Sell 'Em or Smell 'Em

Buckeye, Arizona – What comes after the chicken?  Answer: the egg at least in our story.  As a commodity, they’re every bit as big as poultry.  Heartland hens lay close to 70-billion eggs for market every year. 

In the southwest, a hefty portion of them comes from a Phoenix-area business named Hickman’s Egg Ranch. The business was born in 1944 when Grandma Hickman decided to sell fresh eggs from her backyard chicken flock outside Phoenix. Hickman’s has grown into one of the top twenty producers in the United States.

To keep up with demand, Clint Hickman keeps his birds busy.  He explains, “The genetic type of style of chicken that we have – a white leghorn breed is genetically predisposed to lay an egg every twenty six hours.  We hope by feeding her correctly, keeping her climate-controlled, we’re hoping to keep her right at that level.”
 
Hickman’s leghorns produce on a massive scale. A henhouse containing 136,000 chickens feeds nearly that number of eggs onto a conveyor belt each and every day of the year. At the Buckeye facility, ten such henhouses are in full operation, producing more than a million eggs every day. 

In the temperature-regulated henhouses, a computer system keeps track of the birds’ diet and laying history. Their eggs are unfertilized, since the hens have no contact with roosters. Unlike in the old days, when eggs were gathered by hand, the process of getting a fresh egg from the farm to the consumer is a highly mechanized process. The hens lay their eggs in cages that have a slight pitch to them, so they’ll roll to a small conveyor, which in turn connects to a larger main conveyor belt.  When the computer senses a full load of eggs coming down, it will pull the batch to a complex piece of machinery that washes them, sanitizes them, and packages them.

Shipping and delivery is equally efficient. Says Hickman, “The egg can be less than 24 hours old by the time it actually reaches the store itself.”
 
Women have an important role In Hickman’s assembly process.  Before packaging, each egg is examined for imperfections and given a protective coating of mineral oil.

Most of the people doing this and packing the fragile cargo are women.

That’s no accident.  Hickman claims, “It’s a fact that the ladies are more gentle with the eggs and more caring about the product than what I feel the men are.  They break a lot less eggs.”

Another, smaller segment of the workforce gets special consideration at Hickman’s Egg Ranch.  A major employer in the Buckeye area, it hires inmates from a nearby correctional facility to work alongside its regular staff.  Steve Martin served five years for forgery and I.D. theft to support a drug habit.  He began working for Hickman’s while he was an inmate.  Since his release, he’s risen to the position of manager of the henhouses.

Martin says, “It’s made all my dreams come true.  I’ve never been in a position of management. Always thought I could be, and wanted to be, and it’s given me some serious direction. You know, I love it.  I love working around animals, and I love being able to chart my progress by seeing how good the flock does.”

Steve enjoys serving as an example to current inmates working at Hickman’s Egg Ranch: “It’s great. I like being around the inmates still, because it gives them direction and they see if we really try and put forth the effort, ‘maybe I can get hired on when I get out.’  And it’s true – they can.  So they work harder if they want to work out afterwards, and so it’s just a big positive.”

The most serious challenge facing egg farms like Hickman’s is the specter of avian flu and other diseases. Bio-security is so tight.  Suiting up human beings in protective gear and keeping the flock isolated keeps mortality down and the eggs rolling out.  It lends a decidedly futuristic look to one of the oldest practices in agriculture. But it helps guarantee the supply of one of the most popular foods on the American table from breakfast, lunch, and dinner right through to dessert.

American Egg Board
http://www.aeb.org

United Egg Producers Certified
http://www.uepcertified.com/