Portable chicken coops mean fresh eggs – and a growing business

ENOCHVILLE, N.C.,None — Randy Klocke stood hunched over the brood of hens at his Enochville farm, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. His hands flashed down in a blur, grabbing a hen by a wing and snatching it off the ground, as it flapped its wings frantically.

“I caught you fair and square,” Klocke told the hen, his voice soft, trying to calm the chicken. He looked up and smiled, adding, “Not bad for a big guy.”

Klocke – yes, his last name is pronounced “clucky” — captured the hen for one of his customers, Crystal Dillon, of Statesville, who traveled with her 3-year-old son, Conalan, and 18-month-old son, Samuel, to pick out eight hens from Klocke’s farm.

Klocke runs Rooster Hill Farms, and while he sells eggs and hens from his farm, his major business is building and selling portable chicken coops, also called a Henpen or a chicken tractor.

Back at the farm, Klocke went for a handful of feed, tossing it on the ground to get another group of hens to gather. His hands flashed out and he had another hen before you could think about making a clucking sound yourself.

The hen let out a squeal of clucks and Klocke just made a quick joke, telling the hen, “It could be worse. You could be going to see the Colonel.”

But instead of going to see the famous Colonel Sanders to become a friend chicken dinner, the hen was headed home with Dillon and her boys.

Dillon had purchased one of Klocke’s Henpens about two years ago and needed some new hens. She lives in Statesville and keeps the portable chicken coop in her yard where she can get fresh eggs each day.

“We wanted to have the ability to have our own fresh eggs and have a small operation, and this worked out perfect for us,” Dillon said. “They taste better. And it’s nice to know whose handling our food and where it’s coming from.”

Dillon, a stay-at-home mom, may not strike you as the typical customer, but Klocke said his customers aren’t farmers but professionals. Doctors, lawyers and corporate types are the ones buying his “Turn-Key Chicken Farm.” They get a Henpen, six hens and some accessories – everything they need to start collecting fresh eggs.

Klocke has two small chicken farms, each an acre and a quarter in size. Those farms are home to more than 500 chickens. Another 300 will be showing up on March 17, as he gets ready for the spring, the selling season for Turn-Key Chicken Farm packages.

During the interview the sound of a rooster call erupted from Klocke’s pocket. Fear not, chicken lovers: It was just his cell phone’s ringtone, which started off with the rooster call and quickly turned into a techno beat with the sound of a chicken clucking throughout the song.

The call came from his wife Cynthia, who was finishing her rounds of delivering eggs to Farm Fresh Market in Salisbury. Since the Rooster Hill Farms need to have egg-laying hens ready to sell to customers, Klocke has an abundance of eggs. He sells them to local businesses including Farm Fresh Market and Maddy’s Fatty’s in Davidson, who use the eggs to bake treats.

With the approach of spring, Klocke is preparing to attend the Southern Spring Home and Garden Show in Charlotte and then another one the following weekend in Columbia, S.C.

Last year, he had 38 orders at one show and 19 the very next week. On his own he can only produce about 10 a week, so he has to take orders and get them out to customers, who are lining up. The Henpen itself sells for $799, but a turnkey chicken farm costs $999. And since Klocke provides hens that are already laying eggs, a customer can start having fresh eggs immediately.

“When you buy eggs from a grocery store? Do you really know what you’re getting?” Klocke said. “They’re raised in factory farms with growth hormones, and that ends up on your dinner table.”

Movies such as the documentary “Food, Inc.” which shows some of the more disturbing aspects of food preparation, has pushed people to want to know more about their food, Klocke said.

“And people are thinking, ‘Wait a minute. What am I putting into my body?’” he said. “So if you keep your chickens in your backyard, you know what (the hens) are eating. You know what you are eating.”

BIG BUSINESS

While Klocke can only crank out about 10 Henpens a week, he is looking for a manufacturing company partner to mass produce the units. He’s going to need to if everything works out with a deal he is currently brokering.

Klocke is negotiating to supply Henpens to the Tractor Supply retail chain. He has another meeting with company officials on April 20, and an initial order could be up to 5,000 units.

“I can’t build 5,000 of them,” he said. “I can turn out 10 a week, and it’d take me five years to build that many.”

Klocke said the Tractor Supply representatives are looking at the Henpen to bring in a different demographic to the store – those doctors and lawyers concerned about the origin of their food.

Klocke did a survey of about 500 of his customers. He discovered many were women making more than $100,000 a year. He said that he has placed about 60 of the units in Charlotte and another 30 in the Lake Norman area.

The key for Klocke is finding a niche market. He said the average person could build a chicken coop for about $200. But it wouldn’t be something someone would want in their backyard in Charlotte, let alone Lake Norman.

“Rednecks don’t buy these things,” Klocke said. “They build their own. So we’re looking for the people who want quality.”

Now, the deal with Tractor Supply could expand his business. And he sees why Tractor Supply likes the idea of selling Henpens.

“For them, this is a big win, because for every one of these they sell, they sell more chickens, more feed, more feeders, more drinkers,” Klocke said. “Normally, a doctor or lawyer has no reason to go into Tractor Supply, but now he will, and when he gets in there he’ll see the windmills they sell and the benches, and they’ll make more sales just because they drew this guy into the store.”

GETTING STARTED

Klocke’s Henpens may be turning into a big business, but they have very simple roots. When he was an executive director for the private school Northgate Academy in Salisbury, he and his wife, Cynthia, had already started their own hobby farm. But by about late 2008, things changed.

“The economy turned south, and the school closed, and here I am out of work,” Klocke said. “Where does an executive director go when the economy is like this?”

Fortunately, Klocke and his wife had already saved some money, plus the couple had some rental properties to generate revenue. So, Klocke decided to focus on his farm and wanted to add more hens. He ended up building the first batch of Henpens for himself, but didn’t like the quality so he decided to sell them on Craigslist, just to get rid of them around February 2009.

“I had 21 phone calls within an hour of posting,” Klocke said.

He sold the three original Henpens to the first person who called, but decided to call the other individuals just to see how interested they really were. In the end he had orders for more than 10 more Henpens.

“I said, ‘Hey, there is an opportunity here,” Klocke said. “There’s something people want, let’s fill that niche.”

For Klocke, it’s just another adventure in a life that has come full circle. He grew up on a farm in Iowa and left to join the military, enlisting in the Army. He actually enlisted to get away from farming.

“I thought it was going to be easy,” Klocke said. “And for a farm boy it was.”

Klocke served from 1983 to 1987 and was involved in Grenada. At that time he was in the airborne rangers and had two different parachuting accidents that injured his legs.

“I should have learned from the first one,” Klocke joked. “When the weather changes I feel the price.”

After serving in the military he went to college in Florida and then attended Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Over the years he has been a pastor of two churches, one of which he started. He was a pastor when he met Cynthia.

Cynthia was already living in Enochville so Klocke settled here. Over the years he helped start his own church in Mooresville, New Harvest Christian Fellowship and then helped form the K-12 private school Northgate Academy.

And while it may have looked like a bad situation when he was laid off there, his life has come full circle, working on a real farm again and selling hens to go with his Henpen business.

“And during that time I decided I don’t want to go back to work,” Klocke said. “This is what I like doing. I make enough money that I can support myself and I’d much rather be doing this.”

WSOC