WENDELL — Two years ago, Wendell residents started receiving postcards in the mail reading, “Senny Side Eggs: From our farm to your table.”
Flipping it over, they found a note from 7-year-old Seneca Smith saying “This is my first business. I have been raising 25 laying hens since they were day-old chicks.”
Seneca, now 9, is unique among third-graders. She runs her own egg-delivery business — from raising the organically fed chickens, harvesting their eggs and delivering them to customers, to communicating with clients, setting prices and keeping track of costs and profits.
“The way it started was she wanted things,” said Nikki Burton, Seneca’s mother. “So, we said she should earn her own money, and now she has this amazing entrepreneurial drive.”
According to Burton, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts’ Stockbridge School of Agriculture, Seneca handles all aspects of her business, Senny Side Eggs, except for when Burton needs to drive her to a delivery.
Now, Senny Side Eggs has grown — she has 45 chickens — and residents across Wendell call and email Seneca, place orders and eagerly await her knock at the door.
Seneca has at least a dozen steady customers, and has delivered sporadically to many others. Her surplus she sells to Wendell Country Store.
“I didn’t make my price last year so I raised it to $4.50 for a dozen,” said Seneca, carefully extracting freshly laid eggs from her chickens’ winter coop and inspecting each one for cracks, dirt or deformities.
Chattering away, Seneca rattled off the differences she sees in the dozen eggs in her basket: some are blue, white, brown, speckled or not speckled, depending on the breed.
Some eggs, she explained, are naturally skinnier than others, and some are nearly twice the size of others, suggesting it’s a coveted “double-yolker.”
“Once I got a dwarf egg and it was really, really small,” Seneca said. “I wouldn’t let it go because they don’t lay them much.”
Seneca is practical. She doesn’t name her chickens, which she said will be slaughtered once they get too old or sick, and she gives her chickens 100 percent organic feed with genetically modified organism-free food.
Although she admits she likes the “coziness and fluffiness” of some of the chickens, she is all business. Last year, she took in about $1,000, but only about a $100 profit after her expenses.
“She gets so much education from this,” Burton said. “And we have charts so she gets calculations and learns about profits.”
The food she gets from Vermont is expensive, and more chickens and price increases are the only way Seneca can make more money, she explains with the shrewdness of a seasoned businesswoman.
“This is my part of the farm,” she said, chickens wandering about at her feet in the great backyard of her family’s woodland home. “We also have sheep, goats, pigs.”
Seneca’s father, Doug Smith, is also drawn to agriculture and has a maple sugaring operation on the property. However, it’s not just Seneca’s help around the farm, and her economic drive that pleases him.
He can attest: the fresh eggs are some of the best he’s had. No wonder the local store buys them.
“I am a customer,” he said with a laugh. “And it’s always those big, orange yolks, not those pale yellow ones.”
Seneca, listening to her business’ appraisal, nodded silently in agreement.
“I give them a variety of eggs, too,” said Seneca, pointing out that the experience of buying Senny Side Eggs — and getting a rainbow medley of eggs delivered to the door — is a special experience, unlike buying eggs from a large chain.
“After I give them some eggs, sometimes they then want two dozen,” Seneca said.
Seneca spends most of her day at school, but makes sure she tends to her chickens every morning and evening, and gets her weekly orders ready, records her surplus and brings it to the store.
“People know who she is now,” Burton said. “They contact us like, ‘Senny Side Eggs, when can I get them?’”