Vital Farms

BOBCAT!!

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:16:10 +0000

Job number one on our farms is to ensure the well-being of all our girls. Sometimes there’s more to that than you’d think. Take it directly from Robert, who recently had to deal with an unexpected guest on our farm:

Not your typical neighborhood kitty...

One of the trade-offs we make when we raise poultry on pasture is that by virtue of the fact that the hens live outside and enjoy a more natural, healthy way of life, they are sometimes exposed to predators. Although few things are more infuriating than finding the remains of one of your birds strewn about the pen, it helps to remember that the predators are not malicious or evil; they have a job to do, and they are going to do it until we can figure out how to stop them. Despite the fact almost every critter from a skunk to a coyote enjoys a delicious chicken dinner, it is possible to protect your flocks from predators. Electric fences, motion-activated lights, flashing predators-lights, and good, solid chicken trailers are all excellent passive counter-predator measures. But sometimes, a wily critter figures out all your tricks, and it is time to get active.

This winter, I started noticing little scatterings of feathers in various secluded spots around the farm near the pens. No other remains; no bones or blood or anything. Just feathers. The only animals around here that can eat a whole bird and leave nothing behind but feathers are the neighborhood dogs, or coyotes, and the electric fences usually do an excellent job of keeping those guys out. As I examined the signs and clues, I began to suspect another culprit. These kills did not have the characteristic messiness of canine activity. There was a precision and economy to this predation that led me to a depressing conclusion; that we were dealing with a Bobcat! An afternoon of snooping around finally yielded one large print - more round than a coyote or dog print, and without the tell-tale toenail-marks. A great big Kitty track.

A truly beautiful animal.

My options were to try to sneak around in the woods at night, hoping to surprise and shoot an animal that was much better-equipped for sneaking around than I will ever be, or to try to live-trap it. I hate the idea of killing an animal that is just doing its job, trying to survive and perhaps feed its young. There is no glory or fun in that for me. After all, we put a delicious chicken-buffet right in this cat’s hunting-ground. It is our job to keep the hens safe, and to not lead the predators into temptation.

I bought a large live-trap, four feet long, three feet high, and two-and-a-half feet wide. I set the trap in the woods near the spot where I had seen the print, covered it with a tarp and laid some old brush and branches up against the side. The next step was to slide the gate of the trap open, and tie it with wire so that it would not close if an animal entered it. A buddy of mine who had trapped bear in Alaska had told about this method, called “step-trapping”. The idea is to get the animal accustomed to the trap by degrees over a period of time. Even the hungriest of hunters isn’t going to go head-first into a small enclosed space without a lot of investigation, no matter how delicious the bait might smell.

I bought one of those ten pound tubes of hamburger meat at the grocery store, and threw some on the ground around the trap and in front of the opening. Over the course of the next week I moved the bait a little closer to the opening of the trap. Each morning the bait was gone. On the fourth day I placed the bait just inside the doorway. The next morning it was gone. I placed the bait deeper in the trap. The next morning it was gone! I was still finding signs of predation, so it was very difficult to be patient and allow this process to work itself out. I finally tossed some bait deep into the trap, all the way to the back so that it rested on trigger mechanism.

The next day, not only was the bait gone, but there were feathers inside the trap. The Bobcat had grabbed a hen and taken it into the trap to eat it. I’d say it had gotten pretty comfortable with the trap, at this point. I tossed more hamburger meat into the trap, untied the gate, and set the trigger. The next morning, a big, fat male bobcat was glaring at me through the bars of the trap.

Our friend, on his way to a new home and hunting ground!

I must admit that I gloated for a little while, and I may have shaken my backside in the direction of the Bobcat and verbally taunted him, before we called animal rescue. I’m not proud of this behavior, but it felt good.

Austin Wildlife Rescue did a great job removing the trap from my truck, tucking it away in a quiet place for a while, and then transporting and releasing the big guy into an area where he can hunt safely and not be a nuisance to anyone but the poor critters he likes to eat.

So the hens are sleeping better at night, and so am I. And next time a large predator finds its way onto the farm, we will be more than ready for it!

Vital Farms in Edible Austin

admin — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 08:47:53 +0000

The spring edition of Edible Austin has a terrific feature on our Austin farm! Thanks to Marla the editor and David the author for such a great write-up. We’ve never heard such a unique take on our mobile-chicken-units: http://www.edibleaustin.com/content/editorial/editorial/552?task=view

Home to hens, not droids.

“Each pen consists of…a mobile chicken unit (MCU) that looks like a galvanized, very South Austin version of the Jawa Sandcrawler droid factory where Luke Skywalker purchased C-3PO and, reluctantly, R2-D2. The MCU is the coop where the hens nest.

“”The object is to allow the birds to live as natural an existence as possible,’ [Robert] Kraft continues. ‘There are downsides to that: they have to sleep outside in the cold, but it’s not anything they can’t adapt to. They sleep in big groups and their body heat keeps them warm. The electric fences keep ninety-five percent of the predators away.’”

Vital Farms Goes Viral!

admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:04:49 +0000

Whole Foods recently sent a video team out to shoot the goings-on at our Austin farm. You may know that we’re part of the Whole Foods Local Loan Program, that provides funding to local farmers to help them grow and get their products to market. We really appreciate their work on the great little video they produced:

http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2010/03/vital-farms/

Girls On Film

Also – don’t miss our slightly more amateurish effort: “Hens on Winter Pasture,” on YouTube. Tell your friends!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6VXwKQZkA

Why Are Vital Farm Eggs Packed in 100% Recycled Plastic?

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:17:44 +0000

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.

Cold Chicken

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:15:17 +0000

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.

Mary in Michigan

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:44:30 +0000

“I have just recently found your eggs at Whole Foods in West Bloomfield. I am so grateful I have FINALLY found eggs from humanely raised hens. Thank you, for your concern for the chickens, as well as the environment.”

Michele in Texas

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:17:39 +0000

“Mom always makes me do the deviled eggs for Thanksgiving. This year, looking for a non-factory-farm, ethical source, I bought your eggs from Whole Foods in Arlington. And this year, 24 deviled egg halves weren’t enough for 10 people! They went on and on and declared these to be the best they’d ever eaten. And I smiled to myself, ’cause I knew why. THANK YOU from a new but henceforth faithful customer in Fort Worth.”

The “High Price of Cheap Food”

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:16:23 +0000

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.

Vital Farms in the Austin Food Journal

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:58:58 +0000

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.”

Sandra in New Mexico

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:45:59 +0000

“I just recently bought these eggs at our local Whole Foods on St. Francis in Santa Fe, NM, where we purchase all our food, and I have to tell you that this is the best: you can taste the happiness. Sound corny? I have told friends and family about your product and now they are buying! I fry an egg for whomever enters my home. We have a debate though, what is the fridge life of these eggs? thank you and continue with the awesome product!!!!!!!!!”