The Sugar Maple Emu Farm Story
Emu Today & Tomorrow
the emu industry magazine
June/July 2010
 
Sugar Maple Emu Farm
http://www.SugarMapleEmu.com 
http://facebook.com/SugarMapleEmus
written by Joy Reavis with Jill M. Smith
 
Our Start
 
My husband, Mike, and I purchased our first emus in 1995, just as the prices were starting on their way down. Mike saw an article in a local newspaper about someone who had purchased several ostriches for their small acreage and he thought it would be something that we could do on our 10 Acre farm. But I told him, "Take an aspirin, go lay down and THAT idea will go away!"
 
However, the more that we learned about ostriches, the more we decided that they were not for us. An 8 foot tall bird that can weigh up to 300 pounds seemed a little too big for us to handle. And, the fact that the males become quite aggressive during breeding season just didn't appeal to us.
 
People just north of our town purchased some emus and the newspaper did a front page article about them. We visited them, looked at the birds and received some information about emus and their amazing oil. After two years of research, visiting emu farms and attending seminars, we decided that emus were what we wanted to raise.
 
Although raising emus was new for us, this wasn’t our first experience in agriculture. My husband and I both have farming backgrounds. Mike was raised on a dairy farm, and I was raised on a rural horse farm. My first husband and I dairy farmed along with raising beef and hogs. I was always fascinated with incubating and hatching ducks and geese. We usually had chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys around the farm. This fascination with hatching eggs and raising birds has served me well in our current operation.
 
Developing the Business
 
From the first day that we received our emus, we were in the "tourism" business. We are fortunate to have a beautiful setting for our farm and, even though the buildings are old and starting to show wear, we have often been told that it is a showplace. This helped to lead us into agri-tourism. We give farm tours from May through October for one person, a family, or a group. All tours and store sales are by appointment only.
 
Soon after we began giving tours, I started hanging tarps in our garage to block off a section so that I could leave my products and information set-up to show interested visitors. Each year the area I used got bigger and bigger until now my store covers a 20'x30' area. This area is used for video viewing and displays of products, egg art, jewelry and other emu related items.
 
Marketing

Word of mouth led to increased emu oil product sales. I gave our business card out to "everyone" who asked about emus or products. Our products are now wholesaled locally to a pharmacy, a chiropractic clinic and several health food stores.

It has taken diligence and creativity to market our products and to begin to realize money from the venture. When we first began, we had hoped to raise the emus, put them on a truck and then wait for a check in the mail, just like we did with our cattle and hogs. That just never happened for us. Not at the beginning, anyway. We started talking to emu oil product companies that offered "oil banks" so that we could utilize the emu oil that we produced. I learned to write press releases through advice in e-mails from others on an online emu list and started submitting these "articles" regularly to our local and state newspapers. Not very many got printed at first, but we became known by the local media by doing this. It has led to some really nice feature stories about our farm over the years. And now, these press releases produce our main advertising along with a continuous classified ad in our local weekly newspaper, on several tourism booklets and websites and listing of our website on numerous other websites

Our biggest seller is the Emu Oil. We have private labeled our certified emu oil under the "Sugar Maple Emus Naturals" label. We use our banked emu oil to purchase products from Purple Emu and EPMI and have built up an emu meat clientele over the years. Without a lot of effort on our part, we sell about 1,000 pounds of emu meat each year. Emu egg shells and artwork, jewelry, leather products and other emu related items round out our sales.

In 2002 we had a website built and started promoting online sales. It took more than two years before the income from the website started to pay for the hosting and credit card fees. There is a saying, "If you build it, they will come." Well, not really. Just because we built a website, it did not mean customers came right away. Today, website sales are steady and pick up during the winter months when the on farm store is closed. We now sell wholesale to several local stores, have website sales throughout the US and sell through our farm store, which is open by APPOINTMENT from May through October.

Being an American Emu Association Certified Business Members (CBM) gives us exposure to AEA website visitors and customer leads.  It allows us to support the AEA while promoting our business.

Facilities and Processes

We feed our emus a good, balanced emu feed formula that we have processed at a nearby Cargill feed mill. The feed mill provides the grain which is ground, mixed, pelleted, bagged and delivered to our farm. This has been good for us because with such small acreage, we do not have the room to grow our own grain. The only drawback to purchasing this feed is that we have to order 2-3 tons of feed at a time. However, we are very happy with our feed formulation as it produces thriving chicks and our process birds have good muscling and lots of fat.

 

Currently, including chicks, we have around 50 emus right now, but we had several years where we had up to 200 emus on our farm at one time.

Our incubators and hatchers are in our basement, which is where the newly hatched chicks stay until they begin to eat and start to poop. At that time they are "banished" to the chick barn, an 18' x 30' building where the chicks stay until they are 6 months old. At that time they are moved to one of the three 50' x 60' grow out pens where they will stay until they are sent for processing.

Breeder pairs are each kept in 18' x 125' pens with polydome shelters that are 8' in diameter and 8' high. (The shelters are the top of a grain holding bin where there would be a matching half bolted to the bottom of the top half. An auger would come out of the bottom.) These act like oversized calf huts and are where our breeders are housed year round, even through the coldest winter months.

 

To control pests we use a lot of Diatomaceous Earth. This helps to control fly larvae in the manure piles.  It is, also, mixed with the feed to help eliminate internal parasites.  Emptying containers to prevent standing water and keeping the grass mowed short around the pens helps us to control mosquitoes.

 

Advice to Others

Probably the most important advice I can give current and potential emu growers is to learn as much as you can about these amazing birds by reading books, joining e-mail lists and meeting with other emu farmer and ranchers. And, even after years of experience, when you think you have these emus all figured out, something new will happen that will shoot down your "proven" theories. You will find that you never stop learning something new about emus.

 

Be prepared to grow in some unexpected areas. My husband and I have. Neither of us was skilled in public speaking or sales and marketing when we began, but, out of necessity, we learned as we went. The customer is the most important thing that a business can have so, we have learned to treat them with the respect they deserve. ?

 

The Future

The entire emu industry is growing and expanding. When we started in the mid-nineties, we had to promote our emu meat directly to the consumer in order to sell it. Now, there are wholesale buyers looking for emu meat. We learned to sell and market the emu oil and oil products directly to consumers because that was the only way that we could earn money from our emu business. Now, there are emu oil companies that are purchasing large quantities of fresh frozen emu fat. Even hides, feathers, edible eggs, fertile eggs and egg shells are being sought after by some buyers.

 

For Mike and I personally, we plan to keep on, keeping on, as long as we can. It is only the two of us raising the emus and running the business. We are both in our 60s and we, physically, will not be able to keep raising emus forever. If handling the emusbecome too difficult, we will still continue to sell products and support the emu industry.

 

We will continue for as long as we can. It’s a passion... a love for these animals and this industry that keeps us going. There’s an unwillingness to give up because we truly believe that this is a product that is beneficial to society. Mike says with a smile that this is the most fun he has ever had farming.

 

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