The Vital Voice

We’re frequently asked by customers why we chose to pack our eggs in PET plastic versus cardboard. By most appearances, plastic, which is a petroleum product, is not as good a choice for an eco-conscious company.

While paper/cardboard is a renewable product, the paper mills that are responsible for their production are some of the worst polluters in the world.

Also, we found that the traditional cardboard egg carton did not protect their precious cargo very well, oftentimes leaving a broken or cracked egg. About 2 years ago, we began the search for the perfect vehicle to carry our hens’ eggs to our customers. We found one company in the world that made egg cartons from 100% recycled PET water bottles. Furthermore, the carton itself was 100% recyclable #1 PET. And, to top it off, due to the design which includes a comfortable air pocket on each end of the egg, these plastic egg cartons better protected our eggs.

According to ABC News, there is a vast area of the Pacific Ocean that has accumulated plastic trash on the surface.

Plastic bottles in a landfill

One such plastic garbage tsunami is said to be more than twice the size of the State of Texas. With a sea of plastic water bottles available, we decided that it would be better to support the market for recycled plastic by using 100% recycled water bottles for our packaging than it would be to support the cutting down and processing of more trees in paper mills in order to use the more politically correct cardboard. Maybe if enough demand for recycled PET plastic is created, someone will harvest the Pacific Ocean plastic for profit (attention young entrepreneurs!).

Since the world won’t be running short on plastic anytime soon, we think the 100% recycled containers we use are the most sustainable choice we can make.

Robert is our manager at Vital Farm and a real thought leader in the art of pasture-raising hens. From time to time, he’ll be providing farm updates and answering frequent questions we get concerning pasture-raising. With the rough cold season we’ve been having, many people wonder how the birds handle cold weather.  Here’s Robert’s take:

This winter has been incredibly rainy and cold for this part of Texas. While this bodes well for the condition of the pasture in the coming spring, it can be a little trying when you work outdoors. You just come to accept being muddy, cold and wet all the time as a normal state of affairs, and console yourself with memories of the 107 degree temperatures of last summer’s drought.

Hens dressed for winter

A lot of people ask me if the cold weather is bad for the hens, since they live mostly outside. They actually do quite well in the cold, as long as they have a way to stay dry and sheltered. They are, after all, birds, and the forests and meadows all around the farm are full of thousands of birds who seem to survive each winter, even when temperatures dip into the teens, as they did last month. Birds are provided with excellent insulation in the form of feathers, which we actually use to make winter clothing and sleeping bags.

Each of our flocks has a mobile coop in which they spend their nights, and where they can shelter in inclement weather. These trailers provide the essential protection from precipitation and wind that they need to get through the winter.  On colder nights, they huddle together for warmth. When I make my rounds of the flocks at night, if I stand in the doorway of their trailer, I can feel the heat radiating from the sleeping hens.

Mobile chicken units give shelter and trap heat

Chickens get into trouble when they are exposed to a bad combination of elements, such as wind and cold, or cold and wet, or wind, cold and wet. In these conditions they are unable to retain their body heat, and can die from simple hypothermia. It is very important to make sure that the flocks have plenty of places to go to get out of the wind and rain. As with everything else in pasture-raising, if you give the birds the resources that they need, they will figure out how to use them.

Generally speaking if the temperatures do not dip into the twenties and teens regularly, and the winters aren’t too harsh where you are, you shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping your flocks on pasture in the colder months. As long as they are properly provided for, a cold, sunny day on pasture will always beat a warm day in a cage.

Cheap and tasty, but at what cost?

We really liked Brian Walsh’s article from the August issue of Time magazine, Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food, and feel it’s very relevant to our methods at Vital Farms.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458-1,00.html

In detailing what is mostly pretty grim news, the author provides a litany of the ways in which American food consumers are on the losing end of a pretty sketchy transaction – by ingesting food products that are cheap, but also bring enormous health, environmental, and societal costs. Take the corn industry for example:

But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized — both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop — at least until corn ethanol skewed the market — artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman.

This is especially relevant to the egg industry, as many farms feed their chickens this low-grade, genetically modified, hormone-filled version of corn to their chickens. The resulting eggs are not only uniform and flavorless, but also represent a nutritional compromise for egg eaters.

On our Better Egg page you can read about how pasture-raised hens transfer their natural diet into their eggs in a myriad of ways. We’re proud to say that every Vital Farms egg is produced without using processed or “enhanced” ingredients like GMO corn (or hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, or herbicides). While we’d love for our feed costs to be artificially lowered, that would mean we’d have to reduce the quality of the perfect little super-food our hens produce.

Our thanks to the Austin Food Journal for mentioning us in their post about their trip to the downtown Austin Farmers’ Market: http://www.austinfoodjournal.com/?p=3796

“My wife and I were just talking about how great it would be to have eggs and milk delivered to our house. But, decided that someone probably passed some law that makes it illegal. They must have. Everything cool is illegal. Sure enough I was wrong. Carrie Kelley, of Vital Farms, said their eggs ($5 dozen) are home delivered by Greenlings Organic Delivery. Or, you can purchase Vital eggs at the Saturday market, Whole Foods, Wheatsville, Farm to Market, Peoples Pharmacy, Boggy Creek Farm, Cissi, Whip In, Ashai Imports, Space Station Mir and the interior Congo. OK, I made those last two up, but it seems you can get Vital eggs just about anywhere. Right on.”