Aloha from the Shenandoah Valley By
When you drive across the Blue Ridge Mountains, start down 81, whistle past Staunton, you’ll eventually see some signs for “Raphine”, Virginia. Get off of the highway, get lost, turn around, and start following the shadows surrounded by bricks that constitute some of the old homesteads of the Shenandoah Valley. If you’ve given up, you may have located Polyface Farm, in Swope, Virginia.
Polyface Farm is the domain of Joel Salatin, a self-professed “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic-farmer”. And his farm is unlike any that you’ve ever seen.
He has a list of ten things that drive the ethos of his piece of agrarian heaven: No sales targets, no trademarks or patents, a clearly defined market boundary, incentivized work force, no initial public offerings, no advertising, stay within the ecological carrying capacity, people answer the phone, and quality must always go up. Off the grid. True to the land.
So what’s so darned different and radical about what Salatin is doing?
Grass-based livestock and poultry, mimicking natural patterns.
Have you ever seen those documentary shows where you see the water buffalo moseying along with the egret on his back? As it is in nature, so shall it be on the farm. Starting with the cows, the animals at Polyface follow a cycle and a structure that allows them a healthy diet and allows the earth to heal. Cows are herbivores. Commercial cattle are cannibals. Commercial cattle feed contains ground up cow. Cows are also like water buffalo and elephants, which group together for society and protection from predators, and they migrate to find fresh eats. Polyface has a mobile fence that allows them to move the cattle to a fresh “salad bar” each day.
Once the cows are done “mowing the field”, Polyface moves the chickens in. They eat the tender shoots left by the cattle and dig through the cow dung for bugs and larvae. Because that’s what birds do. The chickens then add more natural fertilizer to a field that will rest until the next go-round.
They use this same idea with egg layers, with a mobile Eggmobile, turkeys in a Gobbledygo, rabbits, and pigaerators.
Yes, pigaerators. Like any farm in this climate, there are certain times of the year that it is hard to pasture cattle, and you have to feed them hay. Polyfarm has a large shed for this, and they line it with a bed of wood chips, sawdust, and old hay. The cows walk on it and crush all of the air out of it. Polyfarm adds corn, which ferments. Pigs come in and dig through the bedding to get the fermented corn, and the whole shed is them aerated. It becomes a big compost pile that Salatin can use all over the farm, hence: pigaerator.
Once the pigs get to a certain size, they graze in a “savannah” (pasture), and then head to the woods for acorns and shoots off of the forest floor. Just like in nature.
Now, Joel Salatin and the team have been somewhat successful. He gives interviews and writes books, and as part of his transparency you can visit his farm any time you’d like. For a nominal fee you can arrange a guided tour. His 400 or so acres bring in a little over $2 million per year. But he’s fighting the “commercial” farm moniker.
If you want to buy some of the good fruits of Polyface labors, don’t go to the grocery store. Ethos ticker #3: a clearly defined market boundary. If you can’t get down to Swope, you can’t have it. No big trailers, no shipping overseas. A writer for Mother Jones got curious and asked to have some chicken shipped to him. Nope. Mother Jones offered an overnight courier. Nope. Salatin feels that if you’re not within his “foodshed” then you shouldn’t eat it. The average meal in the U.S. travels about 1500 miles before you tuck in.
Consider this: There is a sugar cane field in Hawaii. There is a processing plant across from the field. The local workers go to a small café near the plant for lunch and a quick coffee. The little packet of sugar that they use comes from…New York. They cut the cane, clean it next door, and then ship it to California where it is refined into a pure, crystalline white. It is then shipped to a plant in New York that puts it into little paper packets stamped with the creative wording, “Pure Local Cane Sugar.” It then makes the trek back to Hawaii for the dining pleasure of the locals who got it out of the ground in the first place. Aloha.
Polyface doesn’t claim to be organic. That would bring the scrutiny of the USDA. Joel Salatin’s latest book is called “Everything I want to do is Illegal” and it documents his struggles to sell his products (he is a commercial enterprise so he needs a store, certain paving and parking, restrooms, yada yada yada), to live on his land (local zoning says that you can’t build a house under 900 square feet), to eco-friendly waste (he could not use a composting toilet, but had to have a septic system, and the only area approved for a septic field leeched into his streams and creeks. Really?).
The Salatin farm is also in the business of growing meat, for eating, which is not for everyone. Cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and little fluffy bunnies are all grown and loved and cared for so that they’ll brown slowly in a delightful beurre blanc.
One thing is for sure: In a very Hunter S. Thompson sort of way, Joel Salatin and his crew at Polyface Farms is working the land the right way.
