The Poultry Leadership Podcast

Transforming 18 Acres: A Century of Farming at Kreher Farms - Hal Kreher- Episode 19

• Brandon Mulnix • Season 1 • Episode 19

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What drives a family to persist and thrive in farming for a hundred years? Discover the remarkable history behind Kreher Farms as Hal Kreher shares his family’s century-long journey in transforming 18 acres of land into a flourishing farmstead. From his grandfather's initial purchase in 1924 and the bold expansion to a 1,200-bird flock by 1930, to overcoming the Great Depression and the establishment of innovative barn designs in the '60s, Hal takes us through the farm's evolution and the pivotal roles played by each family member.

Organic farming isn't just a trend; it's a way of life at Kreher Farms. Hal sheds light on the myriad challenges and triumphs encountered while shifting towards more sustainable practices. Learn about the critical processes of waste product management, the creation of valuable compost, and the labor implications of de-intensification. Hal’s personal journey—from engineering back to farming—highlights the efficiencies gained through innovative barn designs and the irreplaceable value of family involvement.

Building a legacy in family farming involves countless triumphs and challenges. Hal opens up about the significance of succession planning, the acquisition of a large egg farm, and the importance of strong family relationships in maintaining a successful business. With heartfelt anecdotes, Hal underscores the deep connection employees have with Kreher Farms, their dedication during crises, and the strong community ties that continue to grow stronger with each passing generation. Join us as we celebrate 100 years of Kreher Farms’ rich history, unwavering values, and lasting impact.

Hosted by Brandon Mulnix - Director of Commercial Accounts - Prism Controls
The Poultry Leadership Podcast is only possible because of its sponsor, Prism Controls
Find out more about them at www.prismcontrols.com

Brandon Mulnix:

Welcome to the Poultry Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, brandon Molnix from Prism Controls, and today we have a very special show. We are going to get to hear all about a hundred years of career farms. We may not cover all the details today, but we're going to get a very good overview from a great individual who's grew up on the Ha., . I'm going to let Hal tell you a little bit more about his history, but before we get too far into that, I do need to stop and talk about our sponsor, Prism Controls. This show would not be possible without Prism Controls. As I introduced myself, I do work there, but we work hard to provide technology for the industry and in this case, today, this is providing history to the industry, a great representation of what this industry is all about. So if you can go ahead and check out Prism Controls online, they've got some great product and would love to help you out there. But as we get started, hal, welcome to the Poultry Leadership Podcast. Well, thank you.

Hal Kreher:

It's nice to be here and hey, we use Prism Controls on our farm. We are replacing some of our other control systems with Prism Wow, so we're rolling one for you.

Brandon Mulnix:

Thank you, Hal. I really appreciate that. So, Hal, it sounds like you guys have a birthday coming up. Can you tell me a little bit about what this 100-year celebration is all about?

Hal Kreher:

Yeah, well, 100 years ago, in 1924, my grandfather bought some 18 acres of land in Amherst, New York. You couldn't tell now that it was a farm.

Hal Kreher:

It was his beginning farm and there was no electricity or gas at the farm and the road was not really in good condition. I think he had to ride a horse the last mile sometimes because the road was bad. But he bought that land. Grandpa was a machinist and worked at all over gear. He was, I was told he cut worm gears. It would turn turrets and battleships and in 1924 he had 54 white lighters that he came out from the city with to his new farm and gradually built up the flock to 1,200 birds by 1930. And at that time he decided to quit his job in 1930. I can't imagine him quitting his job with the Great Depression going on. He was the highest paid guy in the machine shop but decided he liked farming more, I guess. So that's how it started and then so I have some very good articles that I found where they had a good interview with Grandpa. He died in 1955, I believe 57. So that was a few years before I was born, so I never met him.

Hal Kreher:

But I have his words in these articles, so that's pretty nice. So it gives some good history of how they built stuff up with their incubators. They got into breeding and selling chicks. And let's see by 1943, he had a 20,000 egg capacity incubator at his farm and would hatch over 75,000 birds a year and that's how he got started. He had some farm and would hatch over 75,000 birds a year, and that's how he got started.

Brandon Mulnix:

He had some contract blocks.

Hal Kreher:

I have a letter from 1946 where he's urging people to get their chick orders in because they ran out the previous year, and it describes how he was working with some different other growers to produce more eggs, to produce more chicks other growers to produce more eggs, to produce more chicks.

Brandon Mulnix:

So your grandfather quit a very high paying job that was very stable during the Great Depression to follow his dreams of being a farmer.

Hal Kreher:

Yeah, isn't that crazy.

Brandon Mulnix:

It's inspiring. I mean, he didn't know what the Great Depression, I don't know the time frame around the Great Depression in that area, but my goodness, what an inspiration.

Hal Kreher:

So then in 1950, my dad and mom got married and my aunt and uncle and the four of them well, the farm purchased the land that were our main offices now here in Clarence in 1950 and the four of them moved into the farmhouse which you know just grandpa moved out to the no electric and no gas and stuff. They moved into a house with no indoor plumbing in 1950. I think they want to at least a year with no indoor plumbing, so that women rebelled against their husbands.

Brandon Mulnix:

Of course they were doing all the work too.

Hal Kreher:

They convinced the husbands they had to put in some bathrooms.

Brandon Mulnix:

Then they got their indoor plumbing. But you know so, Mom and.

Hal Kreher:

Aunt Margie. They were both instrumental in the farm. They would do the egg grading and produce a lot of the workers, me and my cousins and you know, so they helped out great greatly and were a part you know a big part of the success of the farm.

Hal Kreher:

So dad and uncle don, they were. You know, nowadays they'd be hitster farmers. They had birds out on the range, a couple farms going this business. It was turning instead of being a pullet producing business into an ag business. When the hybrid birds came out, they just couldn't compete with their you know, single strain line anymore. They had their own strain of birds that they had bred over the years but it just couldn't compete with the new, newer hybrids.

Brandon Mulnix:

They did produce.

Hal Kreher:

for one of the I think it was decal for a while and then the hatchery, just you know, didn't make sense. So we got more into egg production in the late, probably early 60s, I would say, is when I started more into egg production.

Brandon Mulnix:

Okay, so how many? Let's say early 60s, how many eggs were being produced? Or how many birds was your Uncle Don and your dad responsible for? Responsible?

Hal Kreher:

for, oh, we may have had like 75,000 at that point, something like that between our own farm and some contract farms. The farm that they bought in 1950, it built and they had an old dairy barn, you know, gambrel roof barn with a hay mow. Well then, uncle Don and my Uncle John, they added two more floors to us. It had four floors to it. The first floor, you know, all the way up and an elevator shaft to haul eggs up and down. They didn't have to carry them up the stairs. A stairwell included a little feeding area. They added on a two-floor enlargement to it for birds, and these were all floor birds, of course, and you know this. What I remember, remember was the four-story barn and what we called the new barn. It was a floor barn with slats down the center and the eggnest on the wall and a trolley to take down the length of the barn and put, you know, hand, gather the eggs out of the nest and put them on flasks, put the flasks on the trolley and roll them out to the front.

Hal Kreher:

There were 10,000 birds in that barn but you know, my early memories are that barn, because that was built in 1960, I was born in 1963, and the old, what we call the old barn, the four-story barn, and you know we had different things. I can remember being a little kid being warned about the feeder keep your fingers out of the feeder.

Hal Kreher:

And you know it was probably just a who knows how old I was. You know four or five. You know walking through the barns I'm sure I was in there even younger, because you know that's what people do they take your kids in when you're doing something. And that's what we did. You know we had floor birds and it was. There were issues we had with the drinker. Technology wasn't was very poor, like we had trough feet trough drinkers and so one of those would tip over and make a horrible mess. The feeding was automated. Again, we had to hand gather the eggs. Growing up, we always had those eggs we had to hand gather, and these were nests on the wall that had a what we call a mailbox across the pump where the eggs would roll out of the nest into a tray that had a lid and a nest stick on top, where the birds would land and then walk into the nest.

Hal Kreher:

Well, when you came through and gathered the eggs in the afternoon, you didn't want the chickens to sleep in the nest, so we put that nest stick up in front of the nest, so the chickens didn't have access to the nest and you know most of the eggs are laid in the morning, so it wasn't a problem with making four eggs at that point.

Brandon Mulnix:

You just did that to keep the chickens out, so had to do that for a few.

Hal Kreher:

I don't know, maybe a month, the first month, to train the chickens and go in at night and pick the chickens off the floor and put them up on the slats Again to keep most of the manure up in one area. So it was the kids' jobs, to go out at night and put the nest eggs back down, and that's a bonding experience when you're doing that with your brothers, and so sometimes it would get to be a race.

Hal Kreher:

I was usually the little, the younger one. I'm the fourth out of five sons. I also have two sisters, so the only brother that I have, and so the bigger kids could run faster and stuff like that, so we'd go through and put the nest eggs down and then it was a run back to the house in the dark and you know so. That's terrifying for a little kid. It was uphill, but that's how they learn to run fast. So it's some fun stuff Looking back on it.

Brandon Mulnix:

So it's interesting Some of the technologies now that work to close the nest that work to automate all of those processes. You guys were way before your time, before the birds you know started going into more of the conventional housing it's. I go back to the numbers. You know your, your grandfather, left, and you know kind of left on his own and started this barn at, you know, 12, 12,000 birds. And then you're 1,200.

Hal Kreher:

Got to 1,200. 1,200, not 12,000. Okay.

Brandon Mulnix:

So that's when he jumped out, and then your dad and your uncle got it up to 75,000.

Hal Kreher:

Well, they retired in. It was 1993. And so by that point we probably had 400,000.

Brandon Mulnix:

and so by that point we probably had 400,000, 400,000, okay, so 75 400,000, and then today, how many birds you guys care for we have.

Hal Kreher:

In November we'll have two and a half million. We have a building going up right now. It's a fast growth when you look at it that way, isn't it is?

Brandon Mulnix:

it's just impressive. So, looking back, you had your older siblings and your aunt and uncle lived with your mom and dad, which is just, you know, crazy to think. You know, with a year without no indoor plumbing heck, I've had a bathroom project going for the last month and a half and I think all of my family are ready to kick me out because they don't have one part of the plumbing or another. And to think, you know, a year without any indoor plumbing Wow, that's crazy.

Hal Kreher:

You know, and then they lived in the same house until there were eight or nine kids between the two of them. Uncle Don and Aunt Marty lived on the second floor. Her mom and dad lived on the first floor.

Brandon Mulnix:

I can't imagine. That either. It's all about family. At that point, you're co-raising kids while everybody's out expecting to work, because it's not only did you guys have chickens, but you also started working the crop farm. Is that correct?

Hal Kreher:

Yeah, so all along we had some cropland not too big, probably grew. In the 70s we bought a farm down the street and so we had maybe 500 acres. We were farming something like that, and it was to get rid of the manure. You had to have somewhere to go with it. The manure got to be a big problem, though. We had liquid manure, and I don't know if you've had experience with that, but liquid manure smells a lot worse than the dry manure. It just has anaerobic decay and produces some very nasty ores compounds that really take a lot of dilution until you can't smell them anymore, and so it's pretty bad.

Hal Kreher:

We had that until 1994, when we switched over to composting. We did have some issues with the neighbors. When we were doing that liquid manure that hindered our growth until we had something different.

Brandon Mulnix:

Okay.

Hal Kreher:

When we came up with the composting, then we were able to see okay, we can keep farming wherever we are. We're pretty. We're the first farm to get to coming east out of Buffalo on Route 5. It's one of the major routes.

Hal Kreher:

You know, before the Thruway went in it was a major route and you know there's a lot of houses here and we had to figure that out. But we went to composting in 1994. It had a lot of benefits to us. It made the manure so the flies weren't interested in it. I mean before that we had high-rise buildings where you know the chickens were on the second floor, manure was on the first floor and clean it out once or twice a year and between those cleanouts the flies can get pretty bad, the mice can get pretty bad. It's just not a great system. So we switched to the compost and weren't storing manure in the chicken house anymore, taking it to a compost building Within a day or two, the flies aren't interested in it anymore.

Hal Kreher:

It doesn't attract flies once it starts composting and it's too hot for rodents to live in, and so you know, there's a big change for us and something that really allowed us to go to the next you know. Take the next steps and you know, we started producing compost and selling that to other farms, and we found the market for that was with organic farms.

Brandon Mulnix:

So there's a large organic farmer down near Pennian New York, his name is Klaus Martens and we started talking to him and he said well, you guys make this stuff?

Hal Kreher:

How come you're not farming your crops?

Brandon Mulnix:

organically and you've got the fertilizer for it.

Hal Kreher:

We looked at what that would entail and made the jump in 1999 into organic cropping and at the time I think, corn was $2.35 a bushel and organic corn was $5 a bushel, and so that helped.

Hal Kreher:

And that's you know, organic farming is very tough. It's the crop farming. You have to do it just right and the timing is essential. On weed control and stuff like that, it's very hard and so we've been doing that since then for 24 years. We've cut back recently a little bit on it Some of the ground. We've had some weeds come in that just couldn't control with tillage so we had to switch back on some of that. But then so the composting that led us to sack cages.

Brandon Mulnix:

Well, sack cages kind of led us to the compost thing that happened at the same time.

Brandon Mulnix:

So then, you know, we just, expanded that as we remodeled our complex over to the stack cages, added another compost building and took it from there that got us into like 2000, 2001., you mentioned the whole manure where you probably couldn't even get rid of it before, and then you made it into a product that actually is very helpful to the other farmers, especially the organic ones. What other big changes have you seen? Similar situations, possibly like that or in other areas of the farm?

Hal Kreher:

Well, this is an interesting question.

Brandon Mulnix:

I don't know.

Hal Kreher:

That was a real game changer, because we were taking a waste product and turning it into something we could sell.

Brandon Mulnix:

I can't think of anything else where we took a.

Hal Kreher:

You know, I guess we used to dump liquid ag out on a field and found somebody that would take that away.

Brandon Mulnix:

That was a switch from something like that, but not nearly to the same scale or anything. I don't know that's a good question well, it goes along, the sustainability, as that topic has really come to focus and across the industry. What's the sustainability story?

Hal Kreher:

and you know sustainability is a great thing to talk about you. You know, for farming it's been all about sustainability for a long time, although it's really been focused on productivity and efficiency. And I'll tell you, productivity goes a long way towards meeting your sustainability goals, because you can.

Brandon Mulnix:

You know hardly any inputs. But if you don't have any outputs, what good is it right? Any?

Hal Kreher:

inputs. But if you don't have any outputs, what good is it right Really for agriculture? I think intensive agriculture has made some of the agriculture more sustainable. I know people assume that by having you know 100,000 chickens in a building.

Brandon Mulnix:

That, oh my gosh.

Hal Kreher:

You must be sick all the time because that's what happens to my little kid when he goes to school time, because that's what happens to my little kid when he goes to school.

Brandon Mulnix:

But it's not like that at all. It's the exact opposite.

Hal Kreher:

It's a hundred thousand chickens and in a building where the disease is kept out and the vaccinations and different things you can give them in there nutritionally, you know, is what keeps the birds healthy and you know, I tell people that no, we vaccinate for different diseases.

Brandon Mulnix:

We've gotten rid of different things in the poultry sector by using biosecurity to our advantage and it's a huge thing.

Hal Kreher:

And I don't know how we produce as many eggs. As you know, it would take a lot more people to produce the eggs.

Brandon Mulnix:

The other way, I know it just does so.

Hal Kreher:

we are. You know, the de-intensification that we're going through to cage-free is taking more people. It's taking more labor. Nobody talks about that, the impact of that, you know, I haven't seen the impact of that on the sustainability of it.

Brandon Mulnix:

Well, as a farmer whose family went from floor raised birds to four-story barns, which I have to chuckle, because we see these four-story barns now and they hold a few more chickens than the one that you guys had there on your farm yeah, because that one did it.

Hal Kreher:

Have, you know, 500 chickens on the fourth floor? I don't know you guys were.

Brandon Mulnix:

We're ahead of your time, though, and it showed the value of efficiency and having four instead of four barns one barn with, you know, four levels. You guys were well before your time. So, Hal, looking back at you, you mentioned, you know, some of your earlier memories were you and your brothers and sisters and shutting the nest. What are? What is your story on the farm and how did you get to where you and your brothers and sisters and shut in the nest? What is your story on the farm and how did you get to where you got today?

Hal Kreher:

Well, growing up on the farm, you don't know what you have.

Brandon Mulnix:

Well, sorry, Brandon, I get a little emotional sometimes. No, that's fine, you know growing up on the farm.

Hal Kreher:

you know I had to work hard and stuff and when I went away to college I decided to go to engineering school so I could get a regular job like other people and my friend's parents, you know, and who had weekends off and stuff like that, vacations, yeah, and so I went to engineering school and went to Cornell and when I got out I got a job working for the Navy down in New Jersey and worked down there for a few years.

Hal Kreher:

But by then, you know, I had met this. That's a good name. By then I had met my wife, karen, who you know actually she went to school for poultry, and so she knew more about chickens than I did. So she came in and got a job working at the farm one summer. And that's how we met. That's a whole other story which I don't get into, I guess.

Brandon Mulnix:

And so she knows more about chicken and signage.

Hal Kreher:

I'll reiterate that, but anyhow. So I moved out of New Jersey to work for the Navy and then, in 1989, my brother called me and said hey, hal, we're looking at doing something a little different and we're looking at doing something a little different and we're looking at maybe distributing this beverage.

Hal Kreher:

Our egg trucks, to you know, help lower our distribution costs, but we need somebody to run that, and would you be interested in coming back? And so I said yeah, sure I'd be interested in coming back, and I didn't really consult Karen, but I made the decision to quit my job and come back and distribute Snapple.

Brandon Mulnix:

Oh, and so the first thing I did was you know, go to the store and I'd never heard of Snapple before.

Hal Kreher:

But I went down to the local convenience store and got a couple bottles of Snapple and they had this one tangerine seltzer and I thought well, that sounds good, but you know I wasn't used to alternative beverages.

Hal Kreher:

So we opened it up and and tasted it and it was exactly what it said was seltzer, watered with some tangerine flavoring, no sweetener or anything I was like oh my gosh, what have I done? You know, but anyhow we moved back and we started distributing Snapple in 1989. That business grew very rapidly. By 1994, we were selling over half a million cases a year.

Brandon Mulnix:

So it grew really rapidly.

Hal Kreher:

The business had to grow crazy to deal with that. And now, instead of having egg trucks with some Snapple on it, we had Snapple trucks with some eggs on them. In 1995, we sold off the distribution rights. In Rochester we had a contract for a large area and had sold off all their pieces. And so we sold off the Rochester distribution rights and just had Erie County and Erie and Niagara County, which is Buffalo and Niagara Falls.

Brandon Mulnix:

And it just didn't make sense anymore.

Hal Kreher:

So by 97, we got out of that part of the business and then we started a pellet mill to pelletize the composted poultry manure and again, it was something we didn't have any experience doing and they kind of gave it to me as a project.

Hal Kreher:

Here's this equipment that we had gotten from another company and we've got to figure out where we're going to put this together and see how it works. And so we took a look at the different buildings on the farm and we had an old building down the street, an old barn, that we were able to fit this pallet mill in and we put it in there with all this used equipment and got that up and running, and so that was another business that we got into.

Brandon Mulnix:

That was fertilizer business, and so that has been a pretty good business for us.

Hal Kreher:

It's not a huge thing but it's been okay. And so then that was in 97 and we built the second one in 20. That one started up in 2021, so that one started during covid it that one. That was a very challenging project, so the building took a long time to build. There was, you know, during COVID. It was a complicated building because of the compost building and the pellet mill, a lot of electrical conduits in the floor, wires, you know, going everywhere which way to different distribution boxes, and then you know then the once the building was built, we had to assemble the equipment and then get that up and running and starting up equipment for the first time we didn't have any vendors on site.

Hal Kreher:

because it was during COVID, it was a real struggle. And it was one of those times when thing after thing was wrong, and you know you just feel like oh, I'm trying to do this and it goes, that thing breaks. And then I'm trying to do that and that thing breaks. And so one of the guys was really getting down and he was like, oh man, I just can't. You know, this is another thing broke. It's just.

Hal Kreher:

I can't deal with it hey you know, look, and we've overcome all of that. Every time something breaks, we fix it and figure it out and, you know, make it a little better and we move on. You know, it's just how it's going to go.

Hal Kreher:

And I think he understood that, but he was getting kind of down because of the number of things that were going wrong and just you know, wasn't seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's hard to see that sometimes. And seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, it's hard to see that sometimes, but you know. You just got to give it some perspective and know that you've gotten through. You know the different things that have been thrown at you. You get through this one too, and it might just take some time.

Brandon Mulnix:

Hal, as you mentioned, like your college education, you got into engineering, you went on to work for the Navy. Have you thought of of like your grandfather through that? Because, as you shared his story and his intelligence level and what he was producing during the great depression and where you're at today, I mean so many similarities and stories. It's yeah, it's one of those things where I picked up on that really quickly that man that you've got a very smart family and now you're talking, you're a hundred years and you're now starting to transition to the next generation. Can you tell me about the next generation of Kreher farms?

Hal Kreher:

well, I didn't talk about my generation too much myself and my four brothers cool, he's, the oldest, can help us say that and you know he's been. He was the CEO. He retired a couple years ago, but he was like the main leader in the business.

Hal Kreher:

He came back in 1978. Then my. I'll go through my family. First my brother, scott. He did work on sales. He's also retired but he ran the snapple business with me because it got to be a big. You know, every night we'd have to put the roots together of where the trucks were going the next day and it wasn't on a computer there weren't any computers.

Hal Kreher:

We we had I guess we had a computer to print out the invoices, but then we had to sort them by hand and throw them out on the floor or on the map and rearrange them into the routes. It was something. And then the next one up for me, neil. He's three years older than I, am Neil's the engineer and really was responsible for making a lot of stuff work and keeping it working over the years Myself and then my younger brother, brett.

Hal Kreher:

Brett does mostly administrative stuff with insurance and he's worked a lot with the crops department. Also, my cousin Don that's my uncle's son, obviously Don Jr. He ran the crops department while he was here and helped me. You know he and I built the pellet mill.

Brandon Mulnix:

I almost said help me. I helped him, I guess.

Hal Kreher:

But together we and with another, with two other guys we built the pellet mill and Cousin Dave runs the egg packing operation in Clarence here and also does like the purchasing of commodities. Kurt worked with him on that until he retired, but nowadays he's been working on that, I think, pretty much alone. So then in the next generation we have Don's daughter, jeanette, and Jeanette works with the HR department, mostly Kurt's two boys, mike and Brian. Mike runs the crops department and Brian runs the egg business. And then Scott's daughter, natalie, and she is running the fertilizer business now I've kind of pulled them back as I get ready to retire, so she's running that part and also does the sales on the egg side. And then my son Nate, who's also in the compost and fertilizer part of it. There's other family members that work in the business also. He's supportable. So cousin jim is engineer but works here, but he's not an owner, but we're sure. My son erin works in the female.

Hal Kreher:

Again he's not one of the owners but he's, we're sure and I have uh just the other day, a couple weeks ago, one of the guys who works in maintenance out at our organic farm, he uh said to me hey, I'm related to you guys and I had seen his name on ancestrycom but I thought it was a kind of a common name so maybe it wasn't him. But then he got me his family tree and I found out he's my third cousin twice removed.

Brandon Mulnix:

So, as the next generation takes over Hal, I want you to take a minute and look back. What is one of your proudest accomplishments as a farmer in your generation?

Hal Kreher:

Well, brandon, in 2017, we bought another egg farm from Wegmans and the closing was on the day my dad died. It's a farm that's twice as large as our home farm, so it was a huge leap for us, but it worked out really well. Wegmans is a great customer for us.

Brandon Mulnix:

They wanted to have organic eggs.

Hal Kreher:

So we decided we would build an organic farm and produce organic eggs, so they would have organic eggs to sell. So we did that starting in 2009. That was a very exciting project and you know got mostly built out to plans really pretty rapidly. I mean, we put it in the first two, first three buildings in a pull house and the next three went out pretty fast. We have 11 buildings now there, but it that was a really kind of fun project.

Brandon Mulnix:

And what about? It really just makes you stick your chest out and be proud of it.

Hal Kreher:

Well, it's something we had to come up with our own design. We had looked at other farms and how they were doing things, but it was something where we had to come up with our own design, and it's not like we hired an architect and an engineer firm to oversee the whole thing. We just laid it out how we thought made sense and then worked with a few vendors to get it built, and I think it looks almost exactly like how we thought it was going to look. They changed some of the rules so we had to change some of the buildings, but if it hadn't happened, it would have looked exactly how we thought it would look.

Brandon Mulnix:

That's something to be proud of is just growing, not knowing, not having the experience of doing it, but just making it all work. And when I think of farmers, I think of exactly what you and your generation did is figured it out think of exactly what you and your generation did is figured it out.

Hal Kreher:

Well, some of the challenges. There's been times when we've gone to, you know, too small, because you know it's always been a challenge of resources. Right, you can never build the building as the size you want, but it's always a compromise and you put an electric line in the wrong place or something, and you have to move it later.

Hal Kreher:

You know there's been some times when we've done stuff like that and I'll tell you it's a real challenge to see the future and you know what are your electrical needs going to be the next time you expand or add on to it. And some of that stuff just takes years in advance to get it done. If you need more power than the electric company has coming to your plant that takes years to get them to do something.

Hal Kreher:

It's not something where hey, I want to build this next month. Let's get going. And it's hard to get used to sometimes when you're more used to. Hey, let's plan it out and just pull the trigger on something.

Brandon Mulnix:

How do you pass that experience and that knowledge on to the next generation? Pal.

Hal Kreher:

Well, fortunately there's a bit of an overlap. Of course, the kids have worked in different areas of the business and you know so. They've gotten experience and you can tell people a lot of stuff. But some of the times you got to do it on their own and you know that's part of them, part of it. They got to have the freedom to fail and so they learn.

Brandon Mulnix:

That's really good advice. So, looking back, you've overcome a lot, you've experienced a lot. What was one of the greatest things that?

Hal Kreher:

you overcame in your career, you know, I would say the startup of that power mill. That was a real challenge. I lost like 15 pounds. You know it's two hours away from where I live, so it was a few weeks of every day driving it. You know, it was just it was a big challenge.

Brandon Mulnix:

So what did you learn from that event then that you can pass on to?

Hal Kreher:

I think it was just that, hey, you got to just keep working through your problems and realize that look at all you've overcome in the past. You didn't just make it here. You didn't just start there, wherever you are. You made it through a lot of stuff and you just got to realize every obstacle that comes your way, clamber over it and get on to the next one, that's all I can say but you know something that's more important is being able to get along with people and knowing you know how to deal with it when you're wrong and how to deal with it when you're right.

Hal Kreher:

You know sometimes you need to apologize for something you've done, and you know say you're sorry and you know it's best to learn how to do that. And then, if you're right, you got to to learn how to deal with that too, because nobody likes to make it right all the time.

Brandon Mulnix:

I imagine there's been a few times that you've been wrong over your career and had to apologize, and a few less times that you were probably right and got away to gloat about it. Right?

Hal Kreher:

Oh yeah, oh yeah, but you know this is one of the things my family is so fortunate. We all get along with each other, and it's not that we all agree with each other all the time there. So of course there's disagreements and sometimes it gets heated, but you gotta, you can't let it get too far. And then you also gotta be able to say you're sorry if you were wrong and understand that you might be passionate about something, but you know, you gotta what's more important to you.

Hal Kreher:

Yeah, and you know mostly the relationship is more important than being right and so sometimes even when you're wrong, you gotta. Or when you're right, you oh. The relationship is more important than me being right. I got to just back off here a little bit and see how it goes. I've been in that situation, you know. So getting along, I'd say that's been my family's greatest strength.

Brandon Mulnix:

It's amazing. When you're working as a family, it's you know you can't really get away from each other because you're going to see each other at Christmas.

Brandon Mulnix:

But, it's so important because when you work at a place you spend more time with the people you work with than your own family and getting along. You have to have that respect for each other, that ability to understand each other, because as a family you probably you knew how each other grew up. You knew the morals, the values. But when you start expanding that network it gets a little bit more challenging. And what are some of the biggest things that you've seen as a change in the industry since you started? Well, you know.

Hal Kreher:

I'm just going to step back and say, hey, one of the best things we ever did was we came up with a list of our shared values and at the time I thought we were spending a lot of time on this, but I've had so many people comment to me on hey, because we got them posted up. These are our shared values and it's integrity do the right thing, do things right, be a good neighbor, caring, teamwork, sharing work, ethic, forgiveness and gratitude. And you know we try and live that. And the people that work here they know we try and live that and they try to live that. And the people that work here they know we try and live that and they try to live that. And I've had people come in for a job interview and say, well, the reason I'm in here is because they saw your shared values and I thought that was.

Hal Kreher:

It was interesting that something I didn't. At the time we were doing. I didn't realize again the impact it would make, but it's been a really important thing for us and it's been a really important thing for us and it's been part of. You know that was done as part of our generational transition, just to how to pass this along.

Brandon Mulnix:

I'm glad that you guys did that exercise. You post them and then you live them. Because that's the key is, you can have all the values written down you want, but you got to live them.

Hal Kreher:

Yeah.

Hal Kreher:

Sounds like you guys live them out. Who wants to work for somebody that makes their living ripping people off or something like that? I don't know. I can't imagine how, when you're working at a farm, it's somewhat fulfilling. You're producing food for somebody else, you know you're taking care of these animals and you know there's just a lot of parts that are fulfilling. You know, when you get a project done.

Hal Kreher:

I know we didn't realize how important, you know, the business was to our employees for a long time until it was shortly after I came back in the early 90s.

Hal Kreher:

One of the women that had worked for us for years and years in our backpacking room didn't come show up for work one morning, and so my cousin went over to her house and she had passed away and so we went to her funeral and her family.

Hal Kreher:

You know this was a woman who really, while she was at work, really didn't have the nice thing to say to us, but her family was like oh, she talked about the farm all the time and you know the different people that work there. You know I can feel like I know you guys and it was like wow, you know here's somebody who didn't really seem like they were having a good time, but you know their job was extremely important to them and you know so. Then you know, really opened our eyes to that, and you know, once you realize it, well, of course it makes sense and you know we have people who have worked here for their entire careers and it's very fulfilling when you have someone who works here a long time gets to retire. We've had people that have worked here a few years and then, for whatever reason, they move on to something else and then we've come back. You know stuff like that. One of our complex managers is a guy who started here in high school and now he's a complex manager.

Brandon Mulnix:

It says a lot about your company. If people are willing to come back after leaving, that always says a really good thing. And then to look out in your community and to see the lives that your farm has been able to affect with houses and families and the community that you're part of, and that's truly what to me to me business is about. It's not necessarily about the product but about the lives that you're investing in by providing them an income and then seeing how that affects generations oh, and then you know you get some true friends, some people.

Hal Kreher:

They'd walk through fire for you, anything like guys I know I could call in the middle of the night and ask them to do anything and they'd do it. One year we had what they called the October Surprise Storm. It was October 13th I think it was maybe 2006, something like that where it was October 13th and we got three feet of snow and the leaves were still on the trees, so all the trees broke and you couldn't drive down the road me 45 minutes to get here, what normally takes me seven. And I had to drive over down wires and not take the backtrack and take a different route and all sorts of crazy stuff and show up at the farm.

Hal Kreher:

And here's a bunch of people are here Even though they're facing a disaster at their own home. One guy's got a branch through his window at home, he threw up some plywood and got to work. All these people showed up at work for that day even though they were experiencing their own disaster. It was really amazing. Says a lot. You know the guy who was the first day of work. He showed up. That's funny.

Brandon Mulnix:

Hal, is there anything else you want to share with our listening audience about the career story and just whether it's the future or some of your favorite memories?

Hal Kreher:

Another early memory I had is we used to sell eggs right out of the house. There's a little room on the side of the house where customers could walk right into the house and there was a cooler out there with eggs in it and the door was rigged up so the bell would ring if somebody came in. And you know somebody would run out there and oh, what do you want? And make the change or whatever, and people would take their eggs and go and that's what I had to do. You know, I did that as a little kid and you know, when you're a little kid it's like a game kind of thing and you learn how to make change at a very early age. You know that was kind of a fun thing and there was one guy who would come, usually like where we'd still be eating dinner or right after dinner, and he was a plainclothes policeman. I hope he would pull aside his jacket to show me his pistol, not in a threatening manner but just as something cool to show a little kid it was kind of body.

Brandon Mulnix:

I'm sure you've got a hundred more stories that of over the years of whether it's the business or the family has made a difference in your life as well. As you know, you've probably got great stories to share about things, and maybe they're stories that you just never will share because they're your private ways of helping your communities. Hal, I really appreciate your time today and sharing your stories with the listeners here. Those are the real stories that people actually want to hear about the industry. It's not about the number of eggs you produce, it's not about the number of birds, it's not about the style you use. It's really important is the people, the families, the personalities and the legacy that is behind farms like Career Farms.

Brandon Mulnix:

Well, poultry Leadership Podcast listeners, I hope that you've enjoyed this walk down memory lane for Kreher Farms and the fact that it's 100 years that they have been providing their community with one of the most incredible products in not only eggs, but in other products as well over the years, and so I appreciate Hal for joining us today and as we go, as I end this podcast, I'd really like you to share this story with other listeners through subscribing to the podcast, by sharing it on your social media. Get the word out about Kreher Farms in 100 years. It's not just about the Poultry Leadership Podcast, but this is a true farm story that needs to be shared with others. So thank you, listeners, and I look forward to our next time we get together. Have a good day.

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Brandon Mulnix

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Emily Mulnix

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