feature

makes small farms profitable

US farmer Joel Salatin advocates a holistic, pasture-based approach and focuses on the local market. By farming multiple livestock species, hes managed to cut down on artificial inputs. Robyn Joubert reports.

Going beyond organic

Cows,chickens,pigs, rabbitsandturkeysareall farmedtogetheronpasture. Thelocalmarketandlocal relationshipsareprioritised. Theaimistofarminharmonywithnature. seventh book. his wife teresa does the bookkeeping. their 28-year-old son Daniel runs the day-to-day operations and his wife Sheri handles marketing. counting Joels three grandchildren and his mother, four generations live in harmony with nature at Polyface. Polyface owns 200 acres (81ha) of land and rents another 400 acres (162ha). it supports a mixed bag of free-ranging animals. annual production amounts to about 900 head of cattle, 30 000 broiler chickens, 4 000 layers, 800 pigs, and 1 000 rabbits, plus 450 acres (182ha) of timber. Salad bar beef Joel refers to his pasture as a salad bar for farm animals and calls beef from grassfed cattle, salad-bar beef. our goal is to approximate nature as closely as possible, he says. our cows only forage and are moved away from their manure and onto

Direct customer marketing

Polyface farm services more than 1 500 families, 10 retail outlets and 30 restaurants using relationship marketing. Customers can visit Polyfaces on-farm store on Saturdays, or join a local buying club. Theyre welcome to visit the farm and many have taken up the offer. Others regularly visit the website for news and recipes. Customers are excited not only by the good food, but by the stewardship on the farm. Every six weeks, buying club customers order on-line. They choose from Polyfaces range of salad bar beef, pasture-based poultry, eggmobile eggs, pig-aerator pork, forage-based rabbits and pasture-based turkey. The day before the drop, orders are pulled together in cooler boxes and stored in the walk-in freezer. On the day, orders are taken by bus to dropsites, and exchanged for payment with customers. In 30 minutes to an hour, 30 to 80 orders are handed over.

oel Salatin might call himSelf a third-generation lunatic farmer, but to his followers hes the ultimate role model for the pasture-based farming system. in the US, Joel is renowned for the unconventional farming methods he employs on his family farm, Polyface, in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. Small-scale grass farmers prize Joels no-nonsense books, including Pastured Poultry Profits, Salad Bar Beef and Holy Cows & Hog Heaven. these offer a wealth of practical insight and strong focus on farm finances. everything we do is completely counter to current agricultural wisdom, he admits. We spurn technological advances which advocate petroleum-based fertilisers, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics. We honour the traditional patterns of nature. Practising what you preach Polyface farm, meaning the farm with many faces, is what Joel terms beyond organic. their website www. polyfacefarms.com says, Were in the redemption business: healing the land, the food, the economy, and the culture. Joel argues that animals should be grown in season, so they can develop naturally and more healthily and without expensive artificial inputs. hes developed a pasture rotation system that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximises the composting of animal waste. each species on the farm is dependent on another. the farm is a family operation. Joel (52) juggles farm work with speaking appointments and is writing his

apprentices to loyal disciples

More than 40 people have served year-long apprenticeships with Joel over the past 20 years and his gospel is spreading as past apprentices set up farms throughout the country. Jordan Winters took up a one-year apprenticeship in 2006. During his year in the Shenandoah Valley, Jordan saw first hand the application of methods and principles hed read about in Joels books as a teenager. Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned was the need to be innovative and to keep costs down by reducing the dependency on the large equipment necessary in industrial farming, says Jordan. This, and direct customer marketing, are what allow pasture-based farming to be profitable. Jordan, who is 23, has since started raising his own animals on Winters Grass Farm in New York State, which hes working hard at growing into a full-time business based on Joels model. Jordan has a small but growing base of loyal, regular customers who are quick to share the benefits of his product with others. In addition to local farmers markets, he has customers who buy directly from the farm and who buy from buyers clubs. For the consumer, one of the main benefits of pastured farming over factory farming is they can get to know the farmer personally, check out the farm, and know how their food is raised. If they dont like what they see, they look elsewhere. This is why the local food movement has grown alongside the grassfed movement. Rising transportation costs, of course, make local food more competitive. While few people know about grassfed farming, making public education necessary, Jordan says support for local food is definitely growing. A friend of mine runs a vegetable community-supported agriculture (CSA) project. He has to turn down a lot of orders as they cant keep up with demand and Polyface cant either. The answer isnt to get bigger. Thats what Walmart does. Wed rather see many small farms than just a few big farms.

a new pasture paddock roughly every day. We use portable electric fencing to keep them herded tightly, as is their instinct. this natural model heals the land, thickens the forage, reduces weeds, stimulates earthworms, reduces pathogens and increases the meats nutritional qualities. Joel believes salad-bar beef gives smaller beef farmers an edge, saying that a small operation can turn an excellent profit, regardless of the commodity price of calves. he reckons 95% of US cow-calf producers would be financially better off following the salad bar beef prototype than selling commodity calves or yearlings. cattle are protected by portable shade mobiles in the summer as theyre moved between pastures. Joel measures pasture by cow days per acre. What one cow eats in a day determines how many cows you can put on one acre. Stocking your salad bar a good salad bar offers a full complement of tasty, nourishing grasses and legumes, kept fresh and appealing at all times. its maintained with intensive paddock management, giving grazed pasture ample time to recover, and natural refuges for birds and other wildlife, essential to maintaining ecological balance. What goes into the Continued on page 40

ABOVE: Animals are moved between pastures daily, using portable electric fences. ABOVE: Jordan Winters pasture-raised chicken in portable chicken houses.

Jordan Winters, one of more than 40 apprentices Joel Salatin has trained in 20 years, with his cattle in New York State.
Photos: steven Winters

Joel Salatin, the brain behind of Polyface.

Polyface farms

38

5 June 2009

| farmers weekly

farmers weekly |

5 June 2009

39

feature
the cows trample the bedding and the mass ferments and generates heat. in the spring, pigs are sent into the sheds to aerate the mixture as they root around for the corn. this helps create compost, which Joel calls the backbone of the farms fertility programme. the ready-mix compost is spread back on the fields to grow hay and vegetables and fertilise new grasses. in summer and autumn, the pigs forage in separate pastures rotated every few days with electric fences. they sometimes forage in the oak plantations for acorns. forage-based rabbits and turkeys are the final two faces of Polyface. a portable hoophouse shelters the turkeys inside their electrified-netting paddock and the birds are moved every few days to a fresh pasture. they eat copious amounts of grass which supplements their grain ration. Joels son Daniel has developed a line-bred genetic base for meat rabbits which are hardy and can eat forage without getting diarrhoea. they are housed in elevated shelters above the chickens in a custom-made structure. the breeding stock receives unmedicated alfalfa pellets and hay or fresh greens. in season, many of the rabbits are finished in portable, slatted-floored field shelters which are moved daily. A way of life While critics say this food is too expensive, and the method wont produce enough food to feed a growing nation, Joel disagrees. he says his farm feeds more people per acre than others, although it does require more labour. Small-scale production can work because cutting the distance between the farm and consumer reduces transportation costs and favours the local farmer. consumers are also starting to place greater value on the variety and fresh food that local farms offer, he says. Joel wont ship his food to locations further away than a four-hour drive.

the Polyface manifesto

Pastured livestock and poultry, moved frequently to new pastures or salad bars, offer landscape healing and superior nutrition. Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their distinctive behaviours. We should all seek food closer to home, in our bioregion. This means enjoying seasonality and reacquainting ourselves with our home kitchens. Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale ensures human ingenuity is given moral and ethical boundaries. Cows are herbivores, not omnivores. Stimulating soil biota is our first priority. Soil health creates healthy food.

ABOVE: During summer and autumn, pigs forage in separate pastures, rotated every few days with electric fence. LEFT: Pasture-based chickens follow the cows, foraging for their food.

salad bar is key to the happiness of your pastures and cows, Joel says. a cow always eats dessert first. for a cow, the choice between clover and ragweed is like the choice for a child between ice cream and liver. to protect the tastiest morsels from overgrazing, Joel uses a rotational grazing system which follows the blaze of growth in a plants cycle. this charts the relation of root growth to top growth in an S curve, he explains. this growth can be helped by letting a plant grow several inches before its lightly grazed, and allowing it to regrow to the same length before its grazed again. Integrating chickens and pigs Just as birds in nature follow herbivores as biological cleaners, flocks of egglaying hens follow the cows, scratching around in the fields and spreading manure as they search for flies and larvae. they lay their eggs in the fields in Joels specially-designed eggmobiles

portable henhouses 3,6m x 6,1m. the feathernet is a similar concept. the birds are secured inside a large electrified netting, moved every three days to offer cleaner pasturage. Pasture-fed broilers also follow the cows, in 3m x 3,6m x 0,6m high floorless, portable field shelters, each housing about 75 birds. Broilers are slaughtered at about eight weeks. integrating the cows to mow ahead of the shelters shortens the grass and encourages the chickens to eat tender, fresh sprouts, says Joel. We want every animal to eat as much green material as its genetic potential allows. Animal-prepared compost in the cold Virginia winter, the entire farm hibernates. even the soil needs to rest because the organisms within it go to sleep, Joel says. cows are sheltered in open-sided sheds and provided with winter bedding of straw. manure and urine are covered daily with fresh wood chips. as the floor level rises underfoot, hay troughs are raised by a pulley. Sawdust and whole corn kernels are mixed in with the bedding.

We want people to support farms close to home.

the farm delivers to club drop-off points at nearly two dozen towns in Virginia and maryland and serves more than 36 regional restaurants, caterers, bakeries and small food stores in the region (see box: Direct customer marketing). We want people to support farms close to home and keep the money in their local communities, says Joel. We think theres greater strength in being decentralised and spreading out rather than in being concentrated and centralised (see box: Local is lekker). Joel is romancing the next generation back into farming by offering a way to make a good living while reconnecting with the land and producing clean, nutritious food. to him, this holistic approach isnt just the future, its the moral way to farm. the greatest tragedy is that this way of farming is seen as abnormal, he concludes. Contact Polyface farms on (001) 540 887 8194, e-mail polyface@northriver.coop or go to www.polyfacefarms.com. |fw

coming to US tV
Polyface Farms appears in a forthcoming documentary, Food Inc, due to open in the US in June. It takes a critical look at the American food system, contrasting industrial agribusiness with operations like Polyface. The movie has the same financial backers as Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth.

Joel Salatin has developed a pasture rotation system that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximises the composting of animal waste.
Photos: Polyface farms

local is lekker
Move aside organic and free-range, the new buzz-word on the block is local. Local has certain connotations, says Joel. It means your business is local. That you dont bring in undocumented foreign workers. That you allow visitors. That your scale is neighbourhoodfriendly. Its more than just how many miles from kill to plate. Its about a perception of life and worldview. Were also using the word transparent. Polyface has a 24/7/365 open door policy. If you think were doing something you wouldnt like at 2am, youre welcome to come out and see. Dont wake us up, but youre welcome to visit.

Salad-bar beef gives smaller beef farmers an edge.

Joel with his pig aerators. By rooting around in old winter bedding in the cow sheds, the pigs help aerate it and speed up the composting process.

ABOVE: A cow enjoying the salad bar. RIGHT: Joel Salatin with his beef herd on Polyface Farm. The eggmobile, a portable hen house that lets layers forage after cows.

40

5 June 2009

| farmers weekly

farmers weekly |

5 June 2009

41