Photo by Dan Callis

Nova Scotia native Greg Murray divides his time between a town house in Halifax’s city center and Athol Farms, a 400-acre cattle ranch on the Northumberland Strait. A longtime entrepreneur, his latest venture, the Clean Air & Water Centre, uses advanced ozone technology for sterilization applications, particularly in the food industry.

Although a stroke in 1992 left Murray with extensive left-side paralysis, he can often be found mending fence on his farm. He is excited to be undertaking an ozone-based treatment for relief of stroke-induced paralysis that is commonly used in Europe, the Far East, and in Cuba, where he was introduced to it last April while attending an ozone symposium.

Murray reports that results from the treatment to date have been unspectacular but decidedly positive, with some new sensation in his affected leg. He’s discouraged that ozone’s medical capabilities, widely accepted and utilized in much of the rest of the world, remain virtually unknown in North America. “I suspect it boils down to the following: Too cheap + too simple = minimal profit. Not my idea of responsible capitalism,” he says.

After HBS I took a job out west with an investment management and mutual fund operation in Edmonton, Alberta. The day I arrived the chairman said, “Go home and put on your jeans — we’re going to the ranch.” It turned out that he owned 18,000 acres and 6,000 head of cattle. I learned a lot about ranching in that job and even had to manage the place for a few months when my boss took his family to China. (With eight kids, that was quite an excursion in 1965.)

I saw an oligarchy in the making (some of the eight were already in university), and I missed the East Coast, so after two very eventful years, and a lot of Rocky Mountain skiing, I accepted an offer to join a groundbreaking urban redevelopment project and went home to Halifax in 1966. After the real estate aspect of the project was well along, I returned to the marine portion of my roots and became the first employee (and operations manager) of Halifax’s container-port development, back when that was just a gleam in a lot of eyes. It’s been a great success. In traffic tonnage, Halifax is now third in Canada behind only Vancouver and Montreal, both much larger metropolitan areas.

When my wife and I packed up to come back to Nova Scotia in 1966, we decided to bring along thirty head of two-year-old Hereford heifers to populate the farm my father had purchased just after World War II. We drove; the “girls” took the train.

Dad had built a western-style, open-front pole barn in anticipation, and our somewhat skeptical neighbors came by, leaned on the fence, and universally declared, ‘You can’t run cattle like that in this country. They’ll all be dead by spring!’ The result? Twenty-nine healthy, high-quality calves. Now most cattlemen in the Maritimes use our type of setup.

My cowboy proclivities aside, HBS is one of the feathers I continue to wear at the top of my hat, and have for a long time. The professors were so good — I remember them all fondly, particularly Walter Salmon. He was such an effective communicator. It was very easy to understand what he was getting at and to draw your own conclusions and applications from the material.

Outside the classroom, one of the things I’ve learned over the long haul (and two marriages) is that you should always make the personal stability of your life the first priority in choosing how to operate. I’ve endured a real lack of stability in my personal life and am not comfortable with it at all. It’s important to pay attention to the balance between work and home.

That lesson learned the hard way, I have nonetheless enjoyed a rich, varied life over these past forty years. The farm has been the most notable constant. I continue to enjoy the part of my life that gets me outdoors, gives me the exercise that keeps me fit (I weigh about what I did at HBS), and allows me to learn a great deal about, and appreciate, the joys of working with livestock. People are OK too, but cows don’t talk back!

I have no particular aspirations for retirement at this point. Ozone applications get continuously more interesting, the cattle business always has new challenges, and unless I corral a “retiring” spouse (third time lucky?), I don’t think I’m likely to put my feet up any time soon.

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