A good business plan can capitalize on anything -- even pasteurized chicken manure. "Within five years, there's going to be a billion-dollar-plus company in the organic and natural lawn-and-garden market," predicts John Packard, founder and CEO of Portsmouth-based Pure Barnyard.
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — A good business plan can capitalize on anything -- even pasteurized chicken manure.
"Within five years, there's going to be a billion-dollar-plus company in the organic and natural lawn-and-garden market," predicts John Packard, founder and CEO of Portsmouth-based Pure Barnyard.
Pure Barnyard probably won't be that company: It has only a dozen full-time employees, and its most recent round of equity funding was just $1.7 million, most from within New Hampshire. But Pure Barnyard may well be part of that company.
"The exit strategy is fairly plain. There are big folks out there . . .who are going to be rolling up this industry. Within two, maybe five years, there'll be a day that somebody takes us out and probably a number of other people," Packard said in a recent telephone interview.
Packard is confident in his company's appeal to one of the big boys because the 6-year-old firm is riding high on an organic fertilizer with the clever name of Cockadoodle DOO, which consists mostly of treated manure from massive Perdue Farms chicken operations down South.
"The first five or six years, we were selling organic product into a market that was mildly receptive to organics. The last couple years, we're working to supply demand, not trying to create demand anymore," Packard said.
The company now sells various grades of manure-based fertilizer, plus organic weed control based on corn gluten, in garden-supply stores and other outlets in 23 states, including a half-dozen in the Nashua area.
The big news for Pure Barnyard is that it's test-marketing in a few Lowe's stores, and Packard has hopes of getting permission to sell in every one of the nationwide chain's sites.
"The big boxes (retail chains) sell 80 percent of the (fertilizer) market. Lowe's in September said it didn't see demand for organics, but the success of the tests means (the contract) is ours to lose," Packard said.
Cockadoodle DOO -- a name dreamed up by Pure Barnyard sales manager Dick Sheldon -- emphasizes its organic nature in sales literature, but it aims well beyond the stereotypical "green" community.
"When we, the organic and natural industry, talk to the 'Birkenstock crowd,' we get 100 percent of them -- but most of those people are self-sufficient, using local materials, doing their own composting," said Packard. "For our demographic, the 'soccer mom' is the driver. She doesn't want her kids playing on fields treated with a synthetic fertilizer."
More than 80 percent of Pure Barnyard's sales are to homeowners, with golf courses and institutions such as colleges making up the rest.
Cockadoodle DOO sales materials emphasize safety, at least as much as being Earth-friendly, and Packard points to laws limiting chemical applications on parks and other public areas as a major reason why the organic lawn-and-garden business should boom, even though it tends to be more expensive than synthetics in the short-term and doesn't always make as visible a difference.
Packard, 59, founded Pure Barnyard in 1998 after selling his first company, which made industrial valves for he petrochemical pulp and paper industry, and finding that retirement didn't suit his temperament.
He heard about technology in Holland that took chicken excrement -- a major pollution problem as the poultry industry consolidates -- and composted-and-baked it into a dry, non-smelly fertilizer.
He shipped 200 tons to Goffstown and sold it as organic fertilizer in the Boston area. Transatlantic costs meant this wasn't feasible as a business, but sales at garden centers were good enough to prod him into finding a Quebec farm that used the same procedure, which is roughly the same thing dairies do to milk when they pasteurize it.
As sales climbed, the hunt for a regular supply took him to the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay, where Delaware and parts of Maryland and Virginia join into what is called the "Delmarva" peninsula. That is the nation's chicken-processing capital, with more than a billion birds in monstrous egg-and-poultry barns that dwarf anything built in New Hampshire during its poultry heyday of the 1940s.
But lots of chickens means lots of manure, which means lots of pollution and lots of pressure on companies to do something about it. Perdue Farms has built a massive manure-processing facility, so big it can fit 30 rail cars at once, and has committed to moving 185,000 tons -- that's right, tons -- of processed chicken manure out of Delaware.
Pure Barnyard is taking a lot of it, and if the Lowe's connection comes through, it may take all of it, Packard said.
The treated manure is shipped by rail car from Delaware to a contract packager, which puts it into Pure Barnyard's bags and ships them to designated stores.
That's why Pure Barnyard is so small, despite big sales: It directly handles just sales and product development.
"That's a model similar to most fertilizer companies: Most are marketing and sales operations," said Packard.
The biggest challenge to expansion is the need to put temporary help in Lowe's stores when the product first arrives to peddle the idea.
And then there's that brand name, with its chuckle factor that has proved invaluable.
"We speak in front of large groups, like garden clubs, on a regular basis. When we first start to talk about Cockadoodle-DOO, there are always some chuckles and some people, generally older people, find it difficult to say out loud. But by the end of the talk, everybody's saying it," said Packard. "But you always get a smile.
"It's memorable. As far as branding goes, it has worked very, very well."
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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
