A New Year

written by

posted on

January 14, 2025

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here on the farm, we're reeling from the equivalent of a run on the bank. A combination of things created a run on our inventory after mid-season, 2024.

Unlike industrial food systems, we don't go out and buy inventory in the market when our inventory runs low. We grow our animals, harvest them, store them, and it's a seasonal cycle that has a replenishment lag if we misjudge.

At Polyface, we try to plan to grow enough animals to meet the market, but not too much over that. Feeding eggs to pigs is expensive. We've done that.

As 2024 moved into late summer, we realized we had underestimated our market. In a perfect world, we'd hit our inventory expectations on the nose, every time. But this isn't a perfect world.

I'm here to explain, in full transparency, how we got into a deficit inventory.

Be assured that the 2025 season will see some major production increases to respond to this exciting new reality.

So here we go, three things.

First, our new website.

Throughout 2023, we invested in revamping our website to make it more intuitive, to flow better, and to capture more precisely all the different faces of Polyface. We had no idea how that investment would pay off.

Once those improvements were made, a trickle of efficiency turned into a gusher.

Second, MAHA.

MAHA is Robert F. Kennedy Jr's (known as RFK Jr) movement to "Make America Healthy Again".

The media, podcasts, and conversations surrounding the MAHA agenda created an unprecedented interest in everything health-related, especially the "unorthodox". People found us.

The entire alternative health community, from crunchy moms to herbalists to naturopaths to functional medicine doctors to acupuncturists and iridologists is enjoying new interest like never before.

On the heels of Covid, the quest to bolster immune function awakened a new cultural search for wellness. People are asking: What is wellness? How do I stay well?

The MAHA discussion is now launched in earnest, and it's not over by a long shot. At Polyface, we did not foresee the magnitude of this discussion nor the effect it would have on our late summer sales.

Third, reputation and podcasts.

I'm lumping these together because they are absolutely related. The podcast phenomenon, or what is called non-mainstream media, is taking over Americans' informational conduit.

Joe Rogan's podcast reaches millions more people than all the mainstream TV networks combined.

RFK Jr. told a funny story about something he'd seen on TV news and his son asked, totally serious, "Dad, is there news on TV?" For real. People under 40 don't get their information from TV.

The Polyface brand is now a sought-after voice in the podcast world.

Often the podcast hosts ask "Where can people get your stuff?" The answer is simple: "Polyfacefarm.com."

Suddenly, we see a bump in sales.

Here's a Polyface fact:

Our "production pipeline" is long. This is the time it takes to start with a young animal and end with food on the shelves or the website for you.

For beef it takes three years. Pigs are nearly a year. Chickens are about four months old.

Right now, we're planning all the animals we'll raise for all of 2025.

The fastest item we can "restock" is broilers (meat chickens). They grow the fastest once spring arrives. Second is pork and third is beef.

We have the capacity to increase everything except beef. (And we're continuing to work on the issue: enough land to raise them.)

Both over- and under-inventory are problematic, so it's a delicate balance. Be assured we are doing everything in our power to adjust; to eliminate disappointment without creating an overage problem.

Thank you for hanging in there with us. This is a good opportunity to try something perhaps you haven't used before. We always have some things; just not everything at every moment.

Be adventuresome and try a new cut, a new product. You might be surprised what a joy it is to add it to your culinary portfolio. Feel free to reach out to our team if you need ideas for how to use one of our meats. We have so many cooks among us.

Again, HAPPY NEW YEAR! Thank you for your loyalty and faith in us. Polyface is working hard to earn and keep your trust.

Blessings to you and yours in the coming year.

-Joel

inventory

methods

beef

Pork

Chicken

poultry

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.

A New Year

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