Emus are unusual animals. With their long, thin necks, beady eyes and dinosaur-like scaly legs, they’re curious but will quickly scamper away if you get too close.
To Anne Geller, owner of Thunder Ridge Emu Products, their quirky characteristics add to their charm.
“They’re very neat animals,” Geller remarked. “They have so much to offer.”
Geller considers emus her “bread and butter,” having raised them since 1993. She discovered them when she and her late husband, John, were becoming more health conscious. Lean and low in cholesterol, emu meat fit in their low-fat diet.
“But it turned out the oil is the real prize,” she commented.
Used in cosmetics and skin care, emu oil is renowned for its moisturizing properties and contains omega fatty acids 3, 6 and 9. Geller has a line of 15 products she sells online and at her shop in Manassas—oil, lotions lip balm, foot cream and more. She also makes products under a private label for a large natural company.
“A lot of cosmetic companies are now using it in their anti-aging skin care products,” Geller said. “Once you’re hooked on it, there’s no going back. It’s wonderful.”
‘Never let them get out’
In a paddock located up a slight hill, a mob of emus roam from one end to the other, almost blending in with the wooded landscape.
“The ground is just so bare,” said Andy Deskins, gesturing to the well-traveled ground. “They never stop, they walk continuously.”
Deskins manages Geller’s 30-acre farm in Warrenton. At one point, the property housed nearly 2,000 emus and was the largest operation on the East Coast, but Geller downsized after her husband died a few years ago. Now home to about 20 emus, she contracts with other U.S. emu producers to source supplemental oil.
Deskins said there’s one rule when it comes to raising animals that can run 35 miles per hour.
“Never let them get out,” he warned. “You talk about a headache. You can’t catch ‘em. It’s not like a cow or nothin’, they just want to get away from you.”
Native to Australia, emus are very different from their aggressive ostrich cousins. Relatively docile and low-maintenance, they prefer to leave people alone unless threatened.
Emu meat is a growing niche market
In 1990s, a fervor erupted over emu as the next most-popular meat. Farmers invested heavily in the birds expecting large payouts, but it turned out to be a short-lived fad.
“We developed the industry before we developed the market,” Geller explained. “We were selling the birds about as fast as they were laying eggs, but we were selling them to other emu people and people getting into the emu business. Wrong, wrong, wrong thing to do.”
With an oversupply of emus and no big market for products, the bottom fell out and farmers began exiting the emu business. Now the emu farms around are “mostly hobby farms.
“People who have five to 10 birds, that kind of thing,” Winslow said.
According to the 2017 U.S. Department of Agriculture Census of Agriculture, there are roughly 1,500 farms and about 11,500 emus in the U.S.
Winslow explained that while most farmers raise emus for the oil, there is a growing niche market for emu as another lean, healthy meat option. Most sales are direct-to-consumer or at local farmers markets, and those who rigorously market their product do well.
“People are starting to learn,” Winslow said. “There’s money to be made in it—in the oil and the meat. We want more people to raise the birds, but at the same time, we don’t want to have another ‘90s thing.”
Geller attributes Thunder Ridge’s success to her Northern Virginia location near Washington, D.C., along with aggressive marketing—attending natural products trade shows and traveling to places like Dubai and Singapore to sell her oil.
“I’ve got backorders,” she said. “We have one customer that has a standing order of 2,500 4-ounce bottles of oil.”