First, you gather together a favorite shotgun or two; the right flannel shirts, plus a vest, pants, and jacket; some good boots, of course; a pair of long- johns; a well-trained dog; a box or two of shells; and then you hop in the truck to pick up several of your best friends. You are on your way to the Poore Farm!

As you can guess, this catchy name helps attract business, and hunting guests at the Woodston, Kansas farm of Larry and BJ Poore always make sure they get a photo standing by the Poore Farm sign.

The farm was established in 1905 by R.D. Poore, and is today the home of Larry and BJ. Larry’s parents, Alvin and Venda Poore, once worked the farm, and now live in town.

While they grow wheat, milo, and forage sorghum on the farm, three years ago Larry and BJ decided to begin making the land available for hunters. They were already raising and selling high quality registered Labradors with a proven hunting instinct.

“We went to Great Bend, where the Department of Commerce hosted a conference on agritourism,” said BJ. “I came home and said to Larry, ‘We can sell what people want! Darkness!’

They can’t get darkness in the city,” she went on. “The sky in the city is always light, and they can’t even see the stars. We’ve got lots of that."

“Having a place for the hunters to stay is the big cost,” Larry said, “but we’ve got a friend nearby at Solomon Valley Outfitters in Stockton, and Dennis (Bedore) built a new lodge and has extra space. Our hunters stay there, and we serve them breakfast and dinner at the lodge, with lunch up on our farm while they are hunting.” BJ drives down to the lodge to prepare the meals, and says they make sure the men get big, country meals—fried chicken, roast beef, and so forth.

The lodge has four rooms, with a bathroom and beds for four men in each room. One of the rooms is handicapped accessible. They can kennel dogs, but said that most of their hunters have their dogs sleep with them.

Larry guides the pheasant and/or quail hunts, accompanied by one or more of his labs. They hosted about 12 hunters last year, and this year—their third year offering hunting—they’ve more than doubled that so far.

“Getting the word out is really difficult,” they both said, almost in unison.

Larry said, “We tried advertising in Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, and Pheasants Forever, among others, and I don’t think we got anything from that. We also tried Denver and Kansas City newspapers, and maybe got one lead from that. This year, we are going to go to the sports expo in Denver, and see what that does.”

“You’re gonna laugh at me,” BJ said, “But the best success we’ve had was from E-bay. Everybody is always talking about E-bay, so I listed a hunting trip. We didn’t get any bids, but we did get 8 or 9 phone calls!”

They say the website is also “pretty helpful” (www.poorefarm.com). “They told us at the conference in Great Bend that we needed that, and they were right.”

Website visitors may notice that the website has more than one domain name, all pointing to the same website. When you use the address above, you’ll see that the actual URL (web address) for the home page is http://kansas-pheasant-quail-hunting-rural-nature-working-farm.com/. This long name is an effort to attract more hits from the search engines, focusing on people using the search words “Kansas, pheasants, quail, hunting.” We tested this, and unless you search for the words with the hyphens in place, it doesn’t seem to help. Perhaps the search engines see the domain name as one giant hyphenated word.

In 2005, the Poore’s invited state agritourism leader Ben Allen to visit the farm with them. Ben, who works for K-State Extension, was “on loan” for one year from his regular position to travel the state to assist farms and ranches in accessing their resources. Ben came out and walked through the property with them, and sat down at the kitchen table to help them assess what was needed to invite the public onto the farm.

Among other things, Allen recommended that they consider a controlled shoot area, which does allow for a longer hunting season. The disadvantage, he said, was some hunters are concerned that the birds are too tame in these environments. As yet, the Poore’s have not gone that route, and though they release a few birds, they are by no means tame.

The Poore’s raise about 15 registered labradors a year, yellows and blacks, and all with a natural pointing sense. They sell mostly one-year-olds that have been in the field, gotten used to the guns, and know how to handle the cover and find and retrieve birds. Once you buy a dog, the Poore’s will keep regular contact with you for two years making sure the dog meets your expectations.

They also raise Labradoodles, labs crossed with standard poodle. “These dogs don’t shed,” Larry said. “They’ll get to 50 or 60 lbs, they’re intelligent, and many point birds naturally. A lot of folks don’t realize that poodles were originally breed for hunting.”

What’s next for growing your business, we asked.

“Well, we are putting together a flyer, for Denver, and we’re thinking about mailing that to our previous customers as well as those that bought dogs,” BJ said.

“I’m also going to start video taping the hunts,” Larry said, although there was some friendly interplay between Larry and BJ as to whether this was his idea, or that of one of the hunters. “We’ll shoot the video of the hunt, and when they leave, we give them a little DVD that they can look at to remember the trip.”

Customers just might be willing to pay a little extra for a DVD like that…looks like more hunters are likely to end up at the Poore Farm in the future!

For more information, visit www.poorefarm.com