Flying the Coop : Couple’s Egg Farm Henpecked by Development

In this case, it was not the chicken or the egg that came first, but a laughing young Irish couple who wanted to escape the rigors of city living.

It was 29 years ago that Neil and Pat Sheehan, employees of a Los Angeles bank, visited a friend in the San Gabriel Valley. “He said to come and see him in San Dimas,” said Pat Sheehan, with a look of exaggerated mystification. “San Dimas? Where’s San Dimas?”

They made the 30-mile trip. And, to their surprise, plunked down some money on a long-vacant egg farm across the street. “It was a whim,” said Neil Sheehan. “A freak accident.”

The Sheehan Egg Ranch, which opened inauspiciously in November, 1963, on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, was an idyllic escape for the Sheehans. But the farm had great practical value too. The Sheehans found that they could raise children--four of them--in a pleasant rural setting while making a decent living.

Pat quit her job as an escrow manager for Security First National Bank (the forerunner of Security Pacific) to run the farm. Then, four years later, Neil left his job as a loan teller with the same bank. By then they had 10,000 Leghorns, white-feathered egg layers with tall red combs.

The farm with the drive-through window, where motorists can buy eggs virtually as they fall from the hen, was one of dozens of small egg farms in the San Gabriel Valley, more than 20 of them in San Dimas alone. One by one, they have closed down or moved on.

In the early 1950s, there were more than 3,000 egg farms in the county--2,000 in the San Fernando Valley. Now, it is just the Sheehans and a tiny 20,000-chicken farm in West Covina.

And the Sheehans, who are in their 50s, are phasing out operations and planning to retire.

It is time to face some new realities, they say.

California, with 28 million egg layers, is still the leading egg producer in the country. But there is a new, capital-intensive approach to the business, with profitability based on ever greater investments in machinery, said Donald Bell, a poultry specialist at UC Riverside. A small egg farm nowadays has 100,000 chickens. The Sheehans have 35,000.

“But the biggest pressure,” Bell said, “is that animal agriculture is no longer welcome in Southern California.”

The Sheehans get the impression that their San Dimas neighbors will not miss them when they are gone. “The industrial parks down at the end of the block there--they’re all complaining about flies,” said Pat Sheehan. “We’re the No. 1 target.”

A decade or so after the Sheehans started selling eggs, developers discovered the eastern end of the San Gabriel Valley, dropping tile-roofed homes and office complexes on agricultural tracts like pieces on a Monopoly board. San Dimas’ population, like that of other cities near the junction of the 210 and 10 freeways, skyrocketed in the 1980s, increasing 35% to about 32,000.

The new residents, with the concurrence of city officials, were outspoken in their dislike of the smells, dust and flies that go along with chicken farming. The city once sent a code enforcer to the ranch, but no violations were found. Now, city officials simply try to make the Sheehans feel unwanted.

“If they want to continue operating a ranch, they should abide by healthful conditions,” said City Manager Bob Poff, expressing concern about the number of flies.

But flies come with farms the way snails come with gardens, the Sheehans insist. The only way to get rid of them is with insecticides that are not compatible with food production.

Egg farmers and suburbanites have been rasping against each other like this in Los Angeles County for years, said Bell, with the egg farmers invariably bowing to pressure.

“You’ll be getting your eggs from Illinois someday soon,” said Neil Sheehan, 59, a white-haired man whose eyes glint with mischief.

There is also, of course, Nichols Egg Ranches in Arcadia. But there are no chickens in the Nichols plant on Santa Anita Avenue. Just eggs.

This is where the produce of 200,000 Nichols chickens, at ranches in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, comes for processing. Nichols has moved all its chickens to more rural areas outside of Los Angeles County to avoid conflict with spreading suburbs. A computer-monitored production line washes, weighs and sorts as many as 4 million eggs a week there.

Gone from this scene are those comforting picture-book notions of Old MacDonald’s farm, with hens pecking at golden grain in a barnyard, then retiring to a nest of straw to deposit a fresh egg or two.

Chickens have become egg-producing machines which, when they falter, are retired to another form of consumption, said Nichols operations manager Ronald Christensen. “When they’re not producing enough to make them profitable, they’re sold for Campbell’s soup.”

On the Nichols production line, men and women hustle to keep up with the trays of eggs rolling down the conveyor belts, stacking the eggs on racks and loading them on trucks.

Some of the final product goes to a modest store in front of the plant, where hundreds of San Gabriel Valley residents come to buy their eggs just a day or two out of the hen.

The Sheehans can still wax fondly about ranch-fresh eggs, which they have turned out by the millions. They look good on the plate, they taste good, and when they come out of a frying pan, the yolk stands up like a doorknob.

The Sheehans say their chickens anticipated the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake. A minute or so before it struck, an eerie silence descended on the Sheehans’ entire flock. “It’s very rare,” Neil Sheehan said. “Just about the time I was saying, ‘What the hell’s the matter?’ it hit.”

Then, as their cages rocked back and forth, the chickens all screamed in unison, raising a nerve-jangling clatter.

A year or so from now, the silence around the little egg farm in San Dimas will tell a different story.