Our History
Founded in 1988, Carr's has been actively involved in the nutrition of animals for over 30 years. Originally livestock and arable farmers, Carr’s has grown and evolved from small beginnings into an ever growing family business focusing primarily on bringing your animals back to nature.
In 1995, Carr's of Creswell replaced livestock and arable farming with the aim of building a successful bird feed business (concentrating primarily on racing pigeon corns and specialist blends for cage & aviary birds) with a total devotion to 'producing consistently high quality corn that suited everyone's pocket.'
From Carr’s of Creswell to Carr’s Natural Feeds
The progression into all that is Carr’s today is loosely based around a book dating back to 1865. Passed down for generations through a local farming family, the hand written book details a multitude of locally kept remedies and blends featuring naturally occurring plant extracts. At this time, oils and spices were readily available (even more so than today), coming into the country via the spice routes- as natural remedies were the only means of cure for many illnesses and problems of the time.
Realising the potential of essential and non-essential oils, Carr’s managing director Simon Carr began to build modern day products based around these age old natural remedies for use in conditioning birds and animals. From his findings, Simon brought Ad-herb Original, an oreganum plant extract on to the pigeon market in 1998, after extensively trialling it himself by blending it into his home produced racing pigeon corn.
The Trialling of Ad-herb
Having never kept or raced pigeons before, Simon paired up 4 pairs of pigeons he received from his feed customers and put them on Ad-herb straight away, rearing their youngsters with no problems. He joined a local club, borrowed a clock and with the help of his regular feed customers and of course, Ad-herb, he trained his youngsters ready for their first race. His first race with the youngsters was at Marlborough in 1998 which was approximately 165 miles. Simon picked up 13th fed in the Derbyshire fed 5650 birdage. His friends at the club believed that if the bird had trapped straight away and was timed in quickly he would have topped the fed on his first race. News quickly travelled about the result and the oil he was mixing with the corn. Soon many fanciers in the area were using Ad-herb, with word spreading quickly to the Barnsley area and up to the north east. Ad-herb suddenly became a national favourite. It has since been developed into two formulas; Original (red label) for the corn and pellets and Aqua (blue label) for the water.
Expanding the Range
With the great success of Ad-herb, the next obvious step forward for Carr's was to expand our natural supplements range. With many more interesting natural remedies to explore, we began trialling them according to their intended use and received fantastic results and feedback- and so the Carr's pigeon range was born.
We received many e-mails and calls from very happy customers who had tried and tested our products on different varieties of birds, other than pigeons. In particular, cage and aviary breeders telling us that they couldn’t believe the results they were seeing. With the demand in place we decided to re-invent our pigeon range to tailor specifically to the needs of cage and aviary birds. The results were remarkable– helping 2 fanciers become budgerigar champions and best opposite sex in budgerigar championship national show at Doncaster within 1 year!
We had plans to expand further into a Rabbit range of products but these plans were accelerated when we received an amazing success story from a man named Mr Robert Furniss who had then been breeding rabbits for over 30 years. He had somehow obtained a bad bug in his main rabbit room and lost 30 rabbits in two days but had no idea what the problem was. He contacted his friend Lou Bevan who bred rabbits and also kept pigeons for racing. Lou suggested using our Ad-herb Aqua product on his rabbits with problems. He introduced it to their water supply and within hours a rabbit that had dropped to just 6 ounces began to eat again and made a full recovery. With this great success, we developed our range for rabbits and Entracare Aqua was produced.
In 2003, sales improved to a point that Simon sold off his corn feed business and now concentrates solely on his totally natural feed supplements company.
Carr's Today
Today Carr's is still an entirely family run British business. We have developed our ranges even further into the Equine market with great success and we are hoping to release products on to the canine and poultry markets in the very near future. The launch of our brand new website has helped us to push the boundaries even further and develop as a company into 2013. We are constantly striving and researching for new natural ingredients and remedies to help benefit your animals.
