The GIFT of Limitations

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March 25, 2025

As the weather warms up, new energy seems to just vibrate through the air.

The seasons change in nature, as well as in life.

As I have navigated different changes in my personal life, I have been reminded of how important it is to learn to embrace the limitations set for me.

This isn’t a message that is comfortable or easy to hear, at least not for me.

In a world that is constantly moving, with businesses that are open 24/7, travel available anywhere in the world, and constant news and information at our fingertips, it can be easy to forget that we are, in fact, human and not meant to be constantly busy and on the move.

There are so many things in our lives that give us natural limits: our need for sleep, food, water, relationships, and rest.

Now there are options to try to circumvent our natural need for these limits!

Did you stay up all night? No problem. Instead of sleep, try an energy drink!

Is your body struggling to fight off an infection? There's no need to rest and replenish your body with broth or a good cup of tea if you have over-the-counter drugs that will keep you going.

What about your need to do life within a community and rely on other people? You know what, it is simpler to just keep your friends on social media and not show the true you. It takes too much work to be vulnerable.

However, as much as our modern world likes to take the “fix it” mentality when it comes to our needs in life, embracing our limits allows us to savor our lives.

Instead of constantly pushing ourselves to the brink of our capabilities, we can learn how to stop when we reach our limits and live out of a place of rejuvenation instead of weariness.

Let me give you the permission to not do it all.

You don’t have to.

You were not made to do it all!

There are seasons where life is going to be full and you are going to be tired.

There will also be seasons of rest. Both are good, natural, and necessary seasons of your life!

The world around us also has limits.

In the world of Amazon, most things are available at the click of a button.

But remember that nature doesn’t work like that.

Trees don’t grow in a day, gardens can’t be planted year-round (in most places), and animals go through natural rhythms of reproducing, working, and hibernating as part of their life cycles.

It is easy for me to see these patterns at work in the world as a farmer. As someone who benefits from and supports local farms, I know you see them too.

At Polyface, we try to embrace the limits put around us, even when it can be frustrating.

Chickens go through molt cycles and don’t lay quite as many eggs in the winter.

Cows need a certain number of months to put on the weight to "finish out", so sometimes we will run out of certain beef cuts.

The grass has to regrow before it is grazed again. (That's one reason we only raise chickens and turkeys seasonally.)

If you are like me, embracing the limits in the world and my own body can be hard and can test our patience. Especially when the world guilts you for not doing it all.

Here are some simple ideas to help you learn to love the gift of limitations in life:

(Feel free to add to this list and let us know your ideas!)

- Prioritize getting good sleep every night. You may have to say 'no' to some social commitments to make this possible.

- Take a “Sabbath” day. One day each week, commit to not working your job (turn off your phone or computer if needed) and engage in restful activities before resetting for the next week.

- Meal plan! When you don’t think through meals, it can be easy to slip into unhealthy habits It doesn’t have to be fancy but think ahead and plan what meat you need to thaw out or bake a loaf of bread, etc.

- Enjoy each season in nature. Slow down and enjoy the world around you. Plan a trip to a lake in the summer or go gather greenery to decorate your house in the winter. Enjoy a starry night or a sunset whenever warm enough.

- Evaluate what a “human-sized” portion of work looks like in your job. Commit to not constantly pushing yourself to go over that. Set up good work/life boundaries to reflect your limitations.

- Decide what a healthy dose of world news looks like for you. We definitely want to be engaged in the world around us, but remember that our forefathers only knew the burdens of the world directly around them. We weren’t meant to carry the weight of the world.

- Pinpoint a couple of relationships (family, spouse, friend) that you could pour time into growing. Remember: you weren’t meant to go through life alone and taking care of everything solo. Accept help and grace from others.

BONUS IDEA: Each month of the year, pick a different seasonal and local food to integrate into your diet for the month. Learn to cook it in different ways.

Be encouraged. I hope this has shown you that the limitations in life, whether in our bodies or the world around us, are truly a gift and not something we need to fight!

Blessings,

Priscilla

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.

The GIFT of Limitations

Here are some simple ideas to help you learn to love the gift of limitations in life:

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