Family business is booming at Hoover’s Hatchery in Rudd

By Kelly Terpstra, kterpstra@charlescitypress.com

Drive down the main drag on Chickasaw Street in Rudd and like many small towns there’s  more than at first meets the eye.

The newly reopened and remodeled R&R Town Mart convenience store sits at the principal intersection in town.

Keep your foot on the gas pedal and pull right up to Tanks Bar and Grill for a full rack of ribs — but keep the napkins close by.

Head a little farther down the street and nestled back just off the road sits a business that has been part of Rudd for more than 70 years.

Hoover’s Hatchery is more than just a thriving company in Floyd County.

It’s family.

“It is the people. My hatchery family is very important to me — always has been, always will be,” said former owner Mary Halsted. “I’ll go to my grave with them, carry them in my heart.”

Halsted, who started working at the hatchery in 1972 and became owner years later, has seen the business break through to become one of the largest backyard poultry distributors in the nation.

Through it all — even after selling the business to investors three years ago — Halsted, now age 74, has had a hand in the day-to-day operation.

“A lot of what we’ve done is just really taking what Mary has started and further developed it — with her guidance, of course. She’s still heavily involved,” said Chief Financial Officer Luke Weiss, whose father, Steve, is also one of the owners of the hatchery, along with Mary’s son Tony Halsted, and Bob Taubert.

The business maintains its small-town roots, but is also in the midst of a 20,000-square-foot expansion of its fulfillment center, where fowl are processed and put into boxes. That expansion started this past August and will be completed soon.

Hoover’s Hatchery is capable of hatching and shipping 450,000 baby chicks a week to their customers. The incubators on site can handle 1½ million eggs at a time during peak season.

The backyard poultry market — which Mary said the hatchery started to get into in 1989 — has exploded.

“Our sales have increased quite a bit,” said Weiss. “The whole industry has kind of taken off.”

Hoover’s Hatchery can ship chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys and pheasants in a relatively short time. Weiss said more than 90 percent of the company’s sales are chickens. The company has a customer base that reaches into all but one of the 50 states in the nation.

“Our chickens are in 49 states, Hawaii being the exception. We just can’t get to Hawaii,” said Weiss. “We ship to Puerto Rico.”

Part of the hatchery’s success is the ability to reach places and tap into a market that  wouldn’t have been possible without social media and the internet. Customers can order online and have been for quite some time.

“We sell directly to those customers and ship them chickens in the mail,” said Weiss.

Hoover’s Hatchery still sends out its paper catalog to thousands of customers every year as well.

“That used to be the old way of ordering. They’d to have to call in and place an order that way,” Weiss said.

Weiss said the hatchery in Rudd is one of the larger backyard poultry distributors in the nation. But it is nowhere near as big as some commercial hatcheries that operate on a much larger scale.

“A lot of this growth was because of Mary in what she had with her feed dealer network,” said Weiss. “Mary really kept this business going for many years.”

Weiss said online sales are a decent percentage of their sales and that has led to several expansions of the company’s base operations.

“The online has helped drive some of this,” said Weiss. “More and more people are wanting to do their shopping online.”

Weiss said his company also sells to retail stores and feed dealers, who can then sell locally to small farms or households that want just a few chickens to raise.

“That’s really just about all of our business. That’s what we are,” said Weiss.

The idea of waking up in the morning to get fresh eggs from chickens you’ve raised since they were hatchlings is exciting for customers, Weiss said.

“The backyard poultry market is really trending,” he said. “It’s really started to become more and more popular. It’s part of this greater movement of people having a desire to really understand and know where their food comes from.

“A lot of cities are passing ordinances — even in metropolitan areas like Minneapolis/St. Paul — that are allowing people to have chickens in their backyard,” said Weiss.

Buying chickens or any other fowl is relatively inexpensive. Customers can choose from more than 100 breeds of chickens and the price can be less than $3 per chick. Weiss said they have a minimum shipping requirement of 15 chicks, mainly for the safety and health of the birds.

How long does it take for you to get farm fresh eggs on your dinner table?

Weiss said it takes about 20 weeks for the chickens to mature enough to start laying eggs, depending on the breed. He said a good egg layer can produce an egg a day.

A tasty meal is just one aspect of raising your own animals to produce sustainable food for your loved ones, Weiss said.

“They’ve become more than just livestock to a lot of our customers — they’re pets,” he said. “They become part of the family.”

Hoover’s Hatchery has breeding flocks around the area, as well as in Oelwein and Seymour, Missouri. Weiss said a large portion of the eggs they buy come from Amish or Mennonite farmers. Hoover’s Hatchery sends out trucks to pick up the eggs and then they are hatched in incubators in Rudd. The hatchery sells the chickens at a day old.

“The day that they’re hatched — it’s like a race every day because we have to get them all processed and packaged that same day and up to the post office,” said Weiss.

Mary helps coordinate breeding flocks and also manages customers and sales for the business that was started in 1944. She remembers there were 10 employees when she started working at the hatchery. Now Hoover’s Hatchery has upwards of 100 employees during the busy season from March through May.

“The biggest goal that we’ve had and still maintain is to carry on the legacy of Mary Halsted,” said Weiss.

Weiss said a hard-working mentality and plenty of dedication is what has made Hoover’s Hatchery the booming business that it is today.

“I worked in the Twin Cities for a few years before coming here and that’s a noticeable change when you work up there in a big city like that,” he said. “People are just different down here. Nobody works harder and nobody has a better attitude I think than small town Iowa.”

At the end of the day, it comes down to a fondness for chickens, whether one is buying, selling or raising them.

“I’m amazed at the number of people that just love chickens, period,” Mary said, smiling. “They’re just like family, you might say.”