Tag: rural economy

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Profiting from the Web and Thirsty Chickens

This was sent to us by a friend. It is an inspiring story of ingenuity, determination, and perspiration!

By Willie Davis from the Daily Yonder

With ingenuity and smart application of Internet-marketing, a couple in rural Virginia has managed to stay on the farm, and get away from it occasionally too.

A hen sips from the Avian Aqua Miser in Scott County, Virginia. The Miser has been a generous boost to a farming couple who dreamed it up, designed it and are marketing it from home.

The chickens on Mark Hamilton and Anna Hess’s farm in Scott County, Virginia, don’t fear humans.  “We’ve spoiled them,” Hess says, with an almost maternal headshake.  Not long after Hamilton and Hess first bought their 58-acre farm, a friend gave them chickens hoping for a share of fresh eggs.  What followed—thanks to innovative thinking and high-speed Internet access—are an invention that has sold all over the world, a model for rural economic development, and a self-sustaining farm where the chickens feel spoiled.

Scott County was once a hub for big tobacco farms, and its location—nestled between two coal-rich areas—provided an opportunity for residents to work in the mines.  Once income from the tobacco industry and the coal companies dried up, however, the county suffered.  The population has been shrinking since 1990, and over twenty percent of the residents live below the poverty line.  Filling the void these tobacco farms left are small self-sustaining farms.  With small farms come small-farm problems.

For instance,  Hamilton and Hess needed to provide water for their chickens.  Leave too much water and it becomes dirty and unsanitary. Leave too little and you can never get away from the farm; the chickens would go thirsty.

Mark Hamilton artfully solved this problem with an invention he calls The Avian Aqua Miser: a nipple on a plastic container that allows chickens to drink the water only as they need it, a drop at a time.

“At first, I didn’t know what I was doing,” Hamilton says, referring to an aborted prototype of his invention.  He then noticed that larger commercial farms had been doing something similar.  But “big industrial farms overlooked the small guys, the people who only had one, two, three chickens,” he says.  “It didn’t seem right that people had dirty chicken water.  We wanted to help them out.”

Hess and Hamilton knew they had a winning idea. But how could thy sell it?  “People told Mark, ‘Go down to the Farmer’s Market, sell it that way,’” Hess said.  “That means you have to haul it down there, set up a booth, and stay there constantly,” almost are stifling as never being able to leave the farm.

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