Fairview Farm

Snowy Saturday afternoon, seems like a good day to get into the next chapter of Fairview Farm history. I apologize in advance for going long on this one. We're getting into some of the history that I remember well, so I went into quite a bit detail in some spots here. Some may find it interesting, others might find it to be tediously too much information. Anyways, here's the story of:

"Egg Man!"
By 1966 farms in lower Bucks County were disappearing at alarming rates. Being replaced by suburban housing and developments and strip malls and shopping centers. The demand for newly hatched baby chicks was almost non-existent and the business of selling started pullet hens wasn't as lucrative with less and less farmers in the area and an even smaller percentage of those farmers interested in dealing with chickens just to sell eggs at 50 cents a dozen. By the end of the year, my Grandfather Edwin Daniels II was going to have to make some changes to the place and "go big or go home" in order keep the farm going.
In early 1967, it was decided to get out of the chicken hatchery business, stop raising and selling chicks and pullets, but not get out of the poultry business altogether. With a nice new building only 4 years old, that long chicken house on the North side of the farm was retrofitted to house laying hens. Ed decided the future of the farm lay in, errr, laying hens and selling eggs!
The building was made to raise chickens on the floor, where the chicks could eat, drink, excercise and grow. In 1967, it was set up to house laying hens in cages. The cages were configured in four rows, each row consisting of two sets of two-tiered of cages back to back with each other. In between the rows were raised walkways. Mechanized scrapers would go under the rows of cages to clean the manure. Hundreds of feet of plastic pipe delivered water to automatic water bowls in each cage. feed troughs ran the length of the rows and around the cage rows. At the end closest to the road, the feeders would go underneath a small feed bin. Within the feed throughs was a metal chain with solid plates welded to the links every so many inches. These chains were motorized to go up and down the aisles within the feeders, when going through the feed bin, the plates would push some feed through the troughs to deliver to the chickens up and down the aisles. The cages were slightly slanted with just enough of a gap at the bottom of the low end for any eggs to roll out onto a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt, when activated, would take the eggs to the end of the cage row (at the road end of the building) where they could be gathered by hand into egg flats at one location.
Very high-tech for its time, this one building could now house 20,000 laying hens. With everything being automated, there wasn't much to "feeding" and "watering", it was more, just checking and making sure everything was running correctly. And gathering eggs from all 20,000 hens would be about a 2-3 hour task for 2 people once a day.
In addition to retrofiting the newest chicken house to house laying hens, the store building was retrofited to wash, sort and store the eggs. The bottom of the building (store portion) had been used for the previous few decades to house incubators, hatch, sort and pack baby chicks. Now out of the hatchery business, this area was reconfigured into two walk-in coolers (one to store the eggs before washing and one to store the eggs after they've been washed, sorted and cartoned) and the big area that later became the sales floor had a large egg washer/grading machine set up in it. For those who remember the store configuration, this machine was in the shape of a huge "J". It began around the left end of where the sales counter was later set up (about where the register and scale were). Here, eggs were put onto rollers 30 at a time. We had a device with 30 little suction cups in which you could pick up a flat's worth of eggs at a time, set them on the rollers, then release the suction to leave the eggs on the rollers. Once on the rollers, they slowly moved the eggs through the washer and dryer, which was about where the meat freezer was in the store. Back in the corner (where the milk case is), the eggs would be dropped off, one row at a time, to a conveyor. Once on the conveyor, the eggs would immediately pass over a light single-file. Now, in this back corner (where the milk case is now), we had it all tarped off with black plastic to keep the area dark, so when the eggs passed over the light, someone would sit back there and could easily see any cracked eggs, eggs with bloody yolks or any other defects. These eggs would be pulled out, cracked eggs set aside in cartons, other defective eggs thown away in a bucket. From there, the eggs kept going along the conveyor along that back wall where the produce case is to be sorted out by weight. The eggs would pass over sections of track with springs set for the weights of the eggs. The weight of the eggs would push the conveyor down at certain sections enough for the egg to drop onto a large belt that would push the egg to a gathering section where they'd be cartoned/boxed up by hand. There were 4 of these "weight stations" for the eggs. Being the heaviest, "Jumbo" eggs would drop first, then the next weight station would be set so the "Extra Large" eggs would drop in the next section, then the "Large" and "Medium" into their respective sections. Anythng smaller than medium would go into the last section all the way down toward where is now the left end of the produce case. And all of the eggs would be regathered there by hand, packed into, mostly, styrofoam cartons or cardboard flats, depending where they were headed to.
And the eggs headed to a LOT of places. While many farmers in the area had given up trying to make any kind of money buying baby chicks or started pullets to have eggs to sell, they were more than happy to just buy washed, sorted and packaged eggs from Fairview Farm to resell at their farm stands. Many of our eggs were distributed to these other farmers in the area with their own farm stands and markets including fledgling stores at Penn View Dairy in Dublin, Pa, Styers Orchard in Langhorne, Pa, Hillcrest Market (now Gardenville Deli), Solly Brothers Farm and Tanner Brothers Dairy both in Ivyland, PA. (My Grandfather) Ed Daniels beat the bushes to secure accounts with all of these local farm stands. He also found a market to sell eggs at all of the local restaurants, diners and delis in the area. If they served breakfast, my Grandfather Ed Daniels was on the phone with them selling them Fairview eggs! Some of these included Country Host Restaurant (later New Hope Diner) in New Hope, PA, The Bread Box (now The Bread Crumb) in Doylestown, PA, Wycombe Inn (later Public House, then Wycombe House) in Wycombe, PA and Boswell's Restaurant (now part of Wawa's parking lot) in Buckingham, PA. In addition to farm stands and diners, he also sold eggs to the Neshaminy Manor in Warrington, PA and the Buck County Correctional Facility (prison).

More egg business to come!
Jesse