From the Fields - Frank Hilliker

Frank Hilliker

San Diego County egg producer

The big thing on our mind right now is this weather we’re going to get here in Southern California. We’re preparing for a hurricane. We’re getting all of our winter gear out—sandbags and water diversion things. We’re getting it ready, and we’ll start deploying it when it rains. We’re going to hope the roofs don’t fly off the chicken houses. The chickens will be nice and dry as long as the roof doesn’t fly off.

Other than that, there’s not a whole lot going on. Everything is business as usual. We got our new flocks of chickens in. We’re starting to get them geared up laying eggs so we can get ready for the upcoming season. Our busier time is when school starts through about Easter. We’re making sure all our flocks are younger. We have all our chicken houses full in September, October and then push them straight through December, January, February. 

The price of eggs has gone down, but the cost (of production) continues to rise. We’re trying to pinch every penny we can. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot we can do. Typically this time of year (egg prices) are lower because it’s hotter and people don’t want to eat a lot of eggs in the summertime. But once we get into fall and everybody’s back to school, we’ll sell more eggs, and prices will go up. 

We follow the market, so we dropped the price at our own little farm store. We get people that come in every day and buy eggs, so we’re thankful. (Store traffic) is about average. We don’t have a crazy amount of customers like we did during the high-price times or during COVID, but we have our regulars, and we have a few new customers.