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Murray's Fish Farm: each family member does everything
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
If you want to learn a thing or two about the business of agriculture, have a conversation with the Murrays - Joan the matriarch or either of her two sons Courtney and Brandon - who, together own and operate the Murray's Fish Farm Ltd, and Murray's Fish and Jerk Hut in Clarendon Park, Clarendon.
An affable personality with an old-school generosity of spirit, Joan will share the stories and the lessons of how three generations have managed to weather the ups and downs, yet remain loyal to farming, an entrepreneurial endeavour that many consider to be among nature's most ungrateful.
The Murray family members stand in front of their fish and jerk restaurant in Clarendon Park, Clarendon. From left: Brandon, Joan, and Courtney.
Joan traces her farming roots to her father John Mason, a hardy and ambitious man who, while working in the 1960s as manager of the Henriques-owned New Yarmouth Sugar Estate, acquired 130 acres of central Jamaica's most fertile land, to grow and supply the factory with sugar cane.
The land was passed down to Joan and Keith Murray - her husband and business partner until his death in October last year.
After a few years of producing sugar, followed by years of experimenting with a wide range of other crops, the Murrays found a formula that has remained the foundation of the family business.
Today, Murray's Fish Farm Ltd is unmistakably the core of this business that includes a restaurant and sheep-rearing operation.
Areka Murray cuts onions in the kitchen of the fish restaurant while other members of staff look on (from left front): Rosemarie Thompson, Shareika Anderson, Joan Murray; (left back) Melanie Mason, Courtney Murray, and Donna Raynor, manager of the restaurant. The Murrays employ some 40 workers.
The fish farm consists of 27 ponds that range in size from 22,000 to 44,000 square feet, spread across the 100 acres of land that remain in the family's possession. These ponds together produce between 400,000 and 500,000 pounds of fish per year - enough, according to Joan, to assure the family a modest living.
"You are never going to be wealthy," she offers. "But you are never hungry. It's a good and healthy life."
The Murrays operate a medium-sized company in an industry that is dominated by one large player, with additional competitive pressure from imports. They are limited in their ability to control prices and market supplies.
The Murrays and employees examine fish just taken from a pond and ready for the market. From left: Adrian Saunders, Sydges Dunkley, Kenroy Beckford, Brandon Murray, Joan Murray, Dave Hall, Courtney Murray.
To overcome this lack of marketing clout, they have, they say, carved out a niche among customers who are discriminating about quality, and have sought to tightly control the entire production and marketing chain of the business.
In practical terms, this means that the fish that leave the ponds go straight into the hands and onto the plates of the ultimate consumers without passing through the wholesale network that the very big players in the industry depend on to get huge volumes into market.
The downside is that volumes are stultified, but the upside of this business model, according to Courtney, is the maximisation of revenue retention.
"We do not sell wholesale," he stresses. "Sales are done strictly on a retail basis to allow us to maximise our revenues."
There are a few exceptions. Juici Patties, one of Jamaica's largest restaurant chains that has its headquarters and primary production facility a few hundred yards from where the fish farm is located, has a supply contract with the Murrays to meet the growing demand from customers for its wide fish menu.
The Murrays have also negotiated supply contracts with selected hotels.
While these contracts help to drive volume and provide a reliable income stream for the business, it is the cash sale to individuals who visit the farm and other outlets that is at the heart of this business model.
With modest volumes, and therefore a greater imperative to maximise margins, the Murrays opened a fish restaurant in 1998, a move that created the first downstream integration of their business.
The restaurant which is located along the May Pen to Mandeville arterial road just at the entrance to the fish farm, has served a dual purpose from inception: to advertise the fish to potential customers, and to be an important outlet for the farm.
The cash generated by the fish business has allowed the Murrays to invest in another agricultural enterprise, but one that has a much longer gestation period: sheep rearing.
In this case, the family decided to leverage the vast acreages of land, beginning with just about a dozen sheep a few years ago. This business is still in the investment phase - with the sheep numbers now at 500. The aim is to have and maintain numbers closer to 2,000.
As part of the drive to build an integrated enterprise, the Murrays now have under cultivation, eight acres of coconuts that are the source of the own-brand bottled coconut water - sold under the name Brandcourt exclusively at the restaurants.
The Murrays are the first to acknowledge that they are not yet even close to where they want to be as a family business, but take comfort in the fact that the current mix of businesses has created a level of stability that did not exist in the 1980s or the 1990s.
It all began when Joan, a former head girl of St Andrew High School, and who went to Edinburgh, Scotland in 1956 to be trained as a nurse, gave up her nursing career at Nuttall Hospital in Kingston for farming in 1981.
"We had sugar cane, logwood, beef cattle," she recalls of the over 100 acres of land at Clarendon Park given to her by her father.
But she and Keith soon realised that sugar cane production with its limited payment cycles would not provide the reliable income flow that was required to sustain a family of four.
"There were three payments per year, and all that money had to be reinvested into the next crop," she explains. "We could not live on it."
Keith and Joan went into dairy farming, and supplemented this activity by signing up as a satellite farm for the so-called winter vegetable programme that was pioneered and heavily promoted by the Edward Seaga government of the 1980s. Pumpkins, squash, melons, string beans, cauliflower were among the crops that were produced under contract with the Spring Plains company that led this ambitious agricultural project.
Joan says that gains were at best modest, and never seemed to live up to expectations.
Even when Keith and Joan seem poised to make strong returns from their effort, something always thwarted them.
This determined entrepreneur recalls the period in the mid-1980s when she and her husband had eight acres of land in onions, and were poised for a bumper crop and strong revenue. They were among a handful of producers of the product that was at the time very scarce on the local market.
"Just around reaping time the Ministry of Agriculture gave out permission for onions to be imported into the Jamaican market," she complains. "What was anticipated to be a bumper revenue overnight turned into disaster. We could not sell the onions. We had to dump them on the market. We had rooms full of onions that we had to dump on the market at a loss."
That experience was not unique to onions. There would also be bumper crop for tomatoes, leading to glut, and collapse of prices. As it turned out, the Murrays in their effort to remain in this tough, unforgiving business, would be subject to the same unpredictable conditions that had chased many Jamaicans away from this industry for generations.
Keith and Joan recognised that to survive in this industry, they had to avoid items that were subject to these vicious and unpredictable cycles. They decided to try fish farming, in part as a response to a new push by the Seaga government to develop a large and viable freshwater fish industry.
"In 1986 because of the uncertainty of the crops we were producing we decided to venture into fish farming," she says. "We were also responding to the push by the government for freshwater fish farming."
Courtney, then a teenager, recalls the drama with which that decision unfolded. "One morning we just woke up and saw our father building the fish ponds. He did not appear to have consulted anyone."
Though the promised rewards were encouraging, even this latest venture had its fair share of headaches, because funding was required to build the ponds, and an entrenched market resistance to this new product had to be overcome.
"We were always living on the edge, and constantly borrowing," says Joan. "The banks are not farmer-friendly because there is no crop insurance."
Luckily, the fish venture was facilitated by what Joan describes as "a strong and effective extension service programme to help farmers" and the establishment by the government of a facility at Twickenham Park, St Catherine, to produce and supply fingerlings to the farmers.
Joan also singles out two bankers, praising them "for sticking with us through thick and thin". They are: Jerome Smalling, formerly of Scotiabank Mandeville, and now vice president at RBTT; and Andrica Senior of BNS.
"The family has been at BNS for 50 years," adds Courtney. "They have looked out for us."
Nevertheless, the challenges to farmers seemed never-ending and came from all sources.
One notable case that the three Murrays recall with clarity, but would perhaps rather forget, is their decision in 1984 to supply an importer from Florida with vegetables - lots of it.
Once the vegetables reached Florida, the importer vanished - along with the money belonging to the Murrays and, for that matter, all the other local farmers who got caught into what turned out to have been a major scam.
"With so many challenges it was always a struggle to keep our heads above the water," notes Joan.
The 1990s saw the expansion of fish production, but also marked a dramatic escalation in violence in Spanish Town which forced the Murrays to withdraw from the Twickenham Park facility that was set up for fish farmers to retail their produce, and which had been the primary marketing source for the Murrays' fish.
Having retreated from that market, this family was faced with the challenge of building, almost from scratch, alternative markets for their fish.
"We decided to begin retailing the fish right here," says Courtney. "We would go out to the gate with a fish sign to tell people who were driving past that we had fish inside for sale."
This was a very modest beginning - sale of 30 pounds of fish per day.
By 1995 when both Courtney and Brandon returned from university abroad, the Murrays had 17 ponds of fish under production - a testament to the rapid growth in the business during the first half of that decade.
Courtney, who attended Munro from 1983 to 1989, had secured a full football scholarship to study chemistry at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He had represented Jamaica in the under-16 football competition and was voted most valuable player (mvp) for the daCosta Cup competition in 1989. He was also a competent hockey and cricket player, and medalled in shot put and high jump at the National Championships (Champs).
Brandon, the elder sibling, was also a major sports talent. A former Munro and St George's student, he represented Jamaica in hockey and swimming but like his brother it was his deftness with the football that landed him a scholarship to pursue his tertiary education. He studied history at Erskine College in South Carolina, just three hours' drive from the campus where his brother studied.
Back in Jamaica in 1995 Brandon joined Jamaica Broilers Group subsidiary, Aquaculture Jamaica, while Courtney headed straight into the family business.
"The family farm could not provide income for both of us," explains Brandon. "We both had young families to care for."
Though Courtney was clearly the brother with the closer involvement in the family business, Brandon was never completely outside of the loop. For, still passionate about the game, he found a way to make business out of this personal interest.
"I got permission from my mother to use a piece of the family's land to build a six-a-side football field," he explains. "People came from all over to play there, and I began to see a sports marketing opportunity and convinced my parents to provide more land for a full football field."
With his skills in turf management and help from a cousin, Stephen Jones, Brandon established what is now considered one the best football fields in the island.
"To generate income we invited schools to play here and shared with them the gate receipts," he says.
The quality of the field established by Brandon helped to launch him into the turf management business, and the creation of a company called Brancourt Sports under which this venture is pursued. So far, the company has renovated over 20 fields including St Elizabeth Technical, Munro College, St George's, and the Cayman National Stadium.
In 2002 Brandon teamed up with Christopher Dawes to form the Sporting Central Academy, "to take the business to another level".
This institution has developed into a premier league club with six of its players now in Jamaica's National Under-20 football squad.
Brandon is quick to argue that there is synergy between his soccer business and the family establishment.
"We play from September to May and host teams during the daCosta season," he notes. "The restaurant gets spin-offs from the games."
Interestingly, Courtney claims that the restaurant was his idea - that it was created as part of his own drive to expand the market for their freshwater fish.
"When I came back I went straight into the family business," he says. "I started to look for new markets, and the first thing I did was to restart the fish market in Mandeville."
But there was something more fundamental and long-lasting that Courtney set out to achieve: to change market taste and consumer attitude towards pond fish.
"There was a stigma towards freshwater fish," he points out. "They had a reputation to taste like mud and people thought that they had steroids in them."
Courtney says that in 1998 he convinced his mother to use $1 million that she had saved to start a modest restaurant that would serve exclusively the freshwater fish that the family farm produced.
"We wanted to use the restaurant to promote freshwater fish," he says. "Our mother created the formula and people could not believe it was freshwater fish."
Courtney believes that the fact that the land on which the ponds are built has ample supply of fresh water, along with the fish-nurturing processes that the family has developed have helped to ensure high quality tilapia output that in turn has enabled the farm to win and maintain customers.
In 2002, the restaurant expanded to include a section that serves jerk port and jerk chicken.
While there is no strict division of labour in this family business, Courtney is generally in charge of the restaurants while Joan runs the fish farm and oversees the sheep rearing. Brandon oversees the coconut farming, and the bottling of the Brancourt brand of coconut water that is produced exclusively for sale at the restaurants.
There are 40 employees.
"I get to work at nine in the mornings and close the restaurants at ten o'clock at nights," says Courtney.
This business therefore keeps him away from his wife Nicole and children for the entire day.
"I am also here on weekends and on holidays when we do our strongest business," he says. "I therefore consider myself very lucky to have a very supportive wife. She is a wonderful person and my biggest asset."
Nicole works at Scotiabank in Mandeville.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
If you want to learn a thing or two about the business of agriculture, have a conversation with the Murrays - Joan the matriarch or either of her two sons Courtney and Brandon - who, together own and operate the Murray's Fish Farm Ltd, and Murray's Fish and Jerk Hut in Clarendon Park, Clarendon.
An affable personality with an old-school generosity of spirit, Joan will share the stories and the lessons of how three generations have managed to weather the ups and downs, yet remain loyal to farming, an entrepreneurial endeavour that many consider to be among nature's most ungrateful.
The Murray family members stand in front of their fish and jerk restaurant in Clarendon Park, Clarendon. From left: Brandon, Joan, and Courtney.
Joan traces her farming roots to her father John Mason, a hardy and ambitious man who, while working in the 1960s as manager of the Henriques-owned New Yarmouth Sugar Estate, acquired 130 acres of central Jamaica's most fertile land, to grow and supply the factory with sugar cane.
The land was passed down to Joan and Keith Murray - her husband and business partner until his death in October last year.
After a few years of producing sugar, followed by years of experimenting with a wide range of other crops, the Murrays found a formula that has remained the foundation of the family business.
Today, Murray's Fish Farm Ltd is unmistakably the core of this business that includes a restaurant and sheep-rearing operation.
Areka Murray cuts onions in the kitchen of the fish restaurant while other members of staff look on (from left front): Rosemarie Thompson, Shareika Anderson, Joan Murray; (left back) Melanie Mason, Courtney Murray, and Donna Raynor, manager of the restaurant. The Murrays employ some 40 workers.
The fish farm consists of 27 ponds that range in size from 22,000 to 44,000 square feet, spread across the 100 acres of land that remain in the family's possession. These ponds together produce between 400,000 and 500,000 pounds of fish per year - enough, according to Joan, to assure the family a modest living.
"You are never going to be wealthy," she offers. "But you are never hungry. It's a good and healthy life."
The Murrays operate a medium-sized company in an industry that is dominated by one large player, with additional competitive pressure from imports. They are limited in their ability to control prices and market supplies.
The Murrays and employees examine fish just taken from a pond and ready for the market. From left: Adrian Saunders, Sydges Dunkley, Kenroy Beckford, Brandon Murray, Joan Murray, Dave Hall, Courtney Murray.
To overcome this lack of marketing clout, they have, they say, carved out a niche among customers who are discriminating about quality, and have sought to tightly control the entire production and marketing chain of the business.
In practical terms, this means that the fish that leave the ponds go straight into the hands and onto the plates of the ultimate consumers without passing through the wholesale network that the very big players in the industry depend on to get huge volumes into market.
The downside is that volumes are stultified, but the upside of this business model, according to Courtney, is the maximisation of revenue retention.
"We do not sell wholesale," he stresses. "Sales are done strictly on a retail basis to allow us to maximise our revenues."
There are a few exceptions. Juici Patties, one of Jamaica's largest restaurant chains that has its headquarters and primary production facility a few hundred yards from where the fish farm is located, has a supply contract with the Murrays to meet the growing demand from customers for its wide fish menu.
The Murrays have also negotiated supply contracts with selected hotels.
While these contracts help to drive volume and provide a reliable income stream for the business, it is the cash sale to individuals who visit the farm and other outlets that is at the heart of this business model.
With modest volumes, and therefore a greater imperative to maximise margins, the Murrays opened a fish restaurant in 1998, a move that created the first downstream integration of their business.
The restaurant which is located along the May Pen to Mandeville arterial road just at the entrance to the fish farm, has served a dual purpose from inception: to advertise the fish to potential customers, and to be an important outlet for the farm.
The cash generated by the fish business has allowed the Murrays to invest in another agricultural enterprise, but one that has a much longer gestation period: sheep rearing.
In this case, the family decided to leverage the vast acreages of land, beginning with just about a dozen sheep a few years ago. This business is still in the investment phase - with the sheep numbers now at 500. The aim is to have and maintain numbers closer to 2,000.
As part of the drive to build an integrated enterprise, the Murrays now have under cultivation, eight acres of coconuts that are the source of the own-brand bottled coconut water - sold under the name Brandcourt exclusively at the restaurants.
The Murrays are the first to acknowledge that they are not yet even close to where they want to be as a family business, but take comfort in the fact that the current mix of businesses has created a level of stability that did not exist in the 1980s or the 1990s.
It all began when Joan, a former head girl of St Andrew High School, and who went to Edinburgh, Scotland in 1956 to be trained as a nurse, gave up her nursing career at Nuttall Hospital in Kingston for farming in 1981.
"We had sugar cane, logwood, beef cattle," she recalls of the over 100 acres of land at Clarendon Park given to her by her father.
But she and Keith soon realised that sugar cane production with its limited payment cycles would not provide the reliable income flow that was required to sustain a family of four.
"There were three payments per year, and all that money had to be reinvested into the next crop," she explains. "We could not live on it."
Keith and Joan went into dairy farming, and supplemented this activity by signing up as a satellite farm for the so-called winter vegetable programme that was pioneered and heavily promoted by the Edward Seaga government of the 1980s. Pumpkins, squash, melons, string beans, cauliflower were among the crops that were produced under contract with the Spring Plains company that led this ambitious agricultural project.
Joan says that gains were at best modest, and never seemed to live up to expectations.
Even when Keith and Joan seem poised to make strong returns from their effort, something always thwarted them.
This determined entrepreneur recalls the period in the mid-1980s when she and her husband had eight acres of land in onions, and were poised for a bumper crop and strong revenue. They were among a handful of producers of the product that was at the time very scarce on the local market.
"Just around reaping time the Ministry of Agriculture gave out permission for onions to be imported into the Jamaican market," she complains. "What was anticipated to be a bumper revenue overnight turned into disaster. We could not sell the onions. We had to dump them on the market. We had rooms full of onions that we had to dump on the market at a loss."
That experience was not unique to onions. There would also be bumper crop for tomatoes, leading to glut, and collapse of prices. As it turned out, the Murrays in their effort to remain in this tough, unforgiving business, would be subject to the same unpredictable conditions that had chased many Jamaicans away from this industry for generations.
Keith and Joan recognised that to survive in this industry, they had to avoid items that were subject to these vicious and unpredictable cycles. They decided to try fish farming, in part as a response to a new push by the Seaga government to develop a large and viable freshwater fish industry.
"In 1986 because of the uncertainty of the crops we were producing we decided to venture into fish farming," she says. "We were also responding to the push by the government for freshwater fish farming."
Courtney, then a teenager, recalls the drama with which that decision unfolded. "One morning we just woke up and saw our father building the fish ponds. He did not appear to have consulted anyone."
Though the promised rewards were encouraging, even this latest venture had its fair share of headaches, because funding was required to build the ponds, and an entrenched market resistance to this new product had to be overcome.
"We were always living on the edge, and constantly borrowing," says Joan. "The banks are not farmer-friendly because there is no crop insurance."
Luckily, the fish venture was facilitated by what Joan describes as "a strong and effective extension service programme to help farmers" and the establishment by the government of a facility at Twickenham Park, St Catherine, to produce and supply fingerlings to the farmers.
Joan also singles out two bankers, praising them "for sticking with us through thick and thin". They are: Jerome Smalling, formerly of Scotiabank Mandeville, and now vice president at RBTT; and Andrica Senior of BNS.
"The family has been at BNS for 50 years," adds Courtney. "They have looked out for us."
Nevertheless, the challenges to farmers seemed never-ending and came from all sources.
One notable case that the three Murrays recall with clarity, but would perhaps rather forget, is their decision in 1984 to supply an importer from Florida with vegetables - lots of it.
Once the vegetables reached Florida, the importer vanished - along with the money belonging to the Murrays and, for that matter, all the other local farmers who got caught into what turned out to have been a major scam.
"With so many challenges it was always a struggle to keep our heads above the water," notes Joan.
The 1990s saw the expansion of fish production, but also marked a dramatic escalation in violence in Spanish Town which forced the Murrays to withdraw from the Twickenham Park facility that was set up for fish farmers to retail their produce, and which had been the primary marketing source for the Murrays' fish.
Having retreated from that market, this family was faced with the challenge of building, almost from scratch, alternative markets for their fish.
"We decided to begin retailing the fish right here," says Courtney. "We would go out to the gate with a fish sign to tell people who were driving past that we had fish inside for sale."
This was a very modest beginning - sale of 30 pounds of fish per day.
By 1995 when both Courtney and Brandon returned from university abroad, the Murrays had 17 ponds of fish under production - a testament to the rapid growth in the business during the first half of that decade.
Courtney, who attended Munro from 1983 to 1989, had secured a full football scholarship to study chemistry at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He had represented Jamaica in the under-16 football competition and was voted most valuable player (mvp) for the daCosta Cup competition in 1989. He was also a competent hockey and cricket player, and medalled in shot put and high jump at the National Championships (Champs).
Brandon, the elder sibling, was also a major sports talent. A former Munro and St George's student, he represented Jamaica in hockey and swimming but like his brother it was his deftness with the football that landed him a scholarship to pursue his tertiary education. He studied history at Erskine College in South Carolina, just three hours' drive from the campus where his brother studied.
Back in Jamaica in 1995 Brandon joined Jamaica Broilers Group subsidiary, Aquaculture Jamaica, while Courtney headed straight into the family business.
"The family farm could not provide income for both of us," explains Brandon. "We both had young families to care for."
Though Courtney was clearly the brother with the closer involvement in the family business, Brandon was never completely outside of the loop. For, still passionate about the game, he found a way to make business out of this personal interest.
"I got permission from my mother to use a piece of the family's land to build a six-a-side football field," he explains. "People came from all over to play there, and I began to see a sports marketing opportunity and convinced my parents to provide more land for a full football field."
With his skills in turf management and help from a cousin, Stephen Jones, Brandon established what is now considered one the best football fields in the island.
"To generate income we invited schools to play here and shared with them the gate receipts," he says.
The quality of the field established by Brandon helped to launch him into the turf management business, and the creation of a company called Brancourt Sports under which this venture is pursued. So far, the company has renovated over 20 fields including St Elizabeth Technical, Munro College, St George's, and the Cayman National Stadium.
In 2002 Brandon teamed up with Christopher Dawes to form the Sporting Central Academy, "to take the business to another level".
This institution has developed into a premier league club with six of its players now in Jamaica's National Under-20 football squad.
Brandon is quick to argue that there is synergy between his soccer business and the family establishment.
"We play from September to May and host teams during the daCosta season," he notes. "The restaurant gets spin-offs from the games."
Interestingly, Courtney claims that the restaurant was his idea - that it was created as part of his own drive to expand the market for their freshwater fish.
"When I came back I went straight into the family business," he says. "I started to look for new markets, and the first thing I did was to restart the fish market in Mandeville."
But there was something more fundamental and long-lasting that Courtney set out to achieve: to change market taste and consumer attitude towards pond fish.
"There was a stigma towards freshwater fish," he points out. "They had a reputation to taste like mud and people thought that they had steroids in them."
Courtney says that in 1998 he convinced his mother to use $1 million that she had saved to start a modest restaurant that would serve exclusively the freshwater fish that the family farm produced.
"We wanted to use the restaurant to promote freshwater fish," he says. "Our mother created the formula and people could not believe it was freshwater fish."
Courtney believes that the fact that the land on which the ponds are built has ample supply of fresh water, along with the fish-nurturing processes that the family has developed have helped to ensure high quality tilapia output that in turn has enabled the farm to win and maintain customers.
In 2002, the restaurant expanded to include a section that serves jerk port and jerk chicken.
While there is no strict division of labour in this family business, Courtney is generally in charge of the restaurants while Joan runs the fish farm and oversees the sheep rearing. Brandon oversees the coconut farming, and the bottling of the Brancourt brand of coconut water that is produced exclusively for sale at the restaurants.
There are 40 employees.
"I get to work at nine in the mornings and close the restaurants at ten o'clock at nights," says Courtney.
This business therefore keeps him away from his wife Nicole and children for the entire day.
"I am also here on weekends and on holidays when we do our strongest business," he says. "I therefore consider myself very lucky to have a very supportive wife. She is a wonderful person and my biggest asset."
Nicole works at Scotiabank in Mandeville.
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