01/25/2026
Been almost a year since my last "Fairview History" post, but I have so much more to share, just hadn't gotten around to it.
I left off with our transition from breeding/raising chickens to producing eggs. Here's more to the story of Fairview Farm's egg business of the 1970's and '80's:
"More Chickens = More Eggs"
The very first year of Fairview Farm being in the egg business, egg prices dropped and there were some second thoughts on what we had gotten ourselves into. But, things rebounded the following year and many, many local markets, deli's, restaurants and other business were selling a LOT of our eggs! More than our 20,000 hens could supply.
In 1970, the newest two-story chicken house (built in 1951) was retrofitted to house caged laying hens on the bottom floor. Only 30 feet wide compared to the 36 feet wide main chicken house, they could only fit two full rows of cages and two half rows of cages along the side walls. Also, this building was only 130 feet long, just over a third of the length of the main chicken house. Still, we could fit roughly another 5,000 laying hens in this setup. Now this building (referred to as "4 Building" from the hatchery days) only had automated waterers. While the cages were the same as the other building with a slight slant to the bottom and a trough to catch the eggs as they rolled out, there were no belts to convey the eggs to a common location. Thus, the eggs had to be gathered by hand. We had two flat carts in which we'd push up and down the aisle to gather the eggs on put them on 30-egg flats to take to the "egg room" (store) for washing and sorting. Feeding was not fully automated like in the other building, but we did have an augered feed cart in which we'd fill the cart up at the feed bin and drive this little cart up and down the aisle. It had two augers with spouts positioned to dispense feed in the troughs for both the top and bottom rows of cages. Took a steady hand driving that thing in the aisles while making sure you didn't drop any feed out of the trough. Much like the other building, the aisles were raised and the cages were over top of the lower floor level where the manure would drop. Again, not automated like the other building, we did have manure scrapers to push the manure down to an auger at the one end to send out to the manure spreader. The scrapers would hook up to a garden tractor (lawn mower) and we'd drive that up the aisles to clean the manure. It definitely took more work to take care of the chickens in this building and collect their eggs, but we needed those eggs to keep our buyers supplied!
In 1980, with our own market taking off selling not just our eggs, but Stoney Lane Dairy milk and our own vegetables, we needed to relocate the egg washing/grading machine out of store. At the end of the main chicken house there was a small add-on building in which all the conveyor belts brought the eggs to for gathering. In 1980, we tore that little addition down and put up a much bigger one in it's place. This new addition housed the re-located washing/grading machine which was positioned to hook up to the existing egg conveyors so with the flicking of a few switches, eggs would go from the cages to the washing machine to the packing tables without any middlemen (or women). We still only ran the washer/grader 3 days a week, but this set up proved to be faster and more efficient in the long run. This building also featured a large walk in cooler to store the eggs and a loading dock. We had bought a box truck that same year and could now back it up to the loading dock and wheel carts of cleaned and sorted eggs straight to the truck for delivery.
Even with 25,000 laying hens, we still had such a demand for eggs that we had to find some additional suppliers! Throughout the 1970's, we'd sporadically rent a U-Haul box truck to take to egg farms in Lancaster, Pa and fill up with eggs for resale. Eventually, we bought our own box truck for such treks as well as to load more eggs for our deliveries. With the new building having a loading dock we found some egg suppliers who would deliver into the area and now could quickly back up to the loading dock, unload pallets of eggs and be on their way.
Moving the egg washing/grading machine out of the bottom of the building between the house and first two-story building allowed for expansion of the store and now the walk-in coolers in the store building could be used to store our own fruits and vegetables.
More to come on both the egg business and the birth/growth of the farm market store!
Jesse