At Egg Drop Farm, the Work Starts Before Sunrise
A breeder farm in Adair County, a family that goes back generations, and a mother deciding it’s time to tell her own story.
In Adair County, a few miles outside Westville in far northeastern Oklahoma, Kyle Langley wakes up with the chickens.
By five or six in the morning, the time shifts with the season, he’s already walked down to the barn to make sure the hens are fed, the lights came on when they were supposed to, and the feed system is loaded for the next day. The birds don’t take weekends off. They don’t take Christmas mornings off either, which is why Megan Langley and her daughters usually open presents the day before or the day after.
“I hate to say chickens come first,” she says. “But we do have to make sure that they are taken care of.”
Megan and Kyle run Egg Drop Farm, a poultry breeder operation they built together ten years ago. It sits on the land Kyle grew up on—literally the same house, which his parents sold them when they downsized. The couple’s two daughters have been going to the chicken houses since they were babies.
A breeder farm is the first link in the chain between a hatching egg and the chicken in the grocery store. Megan and Kyle’s flock is about 26,000 hens and 2,000 roosters. At peak, those hens lay around 20,000 eggs a day. Twice a week, the eggs leave the farm for a hatchery, and from there the chicks go to a broiler farm, where they’re raised for meat.
“So our farm is part of the first step in getting the chicken to your table,” Megan says.
A family that goes back
Poultry runs deep on both sides of this family. Kyle’s grandparents—both sets of them—had poultry farms. His dad had a dairy farm, then poultry. When Kyle was finishing high school, his dad built a breeder farm much like the one Kyle and Megan now own. After years of helping his dad run things, Kyle was approached by the company about building his own.
Megan grew up just to the north, in southern Delaware County. Her dad has spent nearly thirty years with Simmons Foods, the company they grow for. Her sister works at Tyson’s home office. Poultry is the family business on every side.
So when Megan talks about raising her daughters in this work, she’s talking about something that has been handed down through generations and is now being handed down again.
“We have a six-year-old and an eight-year-old who can gather eggs and help take care of the farm, just like we can,” she says. “We’ve been raising them since they were born to show them what hard work is. Yes, we get to go do fun things, but we also get to show them that we have to work for those things.”
The people on the farm
The Langleys have two women who come to the farm Monday through Friday to gather eggs, they load trays with eggs then onto racks, and move them into the cooler. The workday starts around 8:30 and wraps up around 1:30. A retired man who wanted to work one day a week comes every Sunday so that Megan and Kyle can get to church. A high school student covers Saturdays.
One of the women who works for them is a widow with three kids. Egg Drop Farm’s schedule lets her put her kids on the school bus in the morning and be home when they step off it in the afternoon. Her seventeen-year-old son is the high school student who works weekends. Some days, the younger kids come along too.
“It’s not just about producing food,” Megan says. “It’s providing a job for someone like her, so she can be home with her kids more.”
When Megan and Kyle want a vacation, Kyle’s dad who runs two poultry farms of his own covers for them. When his parents want a vacation, Kyle covers. That’s how a seven-day-a-week job gets done without anyone burning out: family.
What people don’t see
Oklahoma poultry has been in the news more than usual this past year. A long-running lawsuit over water quality in the eastern Oklahoma watershed has moved into a new phase, and Megan has watched a wave of misinformation roll over rural farming communities.
“People see these huge, six-hundred-foot barns that say biosecurity restricted, you can’t come in, and they just don’t know what goes on,” she says.
So here is some of what goes on. Breeder farms like Egg Drop operate under a nutrient management plan. They submit soil samples. They submit litter samples. They follow state Department of Agriculture guidelines on where, when, and how they can spread chicken litter to fertilize hay fields—the same guidelines that have governed this work for years.
A recent ruling changed those rules for farms that grow for certain companies. For Egg Drop, that means roughly $30,000 a year in commercial fertilizer instead of the litter they already have on hand. A neighbor half a mile up the road, growing for a different company not named in the suit, is operating under the old rules.
What Megan would like people to understand is that she is not dumping anything into the river. She sits on the board of her rural water district. The drinking water that comes out of her kitchen tap is pulled from Barren Fork Creek—the same watershed at the center of all of this concern.
“I drink this water every day,” she says. “I certainly do not want to see it being polluted.”
“If we don’t tell our story…”
Poultry farmers, Megan says, have historically kept their heads down. She’s trying to change that. Not because she sees herself as a spokesperson, but because she has come to believe the alternative is worse.
“If we don’t tell our story,” she says, “somebody else is going to tell it for us.”
Ask her to describe Oklahoma food in three words, and she doesn’t hesitate. For her industry, she picks three she wants Oklahoma families to think about when they sit down to dinner:
Dedicated. Regulated. Compliant.
That’s the short version of a long, pre-dawn, seven-day-a-week life—raising chickens, raising daughters, paying neighbors a fair wage for honest work, and looking after the land and the watershed she calls home.
It’s also why Oklahoma All For Food exists: to make the people behind the state’s food visible and recognizable—our friends, our neighbors, the folks on the school boards and in the church pews—so that when you put an Oklahoma chicken dinner on the table, you know who raised it, how it was raised and why it matters.
