“While its great that the birds have actual contact with grass, it’s not sustainable. Polyface does not raise the birds in winter, and so must buy eggs from other farms to replenish their stock each year. Each chicken on the farm was thus the child of a factory raised bird. Without a (very) small scale home farm, there’s no way to keep the chickens 365 days a year like this.So, buying Polyface chickens is best for the birds on Polyface farms, but it still means a factory life, and the promotion of a factory life, for other birds.”

The criticism Nathan Fiala is making of polyface farm is that the farm is not sustainable. Nathan says this because the farm doesn’t raise chickens in the winter because of the weather, and that the chickens on the farm are a child of a factory raised bird. I don’t understand Nathans criticisms, talking about “promotion of a factory life”  Polyface doesn’t want that at all, if anything there saving birds from going to factories not promoting that lifestyle. Nathan is attempting to make a connection between polyface buying eggs from other farms and promoting factory life.  He does come from a very eco friendly standpoint, and dives deep into the process of how polyface creates its food.

 

 

“Polyface beef is probably priced much closer to the real social price of beef, so I have no problem with the price. Scaling up of such a program, which Joel thinks is feasible, means that the days of $1 burgers at McDonalds would be gone. Again, fine with me, but there is no way Americans will be able to afford the amount of beef they eat now.”

Nathan stance on the price of beef is correct. The average price of beef per pound is $ 2.50, at polyface it’s $4.25. I don’t believe americans will increase spending on meat by this amount just because it’s better for the animals.  This country as a whole, isn’t ethically invested enough to spend a lot more money on meat just for the sake of the animal. This viewpoint is very realistic and reasonable.

 

“Studies have suggested that free-range and organic chickens may have more negative environmental impacts than traditional poultry products, as the chickens take longer to produce.[9] Additional criticism claims that Salatin’s farm is not scalable, since the Earth—which already uses 26% of ice-free land for grazing—does not have enough land to support free-range meat at current consumption levels”

This criticism does have some truth behind it, the cows at polyface take up 33% more land than industrial size productions and the time to slaughter on polyface (20-29 months) is twice as long as a factory cows. “Given we are already using a lot of land to produce the meat people are already eating, this would not be a sustainable increase.”  Modern technology does allow for more sustainable land use. These criticims are coming from real life scenarios and statistics. The amount of land available for farming is so great but does have a limit. With the population increase in the world, it wouldn’t be very sustainable if every farm went about things like polyface does. With more people requires even more meat production, and an efficient factory that produces more meat in less space is worse for animals but realitically sustainable for people and the current/future challenge of feeding everyone.