Short of Turkeys and Beef

For the first time in many years, we’ll be short of turkeys for Thanksgiving.  Consistent with our policy of full transparency, here is why.  And we’ve been short of beef now for some time.  The underlying theme of this explanation is to inform you completely about why and what we’re doing about it. Unlike many businesses, we don’t call up other outfits to supplement ours when we’re short.  We figure out how to produce more and until then, simply run behind. Because of that, when we explore new markets, we can’t adjust our inventory instantaneously.We’ve had a couple of incredibly exciting market developments this year.  We’ve always tried to experiment with new opportunities when markets request product.  You never know which ones will be long term, short term, positive, or negative.  Over the years, we’ve given away turkeys when we overproduced due to assuming a certain market opportunity would come through; that’s not financially viable.  As a result, we’re pretty careful about expansion. Three years ago, a large corporation in Virginia asked us to supply turkeys and Christmas hams to their 300 employees.  We had no idea they would hang with us this long, but here they are, happy and showing unbelievable loyalty.  We’ve been reluctant to count on them simply because these kinds of things normally don’t last.  But isn’t it exciting and even exhilarating that a big company is buying our kind of turkeys and hams for their employees? The other thing that developed—and these things develop slowly—was Azure Standard asked us to supply them with 1,000 turkeys as a trial to see if their customer base would like them.  By the time that deal was formalized, we were too late to order more turkeys and did not have the full number for them, but we we did the best we could.  Some of you who are Azure Standard customers will no doubt see our turkeys pop up on their sales platform. When an engine going somewhere wants to hook to us, we always try to at least collaborate in an experiment.  That’s where we are; if all are happy, this could be an extremely positive strategic client for us in the future. In the same way, we’ve been contacted by a new internet marketing outfit wanting some of our beef.  We’ve agreed to let them have five in 2027.  We’re hoping ongoing discussions will lead them to carry our poultry and pork as well—right now they’re only beef. None of this is about building an empire.  It is about collaborating with the cutting edge of authentic food and circumventing Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Pharma.  Innovation comes in many ways.  Polyface perhaps leads the world in the production element.  But processing, marketing, and distribution are also undergoing innovation and staying relevant is a daily objective.  That some of the most creative significant players in the integrity food movement are asking us to play with them is wonderful.  They could just handle industrial organic meat poultry, which doesn’t see pasture and doesn’t enjoy the happiness context of Polyface livestock. But they’re talking to us, and that’s awesome. All innovation carries a ragged edge as it develops, refines, and hopefully becomes efficient over time.  Thank you for indulging us the freedom to explore these new venues and to collaborate with some of the best players in the good food movement.  As you can imagine, growing and experimenting create their own sore muscles.  Being short is not fun for either of us, but be assured it’s not because our animals are sick or we’re getting tired of being farmers. You can laugh at that. It’s because, true to our history, we are committed to putting food worth eating on plates held by friends.  We count you as friends; that’s why we’re taking you on this little explanation behind the curtain.  Hang in there and thank you, thank you for your loyalty and patronage.

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Speaking the Unspeakable

          All of us encounter taboo topics, going where angels fear to tread, and speaking the unspeakable.  These cliches capture the dialogue land mines we tend to avoid because most of us have a bias toward self-preservation.                   Today, I'm going into that space because we've had a flurry of agriculture activity in the news.  From President Trump's executive order in favor of regenerative agriculture to the opposite elevating the herbicide glyphosate to national security status to last week's decision to import below-market value lean ground beef product to then musing about reducing regulations on farmers processing their animals, we've seen all sorts of perceptions bandied about.                   Without getting into the politics of any of these things, here is the unspeakable truth:  bad farming exists and good farming exists.  There, I said it.  The conventional cultural perspective is that farmers are farmers and farming is farming.  It's an "all for one," and "one for all" Disney idea that all farming and farmers are in this together.                   To be fully transparent, as recently as a couple of months ago I used the term "bad farmers" and "good farmers."  An astute and charitable friend pulled me aside to critique those phrases and suggest I only use "good farming" and "bad farming" in order to honor to not bag people.  Fair enough.                    I'm now using only "bad farming" and "good farming."  The reason this matters is because for decades now, nearly all government subsidies, grants, insurance, and incentives have gone to bad farming.  This is why, for all the billions of annual federal expenditures, farms keep going downhill economically, ecologically, and emotionally.                   Of all the controversial things I've said about farming, by far and away the one that receives the most pushback is when I say bad farming exists.  The conventional industrial complex hates the idea.  Stink up the neighborhood?  "We're just farmers."  Pollute the groundwater?  "We're just farmers."  Dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico due to chemical runoff in the Mississippi?  "We're just farmers."                   With no distinction allowed in the discussion, farming that destroys soil, pollutes the water, desertifies the landscape, produces pathogen-laden food, and disrespects animal behavior gets to ride the emotional equity coat-tails of good farming.  As a culture, we should defund bad farming, both publicly and privately.                   Farm protocols that destroy pollinators, view wildlife as inherently detrimental, and care not a whit about earthworm health are absolutely a national liability whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not. What are the traits of good farming?  Here are some:                   1.  Build healthy soil.                   2.  Honor and respect biology, both plants and animals.                   3.  Prohibit poisons.                   4.  Increase pollinators.                   5.  Build immunological function.                   6.  Increase landscape hydration.                   7.  Smell good.                   8.  Look beautiful.                   9.  Operated by happy people.                   10.  Interact positively with neighbors.                   These are principles we try to honor every day here at Polyface, and your patronage enables us to continue pursuing these objectives.  The fact that our farm has a 24/7/365 open door policy for anyone to come at anytime from anywhere to see anything unannounced confirms a transparency persona that leads to trust.  If you haven't taken us up on this visit invitation, please do.                   When you look at the above list and think about what most people think about a farm environment, you won't find a single one of those items at a conventional chemical industrial outfit.  That's sad but it's also tragic.  It matters how a farm operates.  It matters how animals get treated.  It matters whether the farmer is happy or frustrated.  Farming protocols determine these elements; hence, bad farming and good farming.                   The term regenerative farming is long and hard and not comprehensive.  Why don't we just change the verbiage and call it good farming?  I'm not embarrassed or afraid to say I practice good farming.  And you should not be afraid to say you patronize good farming.  Our farm family is indeed in this together, and it's all about good farming, good food.                   Don't apologize for saying you buy food from good farming instead of bad farming.  Talk about a conversation starter.  Boy howdy.  That'll turn some heads.  But you might just educate someone.  Speaking the unspeakable is often the first step to waking folks up who are asleep at the wheel.  Look in your refrigerator.  Look in the pantry.  What items come from good farming and which ones come from bad farming?                   Go ahead; make the distinction.  And dare bad farming to defend itself.  Speaking the unspeakable often leads to someone trying to defend the indefensible.  Thank you for being the change we all want to see.

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Grass-Fed vs. Grass-Finished

Do cows NEED grains and supplimental feed?

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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.

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Screwworm

In light of the current screwworm outbreak occurring in the US; Joel shares his valuable wisdom on screwworm, devastating diseases, and the Polyface response.

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Seasonal Timings

Joel's thoughts on the seasonal work on a farm, haymaking, and gracefully submitting to nature's timing.

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Polyface Summer Events

Joel gives us the run-down on Summer EVENTS at the farm!

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New Land

Exciting news at Polyface!

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Forage Diversity

What's the common denominators for the most balanced and heaviest load of nutrients in beef? Breed? Climate? Age? Joel breaks it down.

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Vibrant Immunity

Cliff's Notes on the Polyface animal health strategy.

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Assembling A Team

Another peek behind the curtain of Polyface...Our single biggest activity of each year.

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All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together.  Which brings me to my thought this month:  it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation.  I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart.   We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food.  Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things.  They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state.  Then they put all these pieces together and call it food.  But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons.   First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm.  Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments:  water, land, and forest.   For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind.  The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc."  It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted:  "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces."  Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals.   As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them.  The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies.  We use pigs to aerate compost.  Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism.  "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud.  He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied:  "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate."   Folks, I had not prepped him for that question.  When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion.  They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills.  Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity."  She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach.  This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do.  It's that simple.   Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything.  You can't just eat well and not exercise.  You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight.  Hydration.  Sleep.  Stress.  Forgiveness.  Gratitude.  It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together.  Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price.   And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome.  We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface.  Thank you. Joel

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