Polyface Farm

Polyface Farm is a farm located in rural Swoope, Virginia, United States, run by Joel Salatin and his family. The farm is driven using unconventional methods with the goal of "emotionally, economically and environmentally enhancing agriculture". This farm is where Salatin developed and put into practice many of his most innovative and significant agricultural methods. These include direct-marketing of meats and produce to consumers, pastured-poultry, grass-fed beef and the rotation method which makes his farm more like an ecological system than conventional farming. Polyface Farm operates a place where consumers go to pick up their products.

Practices and background

Polyface maintains a “local” attitude towards their products. Salatin encourages people to buy locally to save small businesses. Salatin believes when you know your farmer and where your food comes from, you’re in a much better place. People will drive just to sample Polyface products.

Polyface Farms is also highly influenced through religion. Salatin is explicit about saying his Christian faith informs the way he raises and slaughters the animals on his farm. He sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love. Salatin believes his method is to honor that of God. It is these values that separate Polyface Farm from the rest.

Salatin bases his farm's ecosystem on the principle of watching animals' activities in nature and emulating those conditions as closely as possible. Salatin grazes his cattle outdoors within small pastures enclosed by high-tech, electrified fencing that is easily and daily moved at 4pm to ensure that the animals always have fresh grass; grass has had time, about 100 days, to mature and grow tall, which increases levels of starch. Animal manure fertilizes the pastures and enables Polyface Farm to graze about four times as many cattle as on a conventional farm, thus also saving feed costs. The small size of the pastures forces the cattle to 'mob stock'-to eat all the grass.

In addition Polyface raises pastured meat chickens, eggs layers, pork, turkeys, and rabbits. The diversity in production better utilizes the grass, breaks pathogen cycles, creates multiple income streams, and makes daily life more dynamic and fun. The meat chickens are housed in portable field shelters that are moved daily to a fresh "salad bar" of new grass and away from yesterdays droppings. All manure is distributed by the chickens directly onto the field. His egg laying chickens are housed in mobile trailer stlye coops that follow 4 days after the cattle, when flies in the manure are pupating; the chickens get 15% of their feed from this. While scratching for pupae the chickens also distribute the cow manure across the field.

Salatin's pastures, barn, and farmhouse are located on land below a nearby pond that "feeds the farm" by using of piping. Salatin also harvests of woodlands and uses the lumber to construct farm buildings. One of Salatin's principles is that "plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health."

Media

Polyface Farm was featured in the book The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan as exemplary sustainable agriculture, contrasting Polyface Farm favorably to factory farming. An excerpt of the book was published in the May/June 2006 of Mother Jones magazine. The farm is covered in the August/September 2008 issue of Mother Earth News. Pollan’s book describes Polyface Farm’s method of exemplary sustainable agriculture as being built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. In effect, Joel is farming in time as well as in space—in four dimensions rather than three. He calls this intricate layering “stacking” and points out that “it is exactly the model God used in building nature.” The idea is not to slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species “fully express their physiological distinctiveness.”

The farm is also featured in the documentary films Food, Inc. and Fresh. As well as in episode 3 of the BBC documentary series "Jimmy's Global Harvest" (presented by Jimmy Doherty (farmer)).

Polyface Farm is a participant in Humane Farm Animal Care's Certified Humane Raised and Handled program.

Criticism

Salatin is criticized in Jonathan Safran Foer's recent book Eating Animals by poultry farmer Frank Reese for raising industrial birds, not heritage birds: Reese says of Polyface, "Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. It's like putting a broken-down Honda on the autobahn and saying it's a Porsche." This statement is not entirely true. Polyface uses heritage breeds for its egg production. However for meat birds Salatin uses the Cornish Cross. The same type of bird used in the industrial system. Salatin candidly admits in his book, The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer, that the meat bird operation is currently the least sustainable aspect of the farm. Salatin goes on to say that he looks forward to the day that customers are willing to buy (and he is able to raise) a non-industrial meat bird. Reese's critique also aims at Michael Pollan's view in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma that depicts the farming principles of Polyface as exemplary and sustainable.

In an interview with reporter Gaby Wood from The Observer, Salatin admitted that he raises non-heritage breed chickens. He explained that he had raised heritage birds for several years, but the poultry from these birds had gained little interest from consumers, and was therefore not economically viable for him.

See also

Biodynamic agriculture

References

External links

Official website

Video of a talk at the Berkeley School of Journalism

View of Polyface Farm from Google Maps

Polyface and Sustainability

Flavor Magazine (Salatin writes a column, "Rebel with a Cause," for this bi-monthly magazine focused on the DC foodshed)

Interview With Joel Salatin, The Observer, Guardian UK)

Category:Augusta County, Virginia Category:Farms in Virginia