Standard Feed and Seed Jacksonville Florida

Dear Call Box: Years ago, I went to an old-timey feed and seed store in Northwest Jacksonville. What can you tell me about it?

G.B., Jacksonville

Dear G.B.: The first thing you hear when you enter the front door of Standard Feed Co. is the chirping of parakeets. The store has a slice-of-the-earth appeal from the rows of seeds displayed in buckets to the pungent aroma that emanates from the hay and grains.

While Jacksonville celebrates its urban sprawl, Standard Feed remains a testament to its shrinking rural roots. Despite that urbanization, Standard Feed has survived for 71 years.

Brothers John and Bill Moore opened for business on April Fools' Day 1946, but the joke was never on them. They did a highly respectable $400 worth of sales that first day. They ran the store at Myrtle Avenue and Kings Road for 44 years until they retired in 1990 and sold the business to Rob Davis.

It is the oldest seed and feed store in Jacksonville, Davis said. While dozens of such stores once dotted Duval County, only a few remain, he said.

"That's a reflection of the urbanization of the county," Davis said. "All the cattle farms, the dairy farms and the horse farms are virtually all gone."

Davis attributes Standard Feed's longevity to being in the right location, building relationships with customers and "just doing right by everybody year after year after year."

Customer Nancy Rasco said it's her favorite store. She got her chickens and starter coop there. She gets her feed, plants and seeds there because she said they have the best variety. Rasco said employees are always helpful with any questions she has.

The store sells feed for what Davis calls Old MacDonald's Farm plus. That plus includes food for koi pond fish and even a kangaroo. You can also buy dog vaccine, antibiotics and worm and flea control medications.

In addition to parakeets, it sells cockatiels, chickens, guinea pigs, rabbits, ducks and turkeys. It sells thousands of biddies and young hens from February to October. No roosters, though.

As the business grew, Standard Feed became not just a retailer but a wholesaler and exporter because of Jacksonville's port and accessibility to the Caribbean, Davis said. From the mid- to late-1990s, it shipped 3,000 bags of horse feed a week to Puerto Rico and lesser amounts to customers in St. Croix, Bermuda and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Its client list also once ranged from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to Dee Dot Ranch.

Most of its customers now are backyard gardeners, not farmers, who grow vegetables as much for entertainment as for food, he said. It sells between 150 varieties of garden and vegetable seeds.

The Moore brothers, who died some years ago, came up with an approach to selling their product that they dubbed the "Seedteria," a name they had trademarked. Davis said the brothers told him they went to the World's Fair in New York in 1960 and dined at a cafeteria. They translated the concept of a little of this food and a little of that food to their feed and seed.

The product is prepackaged in standard size increments. But if customers want two or three pounds of one variety and four ounces of another, employees will weigh and package it for them.

Good Friday is their biggest sales day of the year, Davis said. That's because it's deemed by the Farmer's Almanac and by religious tradition as a good day to plant, he said, adding that he's been told there's never been a recorded freeze after Good Friday in Florida.

In 2011 Standard Feed moved from its property at 1282 Kings Road to 1236 Kings Road just a few doors down. It sold its property to Family Dollar, which tore down its original building and built one of its stores in its place. Within a 90-day time frame, Standard Feed remodeled one of its warehouses into a retail store without missing a day of business.

Davis has worked hard to maintain the same ambiance of a small-town Americana store. As you enter the door, a bulletin board notice says "Chicks in stock" next to a "Life is better with chicks" T-shirt. Tool implements such as rakes and hoes hang on walls and from the ceiling. Overhead are exposed air-conditioning duct work.

Outside, murals of burlap bag feed, barrels of hay and a pitchfork decorate its dark red stucco walls painted to simulate brick.

If you have a question about Jacksonville's history, call (904) 359-4622 or mail to Call Box, P.O. Box 1949, Jacksonville, FL 32231. Please include contact information. Photos are also welcome.

Sandy Strickland: (904) 359-4128

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Source: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/reason/call-box/2017/08/27/call-box-jacksonville-s-standard-feed-dishing-seed-1946/15362998007/

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