New Land

             One of our goals here at Polyface is to have the most informed patrons in the world.  Being ignorant isn't helpful; we want you to be confident in your understanding about things 95 percent of Americans don't have a clue about.
               

                 Omnivores have a completely different digestive system than herbivores.  In nature, omnivores tend to be the sanitation crew.  Birds and pigs are both omnivores.  Cows, sheep, and rabbits are all herbivores.

      As a result of their different ecological roles, you could say the omnivores hitch their wagon to herbivores.  While herbivores are limited to forage availability, omnivores are limited to seeds, bugs, and worms.  For them, grass, forbs, and herbs are a tonic rather than the main diet--like leafy greens are to humans.  People can't survive on lettuce; we need starch and protein (seeds and animals--not worms and bugs, but meat, eggs, and dairy).

                  With the advent of mechanical planting, harvesting, and distribution, seeds (grains) have become incredibly cheap compared to historic prices.  As a result, omnivores, who were limited by their scavenging and sanitation duties, have exploded as part of the diet in modern times.

                  Here at Polyface, we can increase omnivores rapidly by simply acquiring more seeds (grains).  But the herbivores are a different story, and you are seeing this play out right now with our shortage of grass-finished beef.  Our beef production is limited by the grass we can grow; you can't buy in grass.  But you can buy in grains.  Hence, the conundrum to meet the demand for beef versus the simplicity of meeting the demand for poultry and pork.

                  Most businesses in this position would simply augment their home-grown supply with beef from other growers.  But we've spent too many years filling in all the blanks for world class grass finished beef to entrust our quality to others.  As a result, expansion, if it is going to happen, depends on being able to manage additional pasture.

                  I'm thrilled, grateful, and blessed to announce that additional acreage has come our way over the winter.  The bulk of it is our adjacent neighbor to the north.  When you come to our house from Staunton and drive along the cliff, it's the property to your right as you come off the hill. The owners approached us in January about managing it; we've signed a lease effective April 1.

                  What does this mean in practical terms?  It means we can increase our beef availability by perhaps 100 animals, which I'm sure will make many of you happy.  The other thing it means is we're in full-scale development mode.  And here's the part where you'll be far more educated than the average bear.

                  Our property development platform stands on three legs:  access, water, control.  Over the next month, we'll be fixing a badly eroded lane through the middle of the property and re-opening a legacy lane that's overgrown and hardly detectable anymore.  This morning, I placed pink survey ribbons along a fence line we'll put in--just a single strand of electric fence--to keep the cows off the steep banks.  This will be the first exclusion on those fragile banks in 100 years.  Those steep hillsides will gradually revert to forest.

                  We'll also put an electric fence along both sides of the lane to enable one person to move the herd from one end of the property to the other.  Part of the access development will no doubt include gouging out a couple of small ponds to slow down water runoff, create some riparian zones, and give us fill to elevate the lane through small depressions.

                  Now for water.  Because we move our cows every day from paddock to paddock, water availability all around the property is essential.  We will tie into our gravity-based water system and simply extend our home-farm water lines throughout this property.  That will entail knifing in more than a mile of inch-and-a-quarter black plastic pipe and installing a valve access about every 100 yards along the lane.  Eventually we may build another pond at higher elevation to service this property independently.

                  As a historical perspective, that property was part of the original Polyface hub.  Our farmhouse was built in 1790 by a man named Lewis Shuey.  It remained in that family until 1890, when it was broken up five ways in a family inheritance; three boys and two girls.  The two girls eventually married and their two pieces joined two of the brothers' pieces.  At that point, the three brothers owned the five parcels.

                  One brother lost his two pieces--we don't know all the details--and it was sold at a sheriff's sale at the county courthouse in about 1914.  Those two pieces were the first to pass out of the family and those two pieces were in the center of the original property.  One brother held onto the two pieces on the north and another the one bigger piece to the south.

                  Eventually, the big south piece was sold out of the family in about 1950.  The middle two pieces were sold several times before my Mom and Dad purchased them in 1961.  The neighbor who owned the southern piece sold it to us in December, 2020, which put three of the original pieces back together.  The northern two pieces are still owned by descendants of the original Shuey family, but they have now asked us to manage it, which puts all five original pieces back together under one control.  We feel like part of something much bigger than ourselves to see how we've been a part of these pieces coming back together.  Enough history; hope it was interesting.

                  This infrastructure development on the new land is what makes managing the pastures with moving, mobbing, and mowing (like the bison) efficient.  Most people think moving cows every day to a new paddock is impossibly laborious, but with the proper access, water, and control (fencing) it takes only a few minutes a day.  That's the secret to ecologically-enhancing grazing management

               Now, when someone asks you about the land management recipe for Polyface beef, you know the answer:  access, water, control.  If you can come for a farm tour and see it, please do.  More beef should be available within the next year.