Do It With What You Have

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posted on

March 24, 2026

The Salatin family has inspired all of us in many ways. Although most of you know Joel the most from his extensive speaking and writing, the whole Salatin family are rooted and loving people.

One of the things I admire about their story is the creativity and resourcefulness which caused Polyface to grow from a small family farm to the inspirational place it is today, feeding hundreds of families all over the country quality, nutrient dense food.

When the Salatins moved to Augusta County, Virginia they didn’t have much, but what they did have (most importantly being their minds and imaginations) they used to implement, what at the time seemed like crazy farming practices. Rotating cows and chickens? Not buying in fertilizer but using compost and animal manure? Building ponds? If you have visited Polyface, you can see that all that work paid off with lush pastures and abundance all around.

We live in a world that tells us that to get to what we want, we need _______ (fill in the blank). This is what marketing is based off of. Every industry will tell you what you need to buy or obtain in order to get to your goals. Farming is not exempt from this and that is why I find it so refreshing to see the Salatin family using their brains to get the job done.

For sure, sometimes we need extra resources in order to complete tasks but let’s not rule out what some creativity and hard work can accomplish. What happens when you look at a bare patch of ground and instead of spending lots of money to buy in fertilizer and machinery to apply it, you decide to take your cow and chickens and let it do the job for you?

Instead of letting money fix our problems by just buying things to help, what if we looked around at what resources were already available to us and developed creative, problem-solving skills?

The truth is that there are so many things available to us at all times that we don’t even think about. For example, gravity! One of my favorite ingenious solutions that the Salatins have set up on their farm is their gravity fed water system. Instead of drilling wells all over the property, Polyface has several ponds up on the mountain which catch rainwater and run off (also given to us by nature) and using gravity, some pipe and fittings, we have water for our animals!

On average, we see thousands of ads in a day, all telling us to get something new. But I already have so much! Instead of chasing more, I can use and enjoy what I already have. This goes beyond problem solving and using what you have to make things work; this changes my heart posture to one of gratefulness, contentment and peace.

Whether you are building a chicken coop or cooking a meal, starting up a farm or deciding on your fall wardrobe, I hope that you can get creative, look around, see with new eyes what you already have available to you and do it with what you have.

~Priscilla Bower

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.

Do It With What You Have

More from the blog

Events of The Month

Duplication

Smart Cattle Grazing -- Virtual Farm Tour

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Polyface Farms

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