Meet the Farmers

Chapter 1

Brad Burnett, OU’s Egg Man

Ten years ago, an OU financial services administrator and his five kids started selling eggs to their neighbors. Today, their farm is the sole supplier of eggs for OU’s campus.

Brad Burnett steps out of his white Suburban into a cold, sunny morning. Wearing a sharp red tie underneath a black sport coat, he looks every bit the part of his job as an administrator in OU’s financial services department.

But it’s not the suit and tie that defines him — it’s the contents of his trunk. Over 2,000 fresh eggs, hand-packaged and ready to be consumed by the OU student body, sit in a dozen neatly stacked cardboard boxes.  

Burnett unloads several boxes onto a two-wheel dolly that he pushes up a ramp behind Cate Restaurants to drop off the last of the week’s hefty supply of eggs, which averages around 18,000 per week.

From regular deliveries to each campus dining location — every weekday before 8 a.m. — he’s well accustomed to the early-morning, behind-the-scenes hustle, greeting everyone by name while stacking boxes in a corner of a refrigerated room.

Burnett supplies the entire OU campus with eggs from Ivy Acres, the farm he owns and operates in Shawnee, Oklahoma, with the help of his five children.

“If you buy an egg here at OU,” Burnett said, “it comes from my farm, Ivy Acres Farm.”

With an empty trunk, Burnett, who is the associate vice president for enrollment and student financial services at OU, heads into his corner office in Buchanan Hall, where chicken-themed decorations dot the spacious room.

He’ll spend his day meeting one-on-one with students to discuss finances, teaching a class about money smarts and overseeing the office he helps manage before heading back to the farm, where he’ll spend three hours collecting, washing and packaging more eggs for the next day’s delivery.

Meeting the demands of both jobs keeps him busy from pre-dawn hours until well past sundown, but for Burnett, it’s worth it.

“It’s been a lot of fun, I’ve really enjoyed it,” Burnett said. “It’s a lot of work — it’s probably more work than anybody would imagine — but it worked out good for us. It was really good for our family, really good for the partners, really good for the economy. I love the fact that that money is going to local farmers rather than, who knows where — not in Oklahoma probably.”

The chickens before the eggs

Supplying eggs to the Sooner state’s largest university was not something Burnett ever would have imagined 10 years ago, when the idea for the business first took root.

It began on a much smaller scale in 2007, when Burnett, hoping to give his five pre-teen kids a decent first job, proposed they start a business to make some money and learn the value of hard work.

“I said, ‘OK you guys, we’re going to start a business — what kind of business do you guys want to do?’” Burnett said. “We had about 20 chickens at the time just because we have a farm … and so one of the twins said, ‘Well, why don’t we get some more chickens and sell the eggs?’”

Burnett placed an order for 75 more chickens, and a family business was up and running.

But what started as a small operation selling eggs to the neighbors quickly took an unexpected turn during a conversation over lunch between Burnett and OU’s Housing and Food director, Dave Annis.

Annis, in search of a cage-free egg supplier in Oklahoma, found his answer in Burnett, who had just started selling eggs and said he was willing to give expansion a try.

Three hundred chickens later, Burnett began stocking Crossroads in the Oklahoma Memorial Union with its supply of eggs. From there, fresh eggs spread from one corner of campus to the next until Burnett could hardly keep up with the demand.

With Burnett single-handedly supplying eggs to Crossroads and Cate, he knew he couldn’t possibly fulfill Annis’ request to expand into Couch cafeteria on his own. Per Annis’ suggestion, he reached out to several local families who agreed to become partners in business and form a co-op.

“It just was a weird coincidence that OU started looking for eggs at almost the same time,” Burnett said. “We never thought that we’d have this — we never thought we’d have a co-op because actually that was something I really had never thought of.”

Despite the expansion, Burnett said his own family has remained at the heart of the business from the beginning. Each of his children has worked on the farm in some capacity, whether by collecting eggs, keeping the books or making promotional videos.

Today, Burnett owns 1,200 of his co-op’s 7,000 total chickens — meaning there is plenty of work to go around.

Burnett’s 18-year-old son, Bradley, said he helps his dad with most of the basic farm upkeep, such as cleaning, feeding chickens and gathering eggs.

“It’s mostly been me and dad,” Bradley said. “My sisters help out here and there, but it’s mostly been me and dad. Jeez, we’ve spent just hours and hours and hours together working, and it really has been awesome. I could complain about a lot of things, but time with my father is not one of them.”

Burnett said family has been the most valuable aspect of owning the business, which allows him to spend quality time with his kids.

“I mean, shoot, it kind of defined my son and I’s relationship,” Burnett said. “From the time he was 8 years old, we were down there washing eggs together. So that’s 10 years of him growing up and he and I talking and learning and doing stuff, so it’s been a really good experience.”

Local food, economic impact

Everything about Brad Burnett screams local — from the country twang in his voice to the Sooners sweatshirt he dons on the weekends to the 300,000 miles he’s put on his Suburban driving from the farm to campus delivering eggs every day.

In an era where locally sourced food is the latest fad, OU’s partnership with Burnett was ahead of the trend.

“We were doing it back before everybody was doing it,” Burnett said. “You know, 10 years ago it was kind of a new idea — now it’s catching on, all the colleges are doing it now. We were the first ones that I knew of that actually started doing it.”

Burnett said he is grateful that OU had the vision to employ local farmers like him in an attempt to source food locally.

“It’d be very easy to just sign a contract and have your food shipped every day,” Burnett said. “It’s more work for them to put up with locals like me that have a little different sort of means and deliver eggs in a Suburban.”

The eggs factor into the university’s larger effort to source food locally. Frank Henry, executive director of OU Food Services, said almost 40 percent of OU’s food is considered local, meaning it is either grown or has an economic impact within a 250-mile radius of campus.

“Trying to round up all this stuff to kind of help out and cut the footprint and all that kind of stuff, all the buzzwords — it’s a pretty big task,” Henry said. “But it’s one that we’re willing to do our part to do what we can.”

The university pays slightly more for locally sourced food, since it is often more expensive, but local partnerships can also be financially beneficial, Henry said. When an avian flu outbreak caused egg prices to skyrocket at places like Walmart, Burnett kept his prices steady, Henry said.

For Burnett, “local” is more than a buzzword. It’s about the impact his business has on the Oklahoma economy when he makes his large weekly purchase at the nearby feed store, orders cardboard boxes from a supplier in Minco, Oklahoma, and employs families who live down the road.

“It always kind of amazes me what the local impact can have,” Burnett said. “One of the partners told me they were using the money from the eggs to pay their mortgage — because they had five or six kids, too, (the partner) said, ‘I just couldn’t quite make it stretch, but once we did the eggs, even though it’s not a ton of money, it was enough to pay the mortgage every month.’”

All in the family

In the 10 years since Burnett first bought a flock of chickens, he has amassed a wealth of knowledge about raising the quirky animals.

There have been a few stumbles along the way, such as the time his canvas barn blew away when 70 mph winds came tearing across the plains, but he’s learned from each mistake and kept going.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that Burnett learned his passion for chickens may have stemmed from something more than just a whim.

In fact, raising chickens has been a part of Burnett’s family history since the 1930s, when his grandparents owned a chicken hatchery in Webster City, Iowa. Situated near the train tracks, the family business shipped chickens all over the country, according to family lore.

When Burnett’s grandfather died, his grandmother was unable to keep the business running and sold it to a man named Murray McMurray.

Today, Murray McMurray’s is one of the largest free-standing hatcheries in the country.

Sitting at his kitchen table between his son and daughter, with a flock of hundreds of chickens roaming in the yard outside, Burnett marvels at the mystery of it all.

“I don’t know how all this works, but somehow my grandfather, who I never met, got me into chickens,” Burnett said. “We never lived on a farm a day in our lives — I had nothing to do with it, didn’t know anything about it and, all of a sudden, I ended up being the ‘egg man.’ Who would’ve thunk? I guess that stuff runs deep.”