Top 3 Ways to Save

written by

Hannah Hale

posted on

January 7, 2025

Happy New Year!

We're already a week into 2025, and I just wanted to check in. I'd love to hear from you!

For the new year, I decided to share my top 3 ways to get the best value from us (your farm!) this year.

So here we go:

#1. Join our "Subscribe and Save" program for free.

With every subscription order, you'll automatically save 5% right away!

This gives you the best prices available from us for UPS delivery and Curbside Pickup orders. Plus, it locks you in for priority inventory on future orders. Just keep your favorite items on your recurring subscription, and we'll do our best to get you those items first.

To start saving, just select "Subscribe" next time you check out.

You can still change your order before it renews and can even skip orders if needed. Learn More

#2. Buy "bundles".

A chest or upright deep-freezer is an inexpensive investment for taking advantage of the savings we offer through our bundles.

My favorites are our Chicken Bundle, All American Bundle, and our Breakfast Sausage Bundle. (note: Chicken Bundles are only available seasonally, as supplies last. When you see them online, take advantage!)

Even a small deep freezer will hold 1-2 bundles, and you'll save $$.

#3. EARN money from Polyface!

We've made it possible for you to earn $10 for every friend who places their first order.

Share your love for Polyface (and your unique link) and we'll give you AND your friend bucks to use. Your friend gets a $10 credit automatically applied to their account. You get a $10 'Thank you' credit applied to your account when they place their first order.

To find your code, make sure you're logged into your Polyface account, then click "My Account" in the top right hand corner of the site. From there, click "Referrals" and you'll see your custom link to share. You can also keep track of your earnings.

I hope these tips help you feel more confident in choosing Polyface this year.

-Hannah

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.

Top 3 Ways to Save

More from the blog

Events of The Month

Duplication

Smart Cattle Grazing -- Virtual Farm Tour

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Education

Polyface Farms

Healing the land one bite at a time!