Note: See the 25 minute video of Eben-Hazer Egg Ranch from March 2008 at the bottom of this posting.

The journey started out in Ramona, about 35 miles north-east of my place. I went to Swiss Mountain View Egg Farm and spoke with Charley Steiner, the owner.

Charley has about 5 to 10 people working for him to take care of the chickens, box up the eggs, and probably do the deliveries. He farms about 25,000 chickens and has been been in business for over 50 years. Given that he's 87 now, he started when he was older than I am. He sells to one of San Diego's landmark egg restaurants, The Broken Yolk, which I just happen to live a couple blocks from in Pacific Beach. Charley filled me in on the egg business in Ramona. In the 70s, there were 54 egg ranches in the area. Today there are 3 (or maybe 4?). The biggest is Pine Hills Egg Ranch which is on the 78 towards Julian. They have over a million birds and are the 58th largest in the nation and 5th largest in California.

Charley told me he plans on retiring in the next few years, but a friend of his who I bumped in to at Ward Egg Ranch in Escondido claims that Charley's been saying that for years. "I'll believe it when he sees it." I think it might be true this time, though. He's got plans to sell his route (the clients he delivers to) to another ranch when the time comes. But despite his retirement plans, he's enthusiastic about the business. When I mentioned that I might be a restaurant client, he was quick to give me a magnetic calendar with his contact information on it along with a dozen free eggs. I could feel the salesman come out in him at that moment and it made me feel like he would be an appreciated customer.

Here are Charley's chickens. I think the high was over a hundred degrees in Ramona that day. Above the cages, there are misters like the kind you find at amusement parks to help keep you cool. The chickens have to be kept at below 95 degrees.

Charley gave me the phone number for Hogervorst Egg Farm, but the number was bad, so I stopped in a shop in Romona to ask. The lady seemed to faintly know of several egg farms and gave me the kind of directions you get in small towns. "Go over the bridge, around the bend, and it's just past the Eucalyptus grove." I was on my way to what turned out to be Klemm's Ranch and now I know why her memory was faint.

Klemm's had closed down. All the smaller chicken ranches I visited had a home on them and this was no exception. A nice lady wandered out of the back yard and I asked her about what had happened. About 18 months ago they sold their route to Hilliker's down in Lakeside. She said the USDA had been harassing them. I assume this was due to stricter enforcement of regulations following the Newcastle's Disease outbreak in 2002 when entire farms of chickens were slaughtered.

My next stop, as suggested by the lady with the faint memory, again turned out to be a closed farm.

The next morning, I headed over to Hilliker's, which oddly enough doesn't seem to have a website, despite being one of the more public friendly egg farms. They are located at 11329 El Nopal, Lakeside CA 92040 (tel: 619-448-3683, eggman1@gmail.com), about 25 miles east of my home. The easiest way to find them is to keep an eye out for the big sign that read "WARNING, notice to all surrounding properties, you WILL be affected by flies, odors, dust, noise, and other irritants, inconveniences, and disturbances from this existing egg ranch. This is an existing agricultural operation with the right to expand."

Hilliker's is a family farm and the whole family seems to work in the business. They farm about 25,000 birds and sell to clients including Henry's, 7-11, Albertsons, and restaurants. Their birds eat a vegetarian diet, which consists mainly of corn, soybeans, grains, vitamins, minerals, calcium. The vegetarian feed is more expensive than feeds mixed with ground animal remains, but they say it makes healthier chickens and better eggs. The feed is purchased through a co-op with the other egg farms in San Diego. Vegetarian fed chickens seems to be a big step up from the other kinds of feed that can be used, but corn has it political and environmental problems as well. I spoke with Frank Hilliker about possibly using organic feed, but at the moment, he said it's much too expensive. All corn products have recently increased in price given the greater demand for for corn for the production of ethonol.

My next stop was to nearby Buchmann Eggs where I spoke with Max Buchmann, president of the company. After discussing the restaurant concept based on local ingredients, he explained how they had changed rolls and where now a distributor of eggs. He had converted their barns in to storage units and sells eggs to grocery stores and even to other egg farms like Hilliker's for their wholesale products. Buchmann purchases eggs from farms around San Diego, Southern California, and some from out of state. In talking to him, I could tell he had a deep understanding of the egg business.

I headed out from there to Ramona again to continue my search for the mysterious Hogervorst Egg Farm that Charley had told me about the day before. I had now found an address on the internet, but when I pulled up to the place, it said Eben-Haezer Egg Ranch. Whatever the name, I had just found my (nearly) perfect egg farm!

I passed by a garden in the front yard, then walked up to the egg stand next to the house and rang the service bell. A minute later, Bernice came out of the house carrying the trash, almost as if she hadn't heard the bell, but had just come out and happened to see me. She owns and runs the farm with her family. The farm is doing okay financially because they go out and find new clients and don't have debt, although she is making sure her five kids go to college. This is their 50th year of operation and they have 60,000 birds.

Of the 60,000 birds, about 1,000 are on the floor of a barn and go outside to a fenced off area next to the barn during the day (free-range). One nice thing about free-range chickens is that you can easily feed them all sorts of greens and food scraps, which makes their eggs more nutritious. They apparently will eat just about anything and are even better than goats at eating weeds. She charges almost twice as much for the free-range eggs as for the other eggs and says that demand for them is strong.

Free-range has some interesting problems. You can fit 4,000 bird in the same size barn when they are in cages. Take them out and put them on the ground, and you really you can only fit 1,000 birds. (Other farms that Bernice knows of pack them in and put maybe 3,000 bird on the barn floor.) When you put them on the barn floor, they end up walking around in their poop and picking on each other. The chickens don't look as clean as the cages ones and since they are not separated in to small groups, the stronger ones pick on the weaker ones.

I've recently been reading a book by Joel Salatin called Pastured Poultry Profits. Joel and his family run Polyface Farms and have been raising chickens for meat in an interesting way using small (100 birds each), portable chicken coups that they move little by little across a pasture. Bernice talked about fencing off different areas of her property where the birds would graze, and then go back in to the barn in the evening. Depending on how it's done, this could have a similar effect of giving the birds fresh, clean areas to graze on.

One thing that made Eben-Haezer Egg Ranch a refreshing find after visiting the other egg ranches was Bernice herself. Unlike the other farms, she was enthusiastic, friendly, and open about all the aspects of her business. After this visit, I felt like I had found the needle in the haystack. I had considered several times not even trying to find the farm, thinking that maybe they had recently closed down. So coming off of the high of finding Eben-Haezer Egg Ranch, I headed to Escondido to visit Harmony Egg Ranch. Given the signs out front, I thought the name "Harmony" was a bit funny.

The signs of course mean that they don't sell eggs to retail clients at the ranch. Next door to Harmony is Ward Egg Ranch. Ward actually buys eggs from Harmony to sell along with their own eggs. Ward is a fairly large egg farm that does sell to the public. However, because of the high value of the land that it is on, they will be ceasing operation on that site within the next three years and homes will be built there.

Ward sells to Henry's, so I asked about what is meant by "local eggs". When you buy local, farm fresh eggs in the grocery store, you are getting eggs from one of these egg ranches, but you don't know which one. The eggs could come as from as far as Riverside county, but most likely, they are all from San Diego county. Almost all San Diego chickens live in the same kind of cages and are treated in a similar way, whether they come from a farm of one million birds (Pine Hills) or 25,000 birds (Swiss Mountain), except for the free-range.

Here are more photos I took during my two days of driving around.

So after a couple days of driving around in August 2007, revisiting Eben-Haezer in March 2008, spending time looking for true pastured eggs (very limited supply at Wingshawdow Hacienda), and reading Pastured Poultry Profits, supporting Bernice at Eben-Haezer Egg Ranch seems like a good thing to do. By encouraging her to experiment with something that is between a free-range barn raised chicken and a pastured egg as described in Pastured Poultry Profits, we can expand the supply of healthy, local eggs in San Diego. You can buy Eben-Haezer eggs at most of the farmers markets and at their farm. See their website for more information.