Meet Detroit’s duck farmer

Suzanne Scoville is at work in the kitchen of a house she owns on the east side of Detroit. She's making Dutch baby pancakes, and uses a manual eggbeater to whip them up. It is an unseasonably warm winter day, and her cat basks in a shaft of sunlight streaming in through the back window, gazing outside at — several ducks cavorting around in the backyard.

No, a flock of mallards hasn't decided to touch down in her yard. The ducks live there. In fact, these ducks provided the eggs for the pancakes she's making.

Scoville, affectionately dubbed "Mother Nature" by some neighbors, is an urban duck farmer. She looks the part of an urban resident gone granola, dressed casually in denim and wool, a crown of brown dreadlocks spilling from her head. 

A graduate of Grosse Pointe South High School, Scoville received an English degree at Michigan State University, then got a job at a bookstore with lots of downtime. Leafing through books, she grew interested in designing sustainable architecture, sketching out her ideas. On a whim, she traveled out West and met seminal earth architect Nader Khalili, who helped pioneer low-impact adobe building in the United States. Scoville says, "I realized that I had already designed a low-impact house in my spare time. After seeing this stuff out West, I thought, 'What I drew up was an earthship.'"

She apprenticed for a week and then got a job working in "natural building," involving adobe, passive solar, and off-the-grid living. For Scoville, it was an inspiration.

"You experience how much energy goes into a home, and you gain a lot of respect for it. You get kind of uptight about wasting energy."

Now supporting herself with a day job as a building contractor, she's incorporating a lot of that into her east side properties, including the small house she lives in, the empty lots, and the large two-story house she's cooking in today, which she hopes to use for lectures, workshops and as a bed-and-breakfast. In fact, in May she plans to host renowned Austrian permaculture expert Sepp Holzer, aka the "rebel farmer." Also, this March, she'll teach a poultry care and cooking workshop where kids will do an egg hunt and learn how to handle ducks without spooking or harming them.

A flush of ducks in the yard may sound odd at first, but once you know Scoville, they're just another one of the enterprises that seem to have evolved organically in and around her home over the last eight years. There's the garden across street, for instance, which she tends with her neighbors. Then there's the rooftop garden she's designing, to use space better, or the kitchen she often uses as a canning space. 

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