Sacred Jobs

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posted on

January 23, 2024

Polyface is currently a winter wonderland.

The pond is frozen over, the valleys and hills are dressed in sparkling white snow, and the sun glistens brightly over it all. The pigs and cows are in the barns, cozily bedded down for the cold winter, and we have started feeding hay. We are in the season of long chores and constant tending to the animals.

As we enter this time of throwing hay, filling waterers, washing eggs, and bedding the barns, we remember that every single job is sacred. Our goal is to provide for our animals so they can live happy, healthy, and productive lives and, in turn, provide high-quality and delicious meat and eggs for you- our loyal patrons.

As we tend to our daily tasks, we seek to do it in a way that shows our high regard for the noble work before us. When we do a small task well, we are valuing the bigger picture that each small task is a part of.

This mentality can be applied not only to farming but to all of the noble tasks we are called to do as humans in this world. Your role as mother or father, brother or sister, son, daughter or friend are sacred jobs that we hold. It may feel mundane as everyday jobs tend to feel. Putting a meal on the table for your family, doing the right thing when no one is watching, teaching a new student, washing the dishes, or caring for someone sick may not feel important in the moment. Hand-washing eggs and spreading fresh bedding in the barn certainly doesn’t feel revolutionary, but the important things in life ride on the back of doing these “small” tasks with faithfulness and love.

We are changing the world when we cultivate strong and healthy relationships with those we love or when we leave the Earth better than we found it. Sometimes this change does not happen in big and public ways. Rather, making simple decisions to do the small jobs well brings about those big changes. This is how small tasks find their meaning and show their importance and sacredness.

Here at Polyface, we are making this commitment to you every day: to do the small things with faithfulness and love to serve you. Our team works hard to do our job well whether that be taking on a large forestry project or packing the items that get shipped to your door. But this call does not end with us. We want you to join us. You may not have a farm or even a garden, but I know that you are in a “sacred” role of some sort wherever you are. What “small jobs” are in front of you that you can do with faithfulness today? Remember, every job is sacred.

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.

Sacred Jobs

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Events of The Month

Duplication

Smart Cattle Grazing -- Virtual Farm Tour

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