What is the Polyface Stewardship?

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April 29, 2025

Many aspiring farmers long to learn from the Salatin family and their decades of successful and innovative farming.

The "summer stewardship" is the program that we designed and host to make that happen!

I’d like to peel back the curtain for you and give you a peek into what the summer stewardship looks like.

After a two-step interview process, which includes submitting an online application and video, and a two-day in-person working interview, our team is selected and prepares to start work at the farm on May 1^st.

Our stewards come from all different places, backgrounds, skill levels, and work experiences. There is generally a wide spectrum of ages as well.

The most important thing is that you come to Polyface with a heart that is willing to serve those around you and learn all you can!

The stewards work hard under a team of caring leaders who help teach them new skills, organize projects, and oversee the general movement of the farm.

This team of leaders includes 2-4 apprentices who are graduates of the previous summer’s steward group and have spent the winter honing their skills, receiving more small-group mentorship, and learning about leadership.

The day starts early for our steward team as they meet up at the crack of dawn (usually around 6am during the summer) to take care of all the animal chores around the main farm.

Each steward is scheduled into a "chore chart", which gives everyone an equal chance to do each chore and the ownership and continuity to take care of one specific animal chore every day for a week. (click here to learn more about our morning chores)

After chores are done, everyone heads to the Polyface-provided housing to cook breakfast.

Lots of sausage and eggs are consumed by our stewards over the course of a summer!

Once everyone is done breakfasting, the team is divided into groups based on the projects of the day.

On a chicken processing day (which happens about 2 days a week during the summer), most people will help with the processing.

There are also pig and cattle moves, maintenance work, building projects, haymaking, fence builds, and many other jobs that go into daily life on a farm!

Stewards are encouraged to “level up” in various ways as they work. Whether that is driving a tractor because you have never seen a clutch pedal in your life or something more complex, we try to help each member of our team learn new things and keep growing through the course of the summer.

Lots of our learning opportunities include a variety of skills to help facilitate this.

The summer is filled with lots of long days of work (think farming bootcamp), but that isn’t all we do!

We also have several extra educational opportunities, though they vary year to year.

Joel usually gives a few lectures, we have some local farming friends who graciously give us tours, and our leadership team usually takes one morning a week to do hands-on education about using tools, driving vehicles, troubleshooting issues in the field, and more.

After each work day, our on-farm chef provides a delicious meal that everyone sits down and enjoys together in our beautiful pavilion.

It is a beautiful time to just relax and fellowship. Polyface stewards work hard, but they also play hard!

Each team is different, but swimming in the ponds, playing music together on the porch, visiting local attractions, and volleyball and other sports have all been popular.

You may also bump into our stewards if you attend a gathering or tour over the course of the summer, as they are highly involved with our farm hospitality. You will enjoy seeing the smiling faces and getting to ask them about their story.

During the summer's progression, the skill levels of all the stewards progress.

They form a tightly bonded team who play to each other’s strengths and no longer fumble through tasks that are new to them, but instead work with confidence and experience.

The days start to grow shorter and colder, and when September nears its end, it is also time to prepare to say goodbye.

A few of our stewards will go home for a short break and then come back as apprentices; some move on to new jobs and opportunities; some return to family farms with new knowledge.

We are so grateful for the many stewards who have served Polyface over the years and have multiplied all over the country.

As a graduate from the stewardship and apprenticeship myself, I can honestly tell you that the memories of that summer are some of my sweetest, and I made life-long friendships that have been such a blessing in my life.

We are preparing to welcome our crew of summer stewards for 2025 this week, and I couldn’t be more excited for them and all future teams who get to come experience the magic of a Polyface summer.

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.

What is the Polyface Stewardship?

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