The family farm: Three generations keep Hickman’s growing

Seventy-three years after Bill Hickman’s mother started the business with a backyard flock of hens, Hickman’s Egg Ranch is still a family-owned business – and now one of the largest egg farming and distribution operations in the country.

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Hickman’s Egg Ranch Founder Bill Hickman, left, President Glenn Hickman, middle, and Vice President Billy Hickman, right, pose in an under-construction cage-free layer house. | Austin Alonzo
Hickman’s Egg Ranch Founder Bill Hickman, left, President Glenn Hickman, middle, and Vice President Billy Hickman, right, pose in an under-construction cage-free layer house. | Austin Alonzo

Seventy-three years after Bill Hickman’s mother started the business with a backyard flock of hens, Hickman’s Egg Ranch is still a family-owned business – and now one of the largest egg farming and distribution operations in the country.

Buckeye, Arizona-based Hickman’s now has 9.1 million birds in Arizona and Colorado and markets eggs throughout the southwest. The Arizona operation, toured by Egg Industry in February, includes 45 layer houses and 11 pullet houses, a feed mill, an egg products plant producing hard-boiled eggs and liquid egg products, a spent hen rendering plant, fertilizer production facilities, and a highly automated egg packing and distribution center processing about 6 million eggs a day. The company employs 500 direct employees and 270 contract employees.

Humble beginnings

Bill Hickman – profiled in the September 1981 issue of Egg Industry’s predecessor, Poultry Tribune, as the purveyor of a 236,000-bird operation – said the farm began as a backyard flock managed by his mother, Nell Hickman. Bill Hickman and his wife Gertie started his iteration of the business with 500 layers and 500 chicks, a shovel and a wheelbarrow in 1958. By 1960, the free-range operation became a cage operation and, in 1964, Bill Hickman built his first climate-controlled house. Glenn Hickman said his father was a pioneer in negative pressure fan barns and one of the first to realize climate control had as much benefit during the winter as the summer.

In 1971, the company, encroached by residential development, moved from its original location to a second in Glendale, Arizona. In 1997, with 350,000 hens, the company moved to Arlington, southwest of Phoenix. Its operations are now spread out through Tonopah, Arlington and Buckeye, Arizona.

Bill Hickman said his sons, Glenn and Billy Hickman, were involved in the business from a young age. They have served as president and vice president since the mid-1980s. Bill Hickman said the business started to grow after they took over the company formally in 1991. Three generations of the Hickman family are now involved in the business: Bill’s children, Glenn, Billy, Clint and Sharman; and his grandchildren Grant, Brandon, and Brett work full time, and Bliss, Cy, Trevor, Benton and Tia work part time.

Family values

Hickman’s, unlike many egg farmers, is public with its name and branding, putting its own name and branding on its egg packaging and festooning its 18-wheeler and pick-up trucks with its tuxedo, sneaker and sunglasses-clad chicken. Bill Hickman said that originates from when the company wanted to do something to stick out from the pack of the 600 other egg farmers selling their product in Arizona. Billy Hickman said the practice helps maintain the connection between the market and the community.

Bill Hickman instilled in his sons and his company a sense of fiscal wisdom. He said equipment costs have broken more egg producers than the up-and-down egg market, and he’s tried to teach the value of saving money during strong financial periods to endure the tougher spells, and for the company to not live beyond its means. Billy Hickman said he thinks the company has endured through the years because of the hard work ethic and conservative financial approach practiced by his father.

As for his legacy, Bill Hickman said he’s happy with his business card that reads “founder.” Bob Sheade, Hickman’s product inventory manager, said his decade with the company has taught him Bill Hickman and the Hickman family inspire a strong work ethic throughout the company and reinforce family values that let employees know they are cared for. As for the community in Phoenix, Sheade said Hickman’s has a legacy with the people, and is in an elite group of the city’s oldest and most well-recognized local businesses.

The next generation

Glenn Hickman and Billy Hickman are presiding over a period of expansion and transition. Within three years, 80 percent of the company’s eggs will be cage free, and after the completion of a planned four-farm, 10 million bird expansion project in California’s Central Valley, the company will double the size of the flock under its management.

Glenn Hickman said the company is now making the transition from a strictly family-owned and -managed operation to a professionally run organization with the family still retaining ownership of the business. He said his father has been able to see his sons successfully take over the business and his grandchildren joining the business as well. Glenn Hickman said he’d be happy to see the same thing.

Glenn Hickman and Billy Hickman’s own children are getting involved in key aspects of the business now, too. While they were required to work elsewhere before returning to the company, Glenn’s son, Grant, and Billy’s sons, Brett and Brandon, have leadership roles on programs looming large in the company’s future as it continues to integrate its business.

Grant Hickman is protein plant manager, and is responsible for the company’s rendering plant -- completed in spring 2016 and currently being expanded -- where spent layer hens are rendered and processed for meat and bone meal and liquid fat. The fat goes into pullet feed while the meat and bone meal is sold to other farms. Brett Hickman is in charge of the company’s cage-free initiative. Brandon Hickman, packaging supply chain manager, is a key figure in the company’s nascent effort to make its own plastic egg packaging out of recycled plastic.

Along with having environmental and consumer benefits, the standardized package would reduce the need for Hickman’s to keep different packaging for different customers and cut down on costs. The standardized package would be similar to the dairy industry’s standardized bottling with different labels applied for different customers.

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