posted 15 years ago
I recently stumbled on Herrick Kimball's blog, after seeing a reference to wheel hoes and wondering how they worked. A quick search brought up directions for building one.
Mr. Kimball sells garlic powder and machines for small farms, and is starting to explore the furniture business. More interesting to me, he has a line of self-published books, including ones that advocate Christian Agrarianism, one on running a powdered garlic business, and instruction books for the machines he sells, and some he uses but only sells kits or essential parts for.
The farm implement business he runs has some particularly elegant vertical differentiation: he'll sell you a finished wheel hoe, or a complete kit, or a kit minus handles and wheel, or a bare-bones kit with no fasteners, or just a blade. Similarly, he set his son up in business selling rubber fingers for anyone following his plans for a tub-style mechanical chicken plucker.
There's lots of cross-marketing, too. He'll mention how the wheel hoe saves labor for his galic powder business.
He has a full-time job as well, but seems to be on the verge of bootstrapping into a full-time farmer: he's probably made enough from mail-order businesses to buy significantly more land.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.
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