Choosing Your Farmers

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posted on

August 26, 2025

Here at Polyface, we believe transparency is the cornerstone of trust. Whether you're a long-time follower/supporter or just discovering our farm, we're glad you're here. Whether you're a current patron or just interested in learning more, we hope we can help.

We're firm believers in folks finding a food treasure map made up of farmers whom you know and trust; farmers you can have access to and get to know.

Today, I decided to offer 10 questions (plus our answers) to help you decide where to buy your food!

These are questions we either hear often or believe are important in choosing a farmer.

Can I visit your farm?

Yes! We welcome visitors and have a 24/7/365 open-door policy. In fact, we encourage people to come and see how and where their food is produced.

From self-guided tours to in-depth educational experiences and large events, we offer several ways to explore the farm. Keep an eye on our website or social media for upcoming events and details.

Do you grow or raise everything you sell?

Everything we sell is raised or produced right here on the farm or in partnership with nearby farms that meet our standards. We believe in short, transparent supply chains. That means you’re not only buying food—you’re investing in a local, regenerative system you can see and trust. Even though we trust them and they meet our standards, we clearly label all products that are not grown by us, so that you can check out those small businesses for yourself.

What is the mission of Polyface Farm?

Our mission is to heal the land, nourish people, and build community through regenerative farming. You can read our full mission statement and guiding principles on our website!

We strive to model a sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture—one that prioritizes soil health, animal welfare, and local food economies; that mimics nature and encourages ecosystems. We want to inspire others to reconnect with the land and take control of their food choices.

How are your animals treated?

We raise our animals with the utmost respect and care for their individual uniqueness and original design. Our animals are rotated frequently on fresh pasture, which lets them express their natural behaviors. Chickens scratch, pigs root, and cows graze—all in clean, open-air environments. We don’t use confinement systems or subject our animals to unnecessary stress. Happy animals are essential to healthy ecosystems and nutritious food.

What do you feed your animals?

Our animals eat what nature intended. Cows and sheep are 100% grass-fed. Chickens and pigs are given non-GMO grain supplements but spend their days foraging outdoors on pasture or in wooded areas. This diverse, natural diet produces healthier animals—and healthier food for you. You can find detailed breakdowns of how we raise our animals in the older posts on our blog. Have fun exploring and learning more.

Is your meat organic?

We are not USDA certified organic. We like to call ourselves "Beyond Organic" because our practices exceed 'organic' standards in many ways. We don't use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or GMO's. Our animals live on pasture. We do not use vaccines or antibiotics. You can read more about this in our blog post "Why is Polyface not Organic?"

How do your farming practices support the environment?

Everything we do is centered around regenerative agriculture. By rotating animals, composting manure, and avoiding chemicals, we improve soil health, build biodiversity, and reduce carbon emissions. Our goal isn’t just sustainability—it’s restoration. We want to leave the land better than we found it.

How do customers purchase your products?

We make it easy to buy directly from us. Customers can:

Visit our on-farm store

Join our neighborhood delivery clubs across the region

Order for convenient UPS delivery to your door across the contiguous USA.

Find our products in retail stores in select areas of Virginia

What factors affect your pricing?

Our prices reflect the true cost of ethical, regenerative farming. That includes fair wages, humane animal care, and environmental stewardship. We don’t cut corners to compete with industrial prices to make more, faster, cheaper, but we do everything we can to stay affordable while maintaining quality. One of our guiding principles is that quality must always go up. Think of it as an investment in your health, your community, and the planet.

Can I learn more?

We’re here to help! We have educational events, this blog, books, and you can find tons of Youtube videos about us because we're not hiding or patenting what we do.

If you have questions, feel free to email us anytime! You can find the best person to answer your questions on our contact page.

You can also call the farm directly. (Please remember that we are a working farm first and foremost. Our store/phone hours are limited because of our busy schedules. We ask that you leave a message and be patient with us.)

You can visit us whenever you'd like to talk to our team at the farm store or during events where you'll find us all in matching shirts.

We love connecting with people who care about food, farming, and the future.

Polyface exists because people like you believe there’s a better way to farm—and eat. Thank you for your curiosity, your support, and your willingness to ask questions. Write these questions down and save them for future use as you build your own food treasure map.

Blessings,

Hannah

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.

Choosing Your Farmers

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Duplication

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