Gifts from Polyface

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November 25, 2025

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I decided to list several reasons that I am grateful for Polyface and my experiences here. What would you add to the list?

-The many kindred friendships I have found.

Finding people who hold the same values and are on the same path as me has been invaluable. Not to mention the many core memories I have made in working long days on the farm together with these people and, of course, having fun too! Polyface draws so many quality people who will be friends for life.

-The mouth-watering food.

You haven’t had bacon until you have had Polyface bacon! There are some cuts of meat that I never had until trying them at Polyface, and now they are favorites. Pork backbone and beef shank are two of my best finds.

We eat a lot at Polyface, often together as a team; those meals have been sweet times of fellowship but also thoroughly delicious. Our ground beef, meat sticks, and breakfast links have been the basis of quick meals that have given me energy on long days.

-The countless valuable skills I was taught.

Only at Polyface can you start out as a complete newbie and be coached with love and patience until you are cutting up chicken like a pro, troubleshooting a well pump out in the field, and driving a tractor.

Through the stewardship and apprenticeship program, I was given training to learn things I had never even thought of trying before. I now have a solid list of skills in which I am competent, and which I can carry with me through life.

-The opportunity to fail in a loving environment.

To piggyback off of my last point, those skills didn’t always come naturally or easily. I can come up with a list (even longer than the new skills list) of times I messed up, broke something, made a bad decision, etc.

But at Polyface, I was also taught crucial leadership skills: how to own my decisions, fail honestly, and then fix it. I haven’t just learned valuable farm skills, but life skills and character that will impact me forever.

-Time and repetition with a large variety of animals.

Through Polyface, I was able to learn grazing, animal husbandry, sorting animals, and taking birds from chick days to the dinner table. By opening up their farm for others to learn, the Salatins have created a "microwave effect" of learning farming. Rather than starting slow and adding a cow here, a pig there into a homestead system, I was able to intuitively learn all their animal systems from ruminants to poultry.

-The opportunity to network and meet the best of the best.

Polyface hosts events and visitors all the time. Through participating in that hospitality, I have been able to meet so many interesting people who are doing great things in this world. I have been able to listen to amazing speakers and hear workshops, talks, testimonies, and personal stories that have challenged me and given me resources to live out my own story.

-The moments of beauty curated from the beautiful farm.

If you have visited, you know that Polyface is a beautiful place. Gazing at an open sky full of stars after catching chickens in the dark, or taking in the mountain view after moving cows, makes my soul expand.

Our souls were made for beauty, and the wildflowers, native grasses, mountain laurel, sunsets and sunrises, wildlife, and ponds are the perfect spot to receive those little gifts.

-The fun that was had.

Whether it was playing volleyball after a team dinner or stacking hay bales in the barn, the many moments of joy have created beautiful memories in my mind that I will never forget.

-An example to follow.

Most importantly, at Polyface, I was given an example of how to live a life of joy, integrity, and contentment.

I have seen a commitment to excellence, a solid work ethic, a sense of adventure, curiosity, and inventiveness lived out in the lives of those who have led me. Not only was I taught how to farm, but also how to live well, to love the land and those around you, and how to be a good neighbor.

This list could continue on and on, but I shall bring it to a landing here and ask you to take a moment to reflect.

How has Polyface impacted your life? What are some of the gifts you have received by being a part of our community? It may look different for everyone, but we would love to know what Polyface has meant to your life.

Don't ever forget: we are thankful for you, too!

Priscilla

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.

Gifts from Polyface

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