From the Fields - Frank Hilliker

By Frank Hilliker, San Diego County egg farmer 

We’ve got our whole farm producing right now. We have cage-free chickens inside. It’s approximately 30,000 chickens. We’re small by egg farm standards, but to the average person out there, they think we’re huge. Our costs are not going down anytime soon. Fuel, labor—we all know what’s happening there. Our feed costs are still really high, our packaging doubled.

Right now, there’s a national egg shortage due to high pathogenic avian influenza. That is creating quite a problem here in California. Costco is out of eggs. Walmart is out of eggs, Albertsons, Vons. So we’re getting a little bit more foot traffic here at the farm store. My inventories are shot. As fast as they’re laying them, we’re selling them. Eggs last year at this time were trading for around $2 a dozen. Right now, they’re over $7.

We try to keep the price as low as possible because we have a lot of (customers who are) elderly people and disadvantaged people. We’ve got so many loyal customers that have been coming in for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, three generations of people coming in and buying eggs. I don’t want to turn them away because we have to raise our prices a whole lot. Our large eggs are $4 a dozen at the farm store. But when we’re wholesaling them, it’s full pop—whatever the wholesale rate is.

It’s been an interesting year. We’re trying to be the best egg farmers we can taking care of our birds, so they don’t get high pathogenic avian influenza. We’ve always had enhanced biosecurity. We don’t let any visitors into the chicken area. We have foot baths for employees. All trucks and equipment get disinfected when they go in and out of the chicken area. It’s everything we’re supposed to be doing.