Paul Kieu
In St. Landry Parish, down a gravel road that looks more like a postcard than real life, Jerome and Nadia Foti have built a farm—a most unusual farm.
The Fotis are not growing sugar cane or cotton. They aren’t raising cattle or training horses. They aren’t growing tomatoes or peppers. Nope. In the little town of Arnaudville, the Fotis have built a farm that produces deer urine.
“In 2003, we moved to the country. In 2004, we got our first deer,” said Nadia.
At some point around the time they moved to the country, the Fotis began to question the products touted to be deer urine that Jerome and their son, Jared, were buying from another company. “We were using product from another company, but we couldn’t be sure if it was really deer urine, chemicals, or goat urine. Our results were inconsistent,” Jerome said.
And so the idea was planted. With plenty of country acreage, Jerome and Nadia purchased two deer and began collecting bona fide doe urine on the farm they now call Deer Ridge Farm. “The first time we used it, we killed the biggest deer of Louisiana that year,” Jerome said. “Someone did a story on the big deer we killed, and other hunters wanted to know how we did it.”
A friend of their son said, “Hey, if you bottle that stuff, I’ll buy it.” And with that, a business was born.
“Before the season ended, we had nine stores selling our new product. Then we didn’t have enough deer,” Jerome said. “With the hunting culture what it is in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, we realized there was a market. Hunters will go to extreme lengths to get an edge.” For the record, many may consider extreme lengths in the world of hunting to be further than extreme lengths in most other contexts.
Southern Whitetail Scents Hyper Heat, the Fotis’ product, is different from its competitors because it is pure doe-in-heat urine. The Fotis collect the urine overnight and then refrigerate it at 42ºF, where it remains from the time it is collected until it is sold. Hunters buy the two-ounce bottles of chemical-free urine for $18 a pop. As part of their preparations, hunters place the product on a rag tied to a string and drag the rag through the woods to attract deer.
The Fotis hand deliver their product throughout the South and sell the product on consignment. They also provide small dorm-sized refrigerators to each vendor, returning at the end of deer season to retrieve all product that didn’t sell.
Since 2004, the Fotis’ deer herd has grown. “We bottle feed all the does,” Nadia said. “We have a playpen here in the house for the babies. They all have names. We use cat collars so that everybody can tell them apart.”
Though they only collect urine to sell during the deer-breeding season, they maintain relationships with the deer throughout the year. Every evening at dusk, the Fotis, along with their children or grandchildren if they happen to be visiting, go out to the fenced field just behind their home. The deer come running, knowing that the Fotis are armed with their secret weapon—animal cookies. “The deer love animal cookies,” Nadia said.
Beside the field, the Fotis, both pharmacists, have a small lab set up where they bottle the urine and keep records on their herd, including medication, vaccinations, and other data. “Can you imagine any company collecting excrement for a profit?” Jerome said with a laugh. “But hunters are a funny bunch. They’re competing against their best friends. When we first came out, hunters wouldn’t tell their friends. Eventually, with a little bit of gumbo, a little beer, everybody starts bragging—and the secret is revealed.”
Paul Kieu
By the end of their second year in business, the Fotis had thirty stores throughout the South selling Southern Whitetail Scents Hyper Heat. By the end of their third year, there were fifty-nine. “When we got to fifty-nine stores, it was too much,” Jerome said. “We had to cut it back to thirty stores to make it work for our lifestyle.”
These days, the Fotis continue hand delivering their product to each of the thirty vendors they serve. “The process is so labor intensive,” Jerome said. “You can only grow the business so big. We’re not in big box stores. We are only going to stay in mom-and-pop stores. We’re very focused on that fact. We’ve been doing it since we started in 2004, and we haven’t changed our philosophy. We wanted to maintain full control of the product.”
From one of the stores, Foti has heard that one of his best customers is Hank Williams Jr., whose hunting buddy is Kid Rock.
“This was never about a lot of money for us. We can’t handle that,” he said. “Bigger is not better, and it would start to control us. That’s never been our goal. Hunters are so competitive, they will take any and every advantage. If they think they can get an advantage by using doe urine on a cloth and pulling it around the woods, they will do it.”
"When we first came out, hunters wouldn’t tell their friends. Eventually, with a little bit of gumbo, a little beer, everybody starts bragging—and the secret is revealed.”
After the initial success of Southern Whitetail Scents, the Fotis used the money they made to start a deer breeding business. The whole farm is licensed and inspected by the Louisiana Department of Agriculture.
So far, the Fotis have helped start twenty new deer farms across the country—Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana—and continue to work as mentors with those farms. “We just love the animals,” said Nadia. “And the people they’ve introduced us to. We’ve become really close with Amish farmers who we’ve helped start deer farms. When we go to Pennsylvania to visit them, we stay in their homes and they stay in ours.” In fact, the Fotis’ business has grown into three offshoots—the doe urine for use by hunters, buck breeding, and whitetail insemination.
“Being responsible stewards is what’s driving us,” Jerome said. “We want to help others enjoy and respect the animals in the same way we do. Not only do we hand raise the does, we also have an older buck that is hand raised. Deer are very fragile creatures. We go to the extreme to take care of these animals and educate others to do the same.”
Visit their Facebook page for all the latest: http://bit.ly/2dIMNc5
