The Organic Butcher of McLean Celebrates 20 Years

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October 21, 2025

“We’re a gathering place. On Saturdays when there’s a line out the door, neighbors meet neighbors, or you meet someone new. There’s a positive vibe, everyone seems happy.”

That’s how owner Don Roden describes The Organic Butcher of McLean.

We had a lovely conversation as he shared some memories from his twenty years of experience.

The reward, to him, has always been seeing his customers smile.

Relationships develop over good food and sharing knowledge. “We’re constantly learning from our customers, and they’re learning from us.”

Customers from various parts of the world find their way to the shop in search of something from home that they can’t seem to find locally. Caring enough to take the time to explore and finally identify a particular cut of beef or pork brings the reward of a smile on the customer’s face. And then, that same item can be introduced to another customer for the first time, with a suggestion to try something new from a far-away land. Another smile…

Don’s motivations for establishing The Organic Butcher were to bring back a fading traditional art, provide full service, and offer the most healthful food he could find. He chooses producers who raise animals on pasture with care and attention. Polyface Farm is among them.

One feature that makes The Organic Butcher unique is the transparency built into the store design.

Don explains, “You’re surrounded by the whole operation. When you walk in, you see everything happening. It’s more than just talking with the butcher at the counter. It’s looking over their shoulder and watching someone make our house-made sausage, and someone else making our salsa and corn salad.”

Observing all this activity is educational and entertaining; a sharp contrast to many butcher shops where it all occurs behind closed doors and opaque walls.

This year, The Organic Butcher celebrated its 20th year by staging a festive all-day event on October 18th. There were luscious selections on the smoker, and a chance to meet and chat with vendors and producers.

If you want to visit sometime, their address is

6712 Old Dominion Drive

McLean, VA 22101

You can also find them online by searching for "The Organic Butcher of McLean."

So go for the experience. Who knows? You might meet some of your neighbors there, and you'll definitely eat good food.

May you be deeply nourished,
Susan

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.

The Organic Butcher of McLean Celebrates 20 Years

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Events of The Month

Duplication

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