Resilience

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posted on

July 16, 2025

RESILIENCE

Lots of evenings recently have featured a beautiful heavenly show of thunder and lightning. Beautiful, yes, but also usually preceded by heavy winds and a quick downpour. It reminds me of how crazy weather can be. Each year differs from others. Each day also differs from others. We all joke about our crazy Virginia weather and we wear our hoodies in the morning and our tank tops in the afternoon.

This year is the first year that I have been at Polyface where we have had the creek running into July. It has been an abundant year with plentiful rainfall and fertile grass. Last year however we worked through drought-like symptoms.

The crazy thing about weather is that we have no control over it at all. What we can do is adapt and prepare. We can pivot priorities as needed and set up infrastructure that allows for us to thrive when the unexpected happens.

Lots of farming is learning to be prepared yet also flexible. Farming is about picking up the pieces from a storm and figuring out how to do it better next time.

It is a lot like life, isn’t it? Just like the weather, life can throw you unexpected curve balls. It can bring abundance one year and the next can leave you wondering if there will be enough.

As a farmer, I plan ahead and batten down the hatches when I see heavy winds on the horizon or prepare for frozen water pipes when it dips below freezing in the winter. As a human, I can pick up the phone and check in on my close friends and family, I can plant a garden and source good food to prepare myself for the storms of life.

I am quickly learning that resilience is an essential quality in life. Don’t just ask yourself the question: “Do I have what I need for when a crisis comes?” but also: “Am I the type of person that I need to be for when a crisis comes?”
Being a resilient person is still being your true person in a crisis. What does it take to keep you kind, calm and joyful despite change and loss? You don’t want to turn into a stressed and angry presence as soon as things are upheaved in your life. But this doesn’t just naturally happen. Take three steps back from a crisis and ask yourself, how do I prepare now to be that person then?

Here are some questions to get you started as you contemplate how to be the person you need to be for whatever storms life throws at you:
Do I know what I believe? Am I grounded in the truth? Do I have community around me? People that I love and that love me? How can I now grow those relationships? Do I need to forgive anyone? Is there anything that I need to cut out of my life that is causing me to be unhealthy? What are my values? How am I living them out? Is my lifestyle sustainable and aligned to my values?

There are many other steps we can take to grow into the people we want to be but hopefully this can get you started.

I must confess, I am not naturally inclined to check the weather, I am much more of a take-it-as-it-comes kinda girl. Maybe “fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants” is a more accurate description! But in order to be a good farmer, I have disciplined myself to prepare for weather patterns, checking high and low temperatures for the day and planning ahead for rain and wind. I am not perfect but I had to start where I was and just begin showing up and doing the best I can.

That is all I am encouraging you to do. Give yourself grace, commit and just show up. Don’t let the storms of life have control of you but instead find your footing and press into resilience. We can’t predict the weather outside or life circumstances but we can prepare our hearts for when the storms come!

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.

Resilience

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Events of The Month

Duplication

Smart Cattle Grazing -- Virtual Farm Tour

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