Feed Stores Offer Everything From Livestock Feed to Farm Animals

Image Gallery The Country Farm Supply feed store provides its customers with their every need – hay, tack and the latest gossip.

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Española, New Mexico – You have to be careful when you walk in to the Country Farm Supply feed store on the main street here. Maybe you only stopped by for a bag of hen scratch – but you could end up going home with a donkey. Or maybe several African geese, a handful of guinea hens, a billy goat, some fancy turkeys, a llama … and a donkey.

These things can get out of hand. When you spend too much time at the feed store, animals just sort of happen, much like the proverbial poop (which we’ll get to later).

Take, for instance, Arturo Medina, who drove 20 minutes down from Chimayó to the Country Farm Supply feed store here on a balmy May morning for an $18 Sweetlix block to keep his donkeys from bloating on the new spring grass.

He leaned against the counter – the glass countertop is the perfect height for leaning and chatting – and popped the question. “Anyone want to buy a donkey?”

Hay prices in the Southwest are through the roof, so Arturo, who loves his donkeys and even sings his grandma’s old Spanish songs to them, has decided to sell a few. Several people jot down his phone number before heading home – at $150 for a 6-month-old donkey, it’s a good price.

A short, pudgy guy in a bright red T-shirt comes in and wants a bottle of malathion. A young couple walks in looking for something to control the grasshoppers eating their garden. With a bit of advice, they walk out carrying two Royal Palm turkeys, two Rio Grande turkeys and two ducks (geese, you see, eat mostly just grass).

Phil Diaz, who lives just up the road, comes by for seed to replant his five acres of pasture. Employee Chris Cortez slings the 50-pound bag of alfalfa seed over his shoulder like it’s a pillow and grabs a bag of orchard grass seed with his other hand.

Someone opens the door to the poultry room and Cortez yells as he walks by, “Shut the door! It stinks!”

Just then, the town’s police chief, Richard Guillen, walks in after an apparently long hiatus. “Chief, I’ve missed you!” someone hollers.

Welcome to the small-town feed store – retail the way it used to be, when the place you bought your hay and hen feed was the same place you poured a cup of coffee and lingered awhile to shoot the breeze with the townsfolk. (Maxwell House, mind you, no double skinny soy no-foam lattes here.)

The nation’s feed stores are perhaps one of the retail areas largely untouched by America’s increasing dependence on same-same box stores – most rural areas, even suburban rural areas bordering large cities, still have a locally owned feed store or two. They are mom-and-pop places where you can buy anything from horse feed, hay, saddles, boots, cast-iron pots and pans, to seed for your pasture and garden.

Time in a Bottle

In Española, the Country Farm Supply on the town’s main thoroughfare has been a feed store of some sort since at least the 1930s, says Richard Lucero, the store owner who also happens to be Española’s former long-time mayor. Lucero remembers going to the store as a young child on his birthday for a 5-cent triple-decker ice cream cone, when the store was both a feed store and grocery.

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