Ringing Up ranch supplies
Store owner prioritizes quality and customer service
When residents of Solano County and surrounding areas need supplies such as livestock bedding, horse-riding gloves, hog feed or even baby chicks, they stop by Higby’s Country Feed, a family-owned and -operated farm and ranch supply store in Dixon. Roland Higby bought his grandparents’ property and started the store in 1984 with about $3,000 in inventory in a tiny shack—his grandparents’ former laundry room. By the late 1980s, Higby had built two storage barns and added employees. In 1992, Higby hired Scott Hulbert, a college student who needed a part-time job. Hulbert “fell in love” with his work at the store, but other career ambitions drew him away about a year after graduation. Higby talked him into returning in 2003, with an agreement for Hulbert to eventually purchase the business. Shortly after Higby built the current 7,200-square-foot store in 2008, Hulbert began buying into the business. He purchased the remainder in 2019 when Higby retired. The store now has 15 full-time employees, including Hulbert and his wife, Nicole, and a couple of part-timers.
What’s kept people coming to the store year after year? We feel that anybody can sell what we sell and so we try to offer really good customer service. We have knowledgeable employees from all different backgrounds. So, not one of us knows everything, but if you put us all together, we can get most questions answered. We try to do a good job of purchasing, so we can be competitively priced and offer quality products. We have a lot of years of experience in picking out hay and our customers appreciate knowing they’ll get really good-quality hay. I actually go out and look at almost all the hay that comes into this store and if there are any problems with it, I won’t accept it. Do you ever get customers having some type of problem but don’t know what they need to fix it? We get that all the time. Every day we get people who have questions about problems with their animals. Our staff can answer most questions or we know where to go get the answers. We have good relationships with our veterinarians around here, and we offer to get the customers in contact with the vets. We have a lot of resources because we’ve been doing this for a long time.
What are some examples of things you sell at your store? As we’ve grown over the years, we’ve adjusted our inventory based on what our customers were asking for. So, we still sell a lot of hay, feed and shavings (for animal bedding), but we’ve broadened into a lot more. We have a lot of fencing for livestock and horses and we’re also a destination for fencing contractors or homeowners just trying to fix their fence. We have vaccines and insect repellants for cattle and sheep. We have a full line of dog and cat food and pet supplies and all kinds of things to take care of horses, like supplements, wound-care supplies and halters. We have clothes for riding horses: britches, tops, socks and gloves. We do a pretty good business selling toy horses and tractors and figurines of different animals for kids. Who are your customers and where are they from? Ranchers are a big part of our business, but we have a large number of horse owners. We sell to the UC Davis Equestrian Center. In fact, there are like 15 departments at UC Davis that we sell to. We also sell to the Sacramento Zoo and Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. We sell mostly to Solano and Yolo counties, but we draw from Sacramento, the Bay Area and Napa. We have a couple of delivery trucks and we regularly deliver to places like Walnut Creek, Martinez and Thornton.
Linda DuBois ldubois@californiabountiful.com
MORE ONLINE Learn about Hulbert’s challenges and rewards in running his store, and what community causes his business supports. That and more at californiabountiful.com.
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