Chicken Coup

You think of Van Nuys as many things--a polyglot community with everything from bustling carnicerias to Armenian bakeries, from lovingly tended tract houses to busy apartment complexes. What you don’t think of it as is a farm community.

But Ken Arno and his business and personal partner, Doreen Radogna, have run an egg farm--the only one in the Valley--behind an ordinary-looking house on Vanowen Street near Louise Avenue--since 1994.

Not far from the incessant whoosh of the 405 freeway, the couple have thousands of chickens, producing even more thousands of eggs, on three rented acres. Arno is a little vague about the exact number of fowl he and Radogna tend--he puts it between 2,000 and 5,000. And while the vast majority of their birds are chickens, they have other species as well, including tiny quail, clamorous geese, ostrich-like rhea and an imposing white turkey that struts around as if it never heard of sage stuffing or cranberry sauce.

Self-taught organic-egg farmers, Arno and Radogna sell their eggs, home-grown rhubarb, backyard artichokes and other products at six Southern California farmers’ markets, including two they own in Eagle Rock and Brentwood. On Sundays, they have stands at the Encino, Hollywood and Palos Verdes markets.

Their most unusual offerings are live ladybugs that Radogna collects in the foothills during the winter and sells as a means of controlling aphids without chemicals.

KenDor’s chicken eggs sell for $2 to $4.50 a dozen, depending on size. As big as a Nerf football, a rhea egg commands $30.

What makes their eggs so attractive to customers, they believe, is that they raise their birds on nothing but natural feed--a mix that includes millet and other grains, flax seed and soy. Arno boasts that his chickens eat no animal byproducts, which in other species have been implicated in such disorders as mad-cow disease. The couple also say that none of the eggs they sell left the chicken more than three days earlier.

“It started out as a hobby,” 49-year-old Arno says of his farming career. Before he began interacting with chickens, Arno dealt with the public. He was a smog mechanic.

“I was the guy who told you you didn’t pass and you got all [ticked off].” His actual phrase is more colorful. “Remember me? It was a very high stress job,” he says. “I dealt with the stress by coming home and digging in the garden. I originally got four or five chickens for their manure for the garden.”

The farm has several free-range areas where the chickens strut at will, often giving themselves dirt baths in shallow holes in the ground, a practice that helps eliminate parasites, Arno says.

“I have some happy roosters here,” he says of one lively area with an automatic watering system and a partial roof for shade. “There are about four of them, for 500 chickens.”

Arno says he has an unusually large number of roosters because the farm sells fertilized eggs to schools. Watching chicks emerge from their shells may have been the original school science project, and it remains one of the most popular.

“I never have enough of them,” Arno says.

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Not surprisingly, not all their neighbors are thrilled by the sound of roosters in the morning. The couple say that a handful of families in the neighborhood have complained to authorities about the farm. Some cite noise, some cite smells, some simply do not want a farm in their mostly residential neighborhood.

As a result, Arno and Radogna have been visited by representatives from such government agencies as animal regulation, building and safety, the Fire Department and the health department. “Someone told the police we were growing pot here,” Arno says, shaking his head in disbelief.

So far, Radogna says, “They all came in and took a look and left.”

To protect their privacy, Arno has started locking all the gates and posted the property to discourage trespassers.

The ongoing flap with their neighbors does not interrupt the endless work required to operate even the smallest farm. Every day, the chickens do what chickens do--eat, copulate and lay eggs. Arno and Radogna must collect them several times a day, the brown eggs of their Production Reds, the white eggs of the Production Whites and the pastel eggs of the Araucanas. The latter breed produces eggs that range from the palest turquoise to a tasteful gold. They are the chickens that inspired Martha Stewart to create a line of paints in a palette she says was inspired by the eggs of her own Araucanas.

Martha notwithstanding, for eating, Arno says, people prefer the brown.

Arno and Radogna were fascinated with their birds from the start.

“When we first got chickens, we got chairs and we used to sit here and watch them,” Radogna says. “It was better than TV,” Arno chimes in.

Although many of their birds roam freely in fenced-off areas, the couple also have some caged birds. These are for customers who like their scrambled eggs runny or who persist in making homemade mayonnaise, despite public health warnings that all eggs should be thoroughly cooked.

As Arno explains, chickens raised on the ground eat whatever they find there, including waste, increasing the likelihood their eggs will be contaminated with dangerous bacteria. Caged chickens are raised more hygienically, if less comfortably.

Committed to treating all its birds humanely, KenDor puts no more than four chickens in raised wire cages that held eight birds when they were used at a defunct egg factory in Ventura County. Arno bought the cages for a bargain price when the operation closed.

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Many of KenDor’s caged birds are sold to them with trimmed beaks, which makes intramural squabbles less lethal. Like the rest of the cage, the bottom is made of mesh, allowing droppings to fall through. The bottoms of the cages are also canted forward, so the freshly laid eggs roll into a trough at the front.

“These chickens are caged, but they are not miserable,” Arno says. “When it gets hot, I take them down to three per cage and I have a sprinkler system.”

Arno says he loves what he does, even when he works an 80-hour week. Seventy years ago, when Utopian entrepreneur Charles Weeks started a short-lived colony of small egg farms in the Winnetka area of Canoga Park, he proselytized: “Each man must create his own little world. None that others prepare for him will satisfy.”

Arno, who never heard of Weeks, would agree.

“I’m making real food,” Arno says proudly. “You’ve been to the chicken factories. That’s not food. It’s chemicals in a shell.”