Lingering in Life's Moments

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February 26, 2024

A beaver has made its home near the bridge at the front entrance of Polyface. Rain storms have come and gone and yet, he soldiers on through life, strengthening his dam when it weakens and building additional hubs further upstream.

Many of our staff have enjoyed watching and tracking the beaver's activity, and we often comment about our little friend in everyday conversations.

“Have you noticed that larger tree he has been working on felling?”

“I took a walk up the riverbank and I found where he is starting a new dam!”

“You saw the beaver yesterday? Lucky you!”

Last week, at dusk (one of the prettiest times of day on the farm) I was rolling out the driveway but was stopped by a fellow team member and her two little girls.

“Look! It’s the beaver!” they whispered with excitement. We all stopped for a moment on the bridge, during that golden time of day and watched him quietly. His broad tail wagged back and forth in the water. He swam about gathering small branches and pushing them downstream toward his dam.

We watched with bated breath, enjoying the peace of the moment until finally he swam out of sight. Even then we craned our necks, peering through the growing darkness, to catch one last glimpse of his slicked-down furry back moving through the water.

Slowly we moved on, each of us back to our respective homes. It was time to finish up our little tasks, cook dinner, and prepare for a new week. But I lingered, enjoying the moment of just sitting in nature and seeing the beauty of a healthy ecosystem play out in front of my eyes.

I am so blessed that, in my line of work, I have daily opportunities to take advantage of moments like these. A cardinal graced me with his presence on the porch this morning; last week, while waiting on a trailer to continue chipping branches, I sat and watched the trees move in the wind.

What good is life if you don’t arrest those small moments and remember how glad you are to be alive?

We live in a world where 'fast' and 'efficient' are always elevated. But think of how much you miss when you rush through life. You will miss the beavers, the cardinals, and the trees.

Our purpose in this world is not just to get things done, but rather to live wholehearted lives. Let’s slow down and truly look at the world. Everywhere, there are wonders to behold, beauties to see, and little things to notice if only we have eyes to see.

Where are these moments in your life? I promise you, you do not want to miss them!

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.

Lingering in Life's Moments

More from the blog

Events of The Month

Duplication

Smart Cattle Grazing -- Virtual Farm Tour

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