshops showing Seattleites how to raise
ducks in their yards.
These days, around Seattle you can find just about every conceivable workshop related to
urban farming. The slow-food, eat-local movement has spurred hordes of city slickers to adopt
some small measure of homestead mentality into their daily life.
Workshops are packed.
The nonprofit Seattle Tilth, which offers the widest range of city farming know-how workshops
in Western Washington, reports record attendance in recent years. Chicken-raising courses
have wait lists. Sessions on beekeeping for honey fill quickly. The group's annual summer
self-guided tour of chicken coops around Seattle has expanded to include homes with bees,
ducks and goats, and now extends to the Eastside.
The widespread interest has led Seattle Tilth to diversify its class offerings to include
raising ducks and goats.
Raising urban dairy goats, which was previously rare (and before 2007 illegal) in Seattle,
has become trendy here and in other parts of the country.
Three years ago, Jennie Grant, who teaches the dairy-goat workshop at Tilth's Wallingford,
Wash., headquarters, convinced Seattle's city government to allow homeowners to raise
miniature (100 pounds or lighter), dehorned goats.
Urban farmers consider goats to be "the city cow," a smaller milk producer that needs no more
yard space than a typical dog.
Grant's class has gotten more popular with Seattleites who are curious about getting fresh
milk to make cheese and yogurt. She tells potential goat owners to buy a breed that's quiet.
Erect a 5-foot fence, build a shed and be prepared to milk day and night.
Grant lives in Seattle's Madrona neighborhood, with a backyard featuring seven chickens, two
goats and a view of Lake Washington. With the eggs and the goat milk, that's pretty much all
you need for a souffle, she said.
She took me out back to the pen and chicken coop. It felt like visiting a house on rural
Vashon Island.
Her La Mancha goat, Snowflake, greeted me with a couple of jumps. Her Oberhasli goat, Maple,
nibbled on my coat zipper and notebook.
She pulled Maple into the pen, gave her a pale of oatmeal treats and milked her, in the same
manner as you would a cow.
The trick is to finish milking before the goat finishes snacking, said Grant, or she might
not remain still.
Her goats each can produce around a gallon a day. Grant has it on her oatmeal, her husband
pours it over cold cereal and her 10-year-old son drinks it straight. The surplus is given to
neighbors or made into chevre and mozzarella. It makes for a mean goat-cheese pizza with sun
-dried tomatoes and caramelized onions, she said.
spacious, fenced backyard in Seattle's Wedgwood neighborhood: putting in an organic garden, a
beehive or a chicken coop maybe.
But no. Hedahl wanted ducks. Or rather duck eggs: richer, denser, with yolks bigger than your
chicken variety, she said.
Here on a recent afternoon were her four ducks, hopping out of the kiddie wading pool that's
plopped in the middle of her yard, each webfoot capable of producing about 300 eggs every
year.
As one after another waddled by, I couldn't help but do the math. That's a lot of quiche.
But these ducks aren't a lot of work, she said. "They're lower maintenance than chickens and
I think (the eggs) taste better." Hedahl now runs workshops showing Seattleites how to raise
ducks in their yards.
These days, around Seattle you can find just about every conceivable workshop related to
urban farming. The slow-food, eat-local movement has spurred hordes of city slickers to adopt
some small measure of homestead mentality into their daily life.
Workshops are packed.
The nonprofit Seattle Tilth, which offers the widest range of city farming know-how workshops
in Western Washington, reports record attendance in recent years. Chicken-raising courses
have wait lists. Sessions on beekeeping for honey fill quickly. The group's annual summer
self-guided tour of chicken coops around Seattle has expanded to include homes with bees,
ducks and goats, and now extends to the Eastside.
The widespread interest has led Seattle Tilth to diversify its class offerings to include
raising ducks and goats.
Raising urban dairy goats, which was previously rare (and before 2007 illegal) in Seattle,
has become trendy here and in other parts of the country.
Three years ago, Jennie Grant, who teaches the dairy-goat workshop at Tilth's Wallingford,
Wash., headquarters, convinced Seattle's city government to allow homeowners to raise
miniature (100 pounds or lighter), dehorned goats.
Urban farmers consider goats to be "the city cow," a smaller milk producer that needs no more
yard space than a typical dog.
Grant's class has gotten more popular with Seattleites who are curious about getting fresh
milk to make cheese and yogurt. She tells potential goat owners to buy a breed that's quiet.
Erect a 5-foot fence, build a shed and be prepared to milk day and night.
Grant lives in Seattle's Madrona neighborhood, with a backyard featuring seven chickens, two
goats and a view of Lake Washington. With the eggs and the goat milk, that's pretty much all
you need for a souffle, she said.
She took me out back to the pen and chicken coop. It felt like visiting a house on rural
Vashon Island.
Her La Mancha goat, Snowflake, greeted me with a couple of jumps. Her Oberhasli goat, Maple,
nibbled on my coat zipper and notebook.
She pulled Maple into the pen, gave her a pale of oatmeal treats and milked her, in the same
manner as you would a cow.
The trick is to finish milking before the goat finishes snacking, said Grant, or she might
not remain still.
Her goats each can produce around a gallon a day. Grant has it on her oatmeal, her husband
pours it over cold cereal and her 10-year-old son drinks it straight. The surplus is given to
neighbors or made into chevre and mozzarella. It makes for a mean goat-cheese pizza with sun
-dried tomatoes and caramelized onions, she said.
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