3 Reasons we love SPRING

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March 28, 2024

Spring is always a sweet time of year. The trees start budding, the grass starts growing, the peepers start peeping and the days get warmer and longer. The world starts to wake up after the cold, still days of winter. There are many reasons to love this special time of year, but I would like to share with you three reasons we love spring at Polyface.

1.) Compost!

Here at Polyface, we are grass farmers, which means that during the spring, when the fields start to turn a vibrant green, we all start to get excited. New energy returns to the farm as we start the process of transitioning our animals from their cozy deep bedding of winter to the sunny pastures. As the animals start their spring grazing, the hoop houses and barns where our chickens, pigs, and cattle were during the winter get emptied and we spread the beautiful compost that they left behind on our fields. Spring is the perfect time to do this with the spring rain soaking all of the nutrients down into the soil.

Our cows are on deep bedding all winter and when they come out of the barn, the pigs then move in to aerate (we call it pigaerating) and stir it all around for us. We incentivize them by spreading a layer of whole corn on every third layer of bedding. As the pigs dig for the corn, they simultaneously get our compost ready for us!

The bedding from the chickens can get spread on the fields immediately. We like to spread compost on fields where we will be making hay or areas that need the extra boost of nutrients. As our hoop houses empty out and the compost gets spread, the space can then be used on the farm for fertile gardens, summer storage or as space to host our many guests!

2.) Baby Animals!

Spring also begins our growing season. With the warmer weather, we are able to start raising our broiler chickens. In preparation for beginning our on-farm processing in May, we receive our first chicks in March. If you visit Polyface right now, you will find full brooders with both baby broiler chickens and young pullets who will grow to be our laying hens. Soon we will have young turkey poults too. We love watching our baby chicks grow!

Additionally, spring is when our cows are calving! Every year, the cycle continues as we finish off some of our fat cows and add new calves to the herd. During calving season (which is a period where all our cows are “due” to give birth), we check the cows closely, tagging any new calves and keeping track of the cow/calf pairs. These pairs will be together until the fall when the calves are weaned. Every year it excites us to see our herd grow with all these new additions and, bonus, they are pretty cute!!

3.) Inspiration!

Polyface is open all year long for visitors but summer is when we host the majority of our large gatherings and our lunatic farm tours. The springtime is when we start to prepare ourselves for the great task of inspiring others around us. Every spring, we gather as a team for a “season kick-off” meeting where we discuss changes, big events, and enjoy fellowship as a farm family. But most important is our vision to inspire people. We hope that if you interact with us in any way, whether you receive our food for your family, or visit the farm, you too will catch a little bit of that Polyface magic.

Spring is an invigorating time of year for these reasons and more. As new life blooms and grows all around us, may you feel the blessing of this lovely time of year!

Events of The Month

Check out upcoming events on the farm this month!

Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

3 Reasons we love SPRING

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Events of The Month

Duplication

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