Polyface Summer Events

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May 5, 2026

While this blog post goes to Polyface Patrons, curated and credentialed by clean food purchases; the farm also offers a platform for info-tainment gatherings throughout the summer. That season is upon us, and I'd like to share with you briefly the options this year. It's a fantastic line-up of education-dense opportunities for you to connect deeper and understand more fully the whys and wherefores of health in all its dimensions.

Learn to Homestead in a Weekend, May 22-23, hosted by Homesteaders of America. This is a dynamic, child-friendly time to get practical self-reliant living advice.*Update* *SOLD OUT*

2. New Biology Experience with Tom Cowan, June 4-6. Co-founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Cowan and cohorts are extreme mavericks in the medical field; Cowan voluntarily gave up his MD license in order to speak uncensored.

3. Two Days of Truth June 12-13 with Dr. Sina McCullough, Dr. Eric Berg, Jeffrey Smith, and others. These are world-renowned speakers and experts on alternative, health, Genetically Modified Organisms, and much more. Unforgettable.

4. Rogue Food Conference, Aug. 14-15, with Dr. Eric Berg, Indiana Delegate Hunter Smith (former Indianapolis Colts superbowl team member) and others digging into the slogan "Circumvention, not Compliance." It's like reliving the Declaration of Independence for two days, all centered around food freedom. Nothing like it in the U.S.

`5. Launching Farmers, Aug. 21-22, hosted by The Stockman Grass Farmer, the world's premier pasture-based livestock publication. Featuring 8 young farmers who came from "I was 20 years old, no land, no money, and am now fulltime farming at 40 without government grants," this is probably the most profound agriculture gathering in the nation.

6. Brownstone Summit, Aug. 28-29, hosted by the Brownstone Institute and its indomitable founder Jeffrey Tucker, perhaps the most articulate proponent of small government and authentic market economics. The interview-speaker format is unique and incredibly entertaining.

7. Chelsea Green Publishing, Author Weekend. Sept. 25-26, hosted by Chelsea Green Publishing, perhaps the longest-reigning environmental and culturally-alternative book publisher in the world. You can meet your favorite authors and hobnob with the intelligentsia of positive cultural change. If you have a love for the written word and challenging conventional thinking, this is a must-come.

You can see more about these by going to our events page at ww.polyfacefarms.com/partner-events. Oh, Polyface does the food for all these events and that is worth coming for by itself. I hope something here floats your boat and you'll pick at least one event to bask in a Polyface experience this season. With May here and thinking about your summer activities, one of these (or two, ha!) will make this season one of your most rewarding. We look forward to seeing you.

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.

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