Tom Watkins - Murray McMurray Hatchery

Murray McMurray Hatchery

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.htmlTranscriptionBrian: 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,