I've written a few times in my blog about how I pick animals to raise. The latest animal that people were going to make millions on is the pigeon.
My opinion is that if someone approaches you, and makes claims that you can make a great living off your farm, you can add pigeons to the list of animals that includes alpacas, llamas, emus, ostriches, and so on.
The basic pitch from Arlan Galbraith, president of Pigeon King International (PGI) was that you'd buy your breeding stock from PGI for a pretty large sum - up to $500 a breeding pair. You'd then build your facilities, and pay for feed, and PGI would buy the pigeons you produced at some contracted price. The purchase price was high enough that it looked like you could make quite a bit of money.
For the first few people into this particular animal fad, you could make money, and in fact Arlan did buy the pigeons produced -- because he needed pigeons to rope the next round of optimistic farmers into the mix. And the next, and the next.
Some farmers got checks for 3 years running -- and served as role models for Arlan to point to to rope even more people in.
This scheme managed to rope in more than 1,000 farmers, with an average investment of $100,000 each, but some invested more than a million dollars. The contracts issued by PKI have a total value of around 1 BILLION dollars.
So I'll go back to my original criteria for picking animals to farm:
Do you and everyone you know eat that animal or use its product at least once a week?
News articles about PKI
PKI dead in the water
Conspiracy killed pigeon king
forums discussing PKI
4 weeks ago
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