Baby ducks are cute! And Metzer Farms hatches hundreds of thousands every year

By Jody Callahan – Reporter, Daily Memphian

April 6, 2026

In the ultimate in irony, Marc and Katy Metzer spend most every day surrounded by adorable baby ducks, yet they can’t ever take one home with them to be a new member of the family.Same goes for their 15 or so employees at Metzer Farms, a family-owned waterfowl and poultry hatchery in Cordova.That’s because Metzer Farms hatches and ships an estimated million or so ducks, geese, chickens, guineas and even turkeys around the country every year. The Metzers just can’t take the chance that someone with a backyard duck would come to work carrying a disease — bird flu and salmonella top the list — that could then be passed on to those thousands of ducklings that hatch in Cordova every year.

“We take biosecurity very seriously,” Marc Metzer said. “We don’t want to introduce any disease that might be at home into our hatchery. Because we’re shipping out birds to our customers, we don’t want to take a chance of any cross-contamination or anything like that.”

That’s a pity, because as Annie Savoy memorably ranted to Crash Davis in “Bull Durham,” “Baby ducks are cute!”

Still, at least the Metzers and their employees can get their fill of the cuteness on hatching days, when more than 30 varieties with names such as “Buff Duck” or “Welsh Harlequin Duck” or even “Khaki Campbell Duck” pop out of their eggs.

“We don’t need to (have pet ducks) because we see them here every day,” said Marc Metzer, whose grandfather launched the company in 1972.

And besides, the Metzers likely don’t need any little critters to take care of at the moment, as Katy is five months pregnant with their first child, a daughter due in July (neither cared for the suggestion of naming the baby “Duckie” after Jon Cryer’s character in “Pretty in Pink”).

And even if they can’t take home a baby duck, there’s still the jokes. A waterfowl hatchery is a unique place to work, and Katy Metzer takes full advantage of that by trying out at least one duck pun a day.

Her favorite?

“I have to get all my ducks in a row.”

Why is my package quacking?

Although the company is based in California, Metzer Farms opened a Cordova location in 2022 in large part because of Memphis’ status as a shipping distribution hub and the home of FedEx. With the more centralized location, the hatchery can ship day-old ducklings, goslings and more all across the United States and Canada overnight.

“A lot of people typically hear of backyard chickens, but there is a niche of people that want backyard ducks and geese. And so we offer that to them,” Marc Metzer said.

While the Metzers do sell chickens that are raised and eventually consumed, most of their waterfowl and poultry are intended to become pets or perhaps the foundation of a small enterprise selling eggs and the like.

“(Hatcheries) supply birds to people that want to raise their own food, have their own eggs, teach their children how to take care of animals,” Marc Metzer said. “(Our customers) want to do small little enterprises with their kids, selling eggs to neighbors and learning how to calculate how much feed costs and how much you can sell the eggs for.”

The hatchery process is fascinating, at least if you’ve never been around such a facility before. To begin with, the Metzers have arrangements with numerous egg suppliers in the area. About once a week, their drivers make runs to the farms to get duck eggs, chicken eggs, geese eggs (which are huge) and more.

The eggs are brought back to the facility and logged into their database, so that hatchery workers know where they came from, when they got there, what kind of eggs they are, etc.

Then, when the timing is right, those eggs are placed in as many as 16 different incubators, each the size of an outdoor garden shed. The eggs then spend a few days, weeks or even a month in the incubator, depending on the type (goose eggs take the longest).

Then the day comes when that batch of eggs is done and it’s time for what must be an exciting event: hatching day. The eggs are moved into the hatching room, where slowly, the little guys poke their way out of the eggs and take their first free breaths. Next thing you know, there are dozens and then hundreds of new ducks and geese quacking away.

Those babies typically are already spoken for, as the hatchery tries to match the number of eggs put in an incubator with the orders received. Sometimes, people just order eggs, so those are handled in a somewhat easier process.

So the same day the baby duck is born, it’s shipped out to its new home. That in itself is intriguing, as the Metzers have shipping live baby animals down to a science. The ducks – the minimum order is three, so rarely is a duck shipped alone – are put into a sturdy cardboard box with plenty of airholes as well as comfy straw and a dollop of food.

The postman picks up the boxes and they make their way to FedEx jets, which send the ducks around the country to be picked up by their new guardians in the next day’s mail.

Huey, Dewey and Louie

And that’s where folks like Alexandra DeMartini and her husband Ricky Stearnes come in. The Midtown couple had a two-acre backyard with chickens, but late last year, one of their chickens got sick and had to be isolated. Frida recovered, but still needs to live separately from the other chickens to be safe.

DeMartini didn’t like the idea of Frida living alone, though, so Stearnes got a grown male duck named Roger from his brother’s farm. Roger and Frida are now pals, and it went so well that the couple got three new ducklings in February. They haven’t settled on names yet, but multiple people have insisted on Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Not only do these ducks help keep the backyard and its gardens clear of grubs, worms and the like, DeMartini said, but they’re just a lot of fun. And unlike the chickens, they don’t disrupt the plants growing in the garden.

“The ducks, they talk all day long, all day. It’s so cute. You just kind of imagine the conversations they’re having amongst themselves,” she said. “And they talk a lot with their tails, like they will curl or arch their tail feathers or they’ll wag their tail almost like a dog. They’re very communicative, which I really love.”

And then there’s the best benefit of all to having these little critters roaming around the backyard.

“They’re absolutely adorable,” a smitten DeMartini said.