Polyface Farm - Practices and Background

Practices and Background

Polyface maintains a “local” attitude towards their products. Salatin encourages people to buy locally to save small businesses. Salatin believes it is advantageous for consumers when they know their farmers and where their food comes from.

Salatin says that his Christian faith informs the way he raises and slaughters the animals on his 500-acre (2.0 km2) farm. He sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love, and believes his method is to honor that of God. Salatin is quoted in the book The Omnivore's Dilemma (p.331) as justifying the killing of non-human animals because "people have a soul, animals don't."

Salatin bases his farm's ecosystem on the principle of observing animals' activities in nature and emulating those conditions as closely as possible. Salatin grazes his cattle outdoors within small pastures enclosed by electrified fencing that is easily and daily moved at 4pm in an established rotational grazing system. Animal manure fertilizes the pastures and enables Polyface Farm to graze about four times as many cattle as on a conventional farm, thus also saving feed costs. The small size of the pastures forces the cattle to 'mob stock'-to eat all the grass.

Polyface raises pastured meat chickens, egg layers, pigs, turkeys, and rabbits. The diversity in production better utilizes the grass, breaks pathogen cycles, and creates multiple income streams. The meat chickens are housed in portable field shelters that are moved daily to a fresh "salad bar" of new grass and away from yesterday's droppings. All manure is distributed by the chickens directly onto the field. His egg-laying chickens are housed in mobile trailer-style coops that follow four days after the cattle, when flies in the manure are pupating; the chickens get 15% of their feed from this. While scratching for pupae, the chickens also distribute the cow manure across the field.

Salatin feels that "if you smell manure, you are smelling mismanagement." So everything possible is done to allow grass to absorb all the fertilizer left behind by the animals. If animals must be kept inside (to brood young chicks for example), Salatin recommends providing deep bedding of wood chips or sawdust to chemically lock in all the nutrients and smell until they can be spread on the field where the compost can be used by the grass.

Salatin's pastures, barn, and farmhouse are located on land below a nearby pond that "feeds the farm" by using 15 miles (24 km) of piping. Salatin also harvests 450 acres (1.8 km2) of woodlands and uses the lumber to construct farm buildings. One of Salatin's principles is that "plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health."

While Salatin does not sell to supermarkets or ship long distances, Polyface products are available at restaurants (including Chipotle and Staunton's Zynodoa) and local food sellers like Charlottesville's RelayFoods.com within a half-day's drive of the farm.