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Specializing in heritage and rare breed chickens for small backyard flocks and homesteading family’s.
Join us as we talk with Tom Watkins from Murray McMurray Hatchery about life and times working in a long-time owned family company and just how does it work to have live animals shipped to customers doors!
For more about Murray McMurray Hatchery and what they have to offer, please checkout their website below!
Murray McMurray Hatchery – https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html
Transcription
Brian: Thomas Watkins is vice president and McMurry Hatchery.
He’s been working at the hatch for eight years. No previous chicken experience but now he’s something of a chicken expert. McMurray Hatchery is a family owned small business, but they just happen to hatch a lot of chicks.
They specialize in heritage and rare breed chickens for the small backyard flocks and homesteading families. Thomas Watkins, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Tom: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Brian: So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what it is that you do?
Tom: Like you said, I’m the vice president here. It sounds impressive. It really isn’t.
That’s part of being a small family company.
You might get a big title, but I’m still the plumber. I do a lot of building maintenance.
Number one is we have chickens.
And with that, we raise our own breeder flocks and take care of all the chickens. We hatch the eggs.
So here we have large commercial incubators and we hatch out about 150 to 200,000 chicks a week and ship them all across the United States. So primarily to small backyard flocks.
We don’t really do anything commercially for that. So it’s just people want chickens, you know, a couple of laying hens in the backyard or to produce their own meat or eggs.
Yeah, you kind of wear a lot of hats.
Brian: So you said you didn’t have previous chicken experience.
How did you end up here? What’s your life story up to this point?
Tom: I married into it, you would say. My father in law is the president of McMurray Hatchery. So McMurray Hatchery has been around for a little over 100 years now.
All right here in Webster City, Iowa. So we’re in the heart of Iowa. And while the McMurray’s are all gone, went through Murray McMurray and his sons John and Charles and then his grandson Murray MacMurray took over and he had two business partners.
And those two retired and it was my father in law Bud Wood and said eight years ago, I came on with really no intention of being any management plan just to kind of help around and work my way up, you’d say, oh, pretty quickly.
It’s, you know, helps when your father in law is the boss, but you just kind of jump in with everybody. We’re really lucky, we have a lot of great help. Because it’s all hands on deck when you deal with live animals.
So we work really hard when you need to work. And then, you know, take time off later.
Brian: Yeah.
Tom: Oh, absolutely. Yeah I don’t know and now, you just answered enough questions, you can be your own chicken expert.
Brian: Good deal well, and it fits into the crowd that you’re playing into, because it’s what they’re all attempting to do, right. They they’re going from quite possibly not knowing anything about chickens to raising them and so forth.
Tom: Exactly. Like I said, I’m living proof of what happens because I never knew people had chickens in their backyards. And then so we got chickens and went from a few, and then you go from having chickens and they are the gateway animal to other, you know, hobby farming. You get a goat, or you get small cow. You move to an acreage, like so.
Yeah, I’ve done everything exactly that any of our customers are going to do or try to do.
Brian: I imagine there’s a whole lot of customers that have been with you for quite a while, having a over 100 year old company, you’ve got a lot of background there.
Tom: Yeah, so we get calls from people who’ve been ordering since the 70s. You know, the 60s and we have primarily with catalogs, prior to the internet, so, like, they look forward to their catalog in the mail.
Instead of the people still do we still do a really good catalog in the old timers and people who don’t typically get catalogs now they’re interested in that kind of stuff.
So yeah, it’s tapered off you know, there was a kind of a lull in there when supermarket said you know, cheap eggs and stuff like that, where were the business wasn’t that great booming for what we were doing.
There’s the old timers and now we’ve got a really big crowd of people who want to get back into being sustainable. And know where your food comes from take care of themselves. That’s exciting. I really like that part.
Brian: So for people that aren’t aware that you can even buy chickens through the mail.
Can you tell us a little bit about how that process works?
Tom: Yeah, primarily new orders come in online now that the internet rules everything. But we still do catalog sales, you can get requests to catalog and order through the catalog.
We have 110 varieties of chickens, 30 varieties of ducks and geese, 15 different pheasants, you know quail, swans different profiles stuff.
So we’re kind of a one stop shop for small farms, even backyard flocks, it’s anything you’d want. Our typical order is less than 20 birds that’s going down. So we’re really still a lot of small orders and people get one Rhode Island red one black cross are a lot of colorful birds because there might be an urban or suburban lot and it starts with that they want to know where your food comes from, you know, raising chickens is really easy.
And it’s very quick turnaround. It takes about six months to raise a chicken to get eggs.
That’s a really fast as far as any animals go, turnaround for reward. So it’s really neat to see people go through the cycle and they get the birds and they get their eggs, and they’re just through the roof. You know, you get a fresh egg and there’s nothing tastes quite like a fresh egg.
So it’s great for kids. It’s really good for learn about the lifecycle of different things. We do a lot of schools, that they’ll hatch eggs and then they might just take home chickens and say, Hey Mom, guess what I brought home? So that’s unique too.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely.
How are you able to send birds through the mail? How’s that work?
Tom: We’ve been doing it a long time, actually, even before there were airplanes we’d send through the railroads, the railroads carried the mail. And we had really good success doing that.
In the 1960s, when airlines started carrying the commercial air, the chickens were right with it. The chick in an egg develops out of the white of it, and the yolk is a food sack.
And so right before the chick hatches out of the egg, it envelops the yolk. So it kind of pulls it through a belly button and into its stomach.
And so that provides a chick with three days worth of food and water. They don’t need to eat or drink for the first three days. They could but they don’t have to.
So that’s why we’re able to ship day old chicks. And then without really any very special accommodations where it’s harder to ship older chicks because they do need that food and water constantly. Yeah day old chicks right through the the post office.
Brian: That’s, that’s so cool. I remember the first time I had heard about that, and it blew me away.
How were you finding new people?
Because it’s such a very niche audience that you’re going after?
What’s the main way that you’re getting or finding new people?
Tom: It’s not hard to find. If you wear a McMurray t-shirt around, someone’s going to come up to you and go, I got chicks from there.
My parents got chicks from there. It’s a very old timey thing.
Brian: Yeah.
Tom: You know, where people had farms, they have chickens. Some of the new people are, they’re just reminiscing about the you know, going off to grandpa’s farm and that chickens running around and every major metropolitan city, you’re allowed chickens, like most of them, I think it’s 93% of them. You’re allowed some backyard chickens.
They’re buried on how many you can have if it’s ten or six or five or something like that. But so we do a lot of travel quite a bit. So we’ll do trade shows.
We’ll do Mother Earth News Fairs.
Brian: Yeah.
Tom: We’ll do some gardening stuff. Because a lot of people who do gardening, even urban or backyard gardening are interested in birds.
It’s kind of a funny correlation, because everyone who has chickens gardens, but not everybody who gardens has chickens.
Brian: Yeah that’s true, that’s really wild.
Tom: We do stuff like that, um, Homesteaders of America, one of the things I’m really excited about is kind of that growth in that new homesteading movement, I feel like people are getting back to out of the cities and back to the farms or even on small plots of land where they can they can do these things for themselves and take care of themselves.
Brian: Are you seeing a growth this year, with the COVID-19 and everything else and people kind of returning to preparedness and homesteading?
Tom: Absolutely. I think anybody can attest to that, that that’s, anytime there’s a shortage of or the question of the shortage, we will see spikes actually when the we can tailor it by the stock market too. If the stock market goes down, then we actually have better sales.
That’s a comfort thing, you know, and during World War 2 it was recommended that every family member have two chickens, because they provided for your own necessity.
So you can provide eggs for your family. It’s little things.
Brian: Yeah.
Tom: It could be the price eggs in the grocery store. Price of chicken doesn’t affect too much. But those things will see new customers come looking for the route going right to the source.
Brian: That makes sense.
You certainly have a name in the industry. Do you have people that come across you randomly online?
Do you guys do any form of online advertising or anything of that?
Tom: Oh, yeah, you have to, we did it for a while. So like 2015 and 2016, we were sold a minimum of six weeks out like you couldn’t get a bird for six weeks for two entire years.
So we kind of scaled back on on the advertising we did.
I think that kind of beat us in the butt later on down the road, you know, 17 and 18. But the traditional advertising stuff you advertise on Google AdWords and things like that.
We do advertise in certain magazines, Backyard Chickens, Hobby Farms, you know, the things that correlate well to exactly what you guys are.
Brian: Yeah.
Tom: People will want to take care of themselves and be more sustainable. People want to be off grid chickens are number one on the list of things you need.
So if you think you’re going to be able to have a long term success, chickens are very easy to do that with lots of different types of stuff.
Brian: What’s your top selling product?
What is the top breed?
What’s the main thing that you see the most of going out?
Tom: Chicken owners are kind of traditionally split between egg layers and broilers, so your broilers are your meat chickens are number one on chicken is the broiler.
It’s a Cornish Cross, or Cornish X Rock, that’s far and away the number one bird we sell people are going to home butcher their own their own meat, it’s a really great way to do it.
You know, it’s not factory farmed in the worst possible conditions, you have full control of the life of these birds. And so you give them a better existence, even a shorter existence.
Then down from that it’s our best egg layers. So we have a Red Star Chickens a really nice brown egg layer.
The Pearl Leghorn, which is industry standard white eggs, that’s at the store, you’re gonna get at the grocery store. Really the things that are gonna lay the most eggs.
And then you know, we could go down and then it’s more fun birds, we do have, like I said 110 varieties of chickens, we get a lot of orders that are one of this, I want a really good egg layer, but then I want a pretty bird too.
So Barred Rocks, Bard Plymouth Rocks are American breed, they’re very traditional, they would have been on everybody’s farm 50 years ago, those are really popular.
Brian: Oh that’s fabulous.
We had Frank Hyman on the show last year, who wrote Hentopia, where he talks about how to build your own coops and everything.
So my wife’s in the middle of building a chicken coop. And she’s a gardener, and now she’s adding in the chickens. And so she was going through your website couldn’t believe all the different breeds and everything on there.
There’s so many different ones, just great pictures online, it’s really cool. I really want everyone to go check that out.
You’ve been involved for eight years. What do you like best about this business and your industry as a whole?
Tom: Like I said, I travel a lot and I get to meet a lot of people. I love talking to people. I love talking about that, you know, that they visited their grandfather’s farm in the 50s and 60s, or, you know, their kids are getting into chickens now and just the stories that people have to tell.
I hate to say the good old days, because that’s tuff to beat, you know, internet and air conditioning. But it is a simpler time. And people have really good memories of those, you know, going out and doing the chores. Might have to clean out the chicken coop and stuff.
But I get to meet a lot of people, I really love doing that. I love that.
I also do work with all the chickens, um, I breed different lines and stuff as well.
One of the things I like to think about, it’s like, alright, I’m gonna be here for 20 to 25 years, my kids will take over hopefully, but I can affect, you know, the genetic lineages of these chickens for another hundred years, like I could, if I wanted to select for a certain color or a certain variety that you can really improve upon what you have just by the different parent lines and things you can do.
So that’s kind of a really daunting, but really exciting thing that I like to do.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely.
Tom: You can, you’re gonna affect the long-term chicken owners.
Brian: It’s a great perspective and something I think most people don’t even take into account when they’re thinking about being involved in a business like this.
So now if you can change one thing about your business, what would that one thing be?
Tom: Right now we’re our kind of our biggest limitation is we do go through the United States Post Office. So if you’re following in the news that has been an issue chickens are, they get special handles and they get priority handling, we don’t have big issues.
But I would like to see a different way to do that, too. We go all across the United States, every week, you know, we hit all 50 states. We could get there in a more timely effective manner, it typically takes two days, two to three days to deliver chickens and they are live animal. And so if we could speed that up, even to the fact that you were not really allowed to ship express or overnight.
Even to allow that that kind of delivery service for for live animals, I think would go along base in in for in for the industry and for the animals themselves.
So that’s one of the things I also am working on.
Brian: Absolutely.
So if we were to talk again, say like a year from now, and we were to look back over the last 12 months, what would have had to have happen between now and then for you to feel happy with the progress in your business in your life?
Tom: You know, if we can go through 12 months, and I have all employees that are healthy, and we have birds that are healthy, and we’re still able to ship chickens, I’m going to be through the roof.
There’s so much uncertainty going around with COVID-19. That’s where we’re at.
You know, keeping workplace open is very difficult. Especially in an industry where we’re not able to isolate, we’re not really able to work from home. You work with the live animal like and there are no off days, there’s not an ability to just be gone or to have time off, keep the wheels going.
We’ve been around a long time and I don’t foresee that changing. So we can weather a lot of storms. And we have obviously a couple of world wars. But there’s a lot of things, you know, I’m pretty easy to please.
Brian: Well, that’s great. What advice would you have to other business owners that are looking to be involved in a business like this?
I know you didn’t start it. Everyone involved there kind of grew into it. What advice would you have to someone who’s either getting involved with a stable heritage business like this or that starting from scratch?
Tom: So with the rise in the poultry industry, not in poultry, like the backyard flock movement, there’s a big influx of hatcheries, like boutique hatcheries. It’s just people who say, I’m gonna I can raise birds, like, my birds lay an egg, I can collect that and you buy a little incubator, and you can hatch them and sell them, you sell them on Craigslist, or you sell them on Facebook, or pretty easy to put up a website and do that stuff.
It’s a very small industry too, even for players and I’ve been around a long time, like we’re pretty big, but we’re also very small. And it’s the same with all of the other hatcheries.
There’s five or six hatcheries comparable size, you know, and then you start getting into the Tyson’s and things we’re talkingma couple 10s of millions birds.
That’s a different, different world. But we all know, everybody, like I know every counterpart in every other hatchery we’ve met. And so even if you’re just starting out, and you want to get into this, it’s a big industry, there’s lots of room for people.
But reach out and talk to somebody like I’m available, call me up, I’ll help. The more that we work together, the more power our industry has like, and the more we can work together, the more we can lobby the post office to give us better shipping. So you know, I don’t want to fight anybody. I want to work with everybody. Everyone’s got a specialty, everyone fits in somewhere.
Let’s figure out how to make it work together. I think that’s a great attitude. And something that’s too often forgotten in dentists that we’re all against each other when actually if we just find our spots, there’s room for everyone.
Like I said, 93% of metropolitan areas allow chickens, let’s get to 100. And we work together and we can we can get there that you’re talking 300 and 50 million people in United States and only 4% of those have chickens.
We’ve even thought about chickens, even knew you could do chickens. So yeah, that leaves a lot of space.
Brian: A whole nother line of conversation there. But I’m just curious, did you ever raise any type of animals growing up? Did you grow up around animals?
Tom: I grew up in a very small town about 200 people. So I was very rural. But we lived in town, all the 200 people I did farm work, you know, I work with cattle. We did grow crops, mowed a lot of lawns and stuff like that.
Brian: Well, you’ve heard a lot of stories from people that have just started out of nowhere, and started started doing chickens. Do you see a huge value in…..well, I mean you mentioned like children growing up around it.
Tom: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Brian: You were able to see the life cycle and everything.
But what what else have you seen as far as that goes? What value do you think that that really gets back home when when someone brings chickens home to raise?
Tom: Like said they’re super easy to raise, they we literally wrote a book called, Chickens In Five Minutes A Day. That’s all it takes to raise chickens, you get them, they need a little more care on the front end. But on the back end food, clean water, pickup eggs, like they have enough space to just be really happy.
They can take care of pests around the house, eat lots of bugs, lots of spiders. They’re beautiful, you know, chickens are absolutely beautiful.
Their yard art is moving art. And that’s where we come in, we have a lot of varieties that are just really pretty.
You know, I have four kids too. And like they’re great chores for my children like, six and seven year old. They take the scraps out from dinner, they feed the chickens, I get the eggs like they get they have chores to do, they have responsibility and they like doing it because they like chickens are neat. Chickens and kids go hand in hand.
If you don’t have kids, chickens are still great. It doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s not complicated. You don’t need a complicated setup.
You know, if you had a cow, you’re committed to infrastructure, you’re committed to a you’re committed to high expensive stuff. Usually chickens eat half a pound of food a day gets four ounces and gets a third pound. 50 pound bag of feed is several months worth of food for chickens. Six months of the year cost to $14 to feed a chicken. So that’s pretty low costs for and you’re gonna get eggs out of the deal, eventually. Egg a day.
Brian: Yeah, no that’s really, really cool. And it’s a great, great message to have out there. That’s really neat. You said you have a have a book. It’s called, Chickens In Five Minutes A Day.
Tom: Yeah, I have to rewrite that that’s on my to do lists. We had it published probably 10 years ago. And we didn’t do enough reprints that it went of out of print. So that’s on my to do list is to rewrite our book.
Brian: Good, well we look forward to seeing that.
Tom: Yeah.
Brian: So I’ve asked you a bunch of questions. What am I not asked you that you like to answer?
Tom: Pretty good questions.
How do we fit into what your guys are trying to do?
What’s the overall message you’re trying to send?
Brian: We tend to talk about just the business side of self reliance. So we talk to a lot of businesses that either play toward that specifically from the products they produce, or they play toward in their entire infrastructure.
So we’re just happy to have you here and talk about it from a perspective of having this really solid, historic background and the whole thing, and while at the same time encouraging other people to be productive. So we really, really found this interesting.
Tom: Yeah. One thing that I didn’t touch on but, outside of eggs, getting baby chicks, like their industry and of themselves. If you go to farmers market, you know, there’s someone selling fresh eggs and they could be anywhere from $2 to $12 depending on where you’re at. And you know, what type of breed they’ve got, how there’s some really super dark chocolate eggs, there’s blue eggs, there’s green eggs, you know, white eggs.
A lot of people don’t know that eggs come in different colors.
So that’s a business people do, especially if that’s from not just a off grid or self sustainable people, you’re gonna have a flock to produce for yourself and to sustain. To keep regenerating your birds, you hatch eggs, you get more chickens, you raise them up.
But that’s a source of income to my grandmother, that was grocery money was the chicken egg money. We’re still there, it’s just more of a specialty market.
Farm fresh eggs are, I don’t know, anybody who has too many farm fresh eggs. There’s someone looking for them, and they’re looking and you can sell them at a premium.
People care about how their birds are raised, and nobody wants to see, you know, the factory farms. So if you can, look in your backyard, and they can see the chickens running around the chickens are happy.
Then that commands its own premium when you go to market with these eggs. Like that’s a business perspective to this as well. And it’s the same with meat.
So that’s eggs, but it depends on your state, but you’re allowed to produce so many birds and home butcher. There’s a lot different some regulations there.
But it’s pretty easy to look into for yourself. You can raise your own broilers your own, raise your own chicken meat. It’s very easy to do my family wheats, my two brothers came and we did about 300 birds between us and half a day.
So we filled everybody’s freezers full of chicken, we have a year’s worth of chicken like fabulous for for half a day’s worth of work.
Wait, I knew how those birds are raised because I did it. So there’s no we don’t have issues with that you’re going to have on somebody’s shed somewhere. But yeah.
Brian: Peace of mind is really helpful.
Tom: Yeah. And so that’s another business side of things. You can and it depends on your state and how many you can do at a time. The US you can look at the USDA, and they’ll give you a definitive answer some states, I think it’s less than 1,000, which is quite a few birds. There’s business opportunities here for people as well.
Brian: So that’s great. So what could a listener do if they want to find out more about McMurray Hatchery and everything you guys provide?
Tom: You can go on the website and the website’s a really cool resource. We have a catalog. We’ll mail out catalogs to people if you don’t have internet or you’re not big on online shopping. So we’ve produced a catalog since 1919.
It’s changed a few times but it’s really cool thing.
McMurrayHatchery.com. Like I said, we have breed photos, breed profiles, you’ll see the full selection of everything that we do.
We’re on YouTube, you can see some videos we’ve done on YouTube or Facebook. All of the social medias, you can tweet us.
Brian: Well Thomas Watkins is the Vice President of McMurray Hatchery. Thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Tom: Yeah, thank you very much.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: That was really cool meeting up with Thomas here and finding out the perspective of somebody who married in to kind of a legacy business, like this hatchery.
And at the same time, they’re still small enough that he can say, Hey, I’m still the plumber, you know, I’m still doing a lot of the work that no one else wants to do, I do whatever needs to get done. That’s cool.
That’s really neat that there’s something really neat and inspiring about that.
I like when talking with Thomas about their ideal customer, how he basically says it’s just people who want chickens, you know, and it’s almost more of who isn’t his customer.
I like how he framed that, because he’s they’re not looking to just retail out to large chicken farms or hatching operations, they’re looking for the backyard person, they’re looking for the person that’s starting from scratch, they’re looking for a person with a small group of chickens, or is just starting out in the chicken world.
That’s really a specific niche and something that is cool to see somebody taking on. And really being unapologetic about it.
He says that catalogs still exist. They’ve got physical paper catalogs. And this is something I’ve discussed quite a lot on my daily show, Brian J. Pombo Live, when we’re discussing the fact that a lot of these older mediums haven’t died away, they’ve just taken on competition with online versions or with digital versions.
And so you’re still have a lot of paper catalogs out there. In fact, I came across an Amazon.com paper catalog that they sent out for people that they knew had children, I think it’s for people in their prime program that have children, and it was a special children’s toys catalog, specifically for Amazon.com.
You can’t get more online than that yet, they’re using paper catalogs, there is a value in using some of the older mediums even more valuable now than in years past when it was the only medium.
It’s something to keep an eye on when you hear people that use that, see why they’re using it and how it could be valuable how these analog versions of the same things that we see on a regular basis online, how the analog version, it has a value unto itself.
It’s interesting.
It’s cool that Thomas and his company have been able to take on this rise in sustainability like he discussed and how homesteading is back on track and growing in popularity, especially with all of the happenings of 2020 the COVID situation and everything else.
People are looking to be more self reliant, they’re looking to have more stability in their life. The fact that they’re able to profit off of that after providing this service for so long.
And now really being on top of it and being able to handle this this rush of new customers. I think that’s really great to see and I wish Thomas all the best can’t wait to see what they have coming up in the future.