From their farm 15km away, they will be supplying all the beef and lamb for the butchery, which will be managed by 2016 Lower North Island Young Butcher of the Year Justin Hinchco.
Given that most independently owned butchers had disappeared due to supermarkets and national butchery chains, Murray was pleased that Waipawa would still have a local butcher once he retired.
"We used to butcher four or five whole animals a week before the supermarkets came along and there used to be four or five butchers in Waipuk, but they've all gone now. And it's the same in Hastings - there's not many left there, either.
"The only thing that's going to change in Waipawa is that people won't see Murray Stephens' face in the shop any more," he grinned.
Murray was still at school when he started helping out at the butchery for his dad, who ran a piggery and held livestock in the paddocks at the old Otane slaughterhouse, to supply the butchery.
I won't be able to just ring the wife any more and say 'what shall we have for dinner tonight - steak, lamb, casserole?'
It was at the slaughterhouse where Murray was ordered by his dad to slaughter his first animal, an old ram, for offal to be fed to the pigs.
"Of course I went to cut the ram's throat, and I cut it all right, but it straightened out and tossed me over and it walked straight out the doorway and down the bank to the creek. And my old man said 'now you can go down and get the damn thing!'"
By the time he started as an apprentice, regulations had changed and animals had to be slaughtered at the Tomoana Freezing Works.
Murray said one of his jobs was to drive to the Hastings freezing works every Monday morning and fill up a two-tonne Ford truck with the meat for the week.
"Before then we'd done all our own killing. I'd go down and come back and the truck would be chock-a-block.
"We only had one freezer so all the meat had to be broken down and stacked away that day.
"Heaven forbid if I was late or had a puncture or anything, or I'd be in big trouble with the old man," said Murray, who described his dad as a hard taskmaster but also a good, fair man.
Murray took over as owner in the mid-1980s when his dad and business partner sold out. He reckoned the meat was better back then, particularly pork, as feeding pigs offal, garbage and cooked scraps was still permitted.
"The pigs had a lot more fat on them because of the tucker they were getting."
A career highlight came in 1998 when Murray won a gold medal at the NZ Sausage Competition with a beef and bacon sausage. It provided a real boost for the business, he said.
"That really set the business alight. This was back in the days when there were only about three types of sausages, not like all these fancy things on the go today," said Murray, who revealed the secret to his popular sausage was "good quality meat from one end of the skin to the other".
Customers began coming from all over for his sausages, and Murray was proud he had consistently employed three other staff at the butchery, which had relied mostly on word of mouth for custom.
Apart from his "wonderful, loyal" customers, Murray said what he would miss most about the business was having access to his own personal larder.
"I won't be able to just ring the wife [Helen] any more and say 'what shall we have for dinner tonight - steak, lamb, casserole?' Now I am going to have to buy my meat like everyone else."
