The Farm of Many Faces: Touring Joel Salatin's Grass Farm

It's hard to think of any farmers more famous than Joel Salatin. The owner of Polyface Farm, Salatin has been featured in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and in the documentary Food, Inc. He has written numerous books, lectures far and wide,* and happens to give weekly tours on his farm, one of which we attended two weeks ago.

For those who aren't familiar with Polyface Farm, a little background: Joel Salatin describes himself as a "grass farmer". He pastures broilers, turkeys, layers, pigs and beef on his land, using intensive grazing methods. Salatin is not organic certified (see here), but he doesn't need to be. He's made a name for himself in the sustainable agriculture world. In fact, Salatin only sells directly to consumers at his farm, and to restaurants and buyers' clubs within a four hour driving distance of the farm.

Tours at Polyface Farm are very well attended, if my experience was any indication. Everyone loads onto a couple trailers that have been comfortably padded with straw bales, which Mr. Salatin then trucks around the farm with his big ol' tractor.

First stop: the broilers and the turkeys.

The broilers, as you can see, are kept in separate pens that are about ten by ten feet. They are moved across the field to a new spot every day, giving the chickens new grass and new insects to feed, but without leaving them in one area long enough to kill the field with their "hot" (i.e. nitrogen-rich) poop. The turkeys are moved every two days.

The pigs are kept in woods on Polyface's 550 total acres. They're moved about every two weeks, which is enough time to stir up the soil in the forested areas without killing the trees. According to Salatin, after being used as a pig run, this area will be far more lush and vibrant than if it hadn't been.

Salatin says they don't cut much hay...just what they need.

Salatin's so-called "Egg Mobile", where his layers are housed. He follows them about two days behind the cows, so the chickens can go through the cow dung and pick out parasites and flies, mimicking the symbiotic relationships between birds and some migratory animals in nature. By scratching up the cow droppings, the chickens also spread it around, making it a more effective fertilizer, and fertilize the fields with their own leavings as well.

The cows are moved every day. By grazing them within a smaller area, Salatin says they are forced to eat everything, not just pick and choose the nicest bits. The cows are grass fed and, in winter, put on hay - they are never given a corn-based diet.

If you've read or seen anything about Salatin, you know that he has a lot of stock phrases, and we got to hear them all. (If I were giving a tour a week and lecturing 100 days a year, I'd probably have some handy sound bytes too.) But despite that, he was certainly not merely reciting a memorized script. He was genuine and approachable, answering questions in detail, and no topic was off-limits.

Although the tour ended after the cows, we took a few minutes to explore around the farm. This is Polyface's chicken processing area. Because it is open to the air, the USDA has tried to shut Salatin down numerous times, saying the area doesn't conform to USDA standards. Somehow - through the forcefulness of his personality, perhaps - Salatin has managed to keep them back.

They process a lot of chickens. These chickens actually come from a satellite farm that grows and processes chickens for Polyface, and is run by a former intern.

Our last stop was the gift shop, which features quite a bit of meat products, as well as t-shirts proclaiming things like "Lunatic Farmer" and "Everything I want to do is illegal." Nearly everyone on the tour came armed with large coolers, which they then stocked with Polyface Beef, Polyface Pork, and Polyface Chicken. We were no exception.

*Salatin will be a keynote speaker at this year's Acres U.S.A. conference, incidentally.

Paperwork and the Farm

The concepts of paperwork and bureaucracy seem antithetical to farming, which we tend to think about as practically the most natural activity one can do, short of actually going to the wilderness and living off the land. The farmer pays close attention to her fields and livestock. She touches the earth with her bare hands daily, is far more in tune with the geography and weather than the average person, and depends upon the well-being of her beets and fennel, grass and sheep for her health and livelihood.

And yet... there is paperwork. A hefty amount of it, too. If you are USDA Organic Certified, that is. Which Brightwood Vineyard and Farm happens to be.

We must write down everything we do on the farm - and I do mean everything. We write down what we plant, which rows, how many feet. We record every "input" (e.g. compost or fertilizer) that goes on the plants. We meticulously catalog how many pounds of every single piece of produce we harvest, how many feet of each bed we harvested, the quality of the harvest, the seed lot numbers, and where it is going.

This, of course, is nothing compared to the leviathan piles of paperwork that Susan faces whenever her USDA Organic Inspection comes around, which it did last week. Documentation proving that her seeds are organic, and if they aren't, a minimum of two letters proving that she tried to find organic seeds and couldn't. Pictures of cover crops and videos of said cover crops being tilled into the field. Lists of every single seed she has purchased in the last year, if it was planted, where it was planted, and organized by a seed lot number that she assigns it. Maps of the farms, showing how they look in relation to one another, storage facilities marked, vegetable fields marked, livestock areas marked... heck, everything marked.

All this time and effort spent on paperwork appear, to me, completely anathema to the idea of farming. Most of the farmers I know became farmers because they wanted to be linked closely with the land, not so they could sit inside and stare at a computer for hours each week. That's certainly not why I chose this job.

Just how necessary is being USDA Organic certified, anyway? I just finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and he does an excellent investigation of two opposing viewpoints of this topic. On the one side, you have "Industrial Organic": large-scale organic farms that farm hundreds of acres of crops or rear thousands of livestock without pesticides, herbicides, or antibiotics. These include such enterprises as Earthbound Farm, Cascadian Farm, and Horizon Organics - familiar names to anyone who frequents the organic aisle of their local supermarket.

Diametrically opposing these farms is Joel Salatin, the farmer who runs the now infamous (in farming circles, at least) Polyface Farm in Staunton, Virginia. Salatin does organic livestock, but he isn't USDA certified as such. He refuses to be. And Pollan provides plenty of salty quotes to illustrate this point. For example:

We never called ourselves organic - we call ourselves 'beyond organic.' Why dumb down to a lesser level than we are?

And my personal favorite:

Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians - we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted - to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches...But the Western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.

So that's how Mister Salatin feels about the subject. And, honestly, I identify with him to a large degree. Big Organic has no soul - it has compromised the spirit of the organic ideal that started in the 60's.

But, if we compare conventional farming and Big Organic farming, there is very clearly a lesser of two evils. Although Big Organic farms may be "free range" in name only, may look exactly like a conventional farm from the outside, they are much more environmentally friendly. They aren't degrading their soil and polluting the land with pesticides. They aren't pumping their broilers or cattle full of hormones. Said chicken may not be living a life full of chicken enjoyment on the open farm, but at least we, the consumer, know that it is the healthier option, for us and the earth.

But honestly...the best option of all is to go to a local farmer's market and purchase food from someone you trust.

These are the farms that fall in the middle of the extremes. And the choice of whether or not to get USDA certification is a highly personal one that each of these farmers must make. Do their consumers care? Are they willing to put in the extra hours, poring over hundreds and hundreds of papers until their eyeballs bleed? (Figuratively speaking.) For some farms, it's a choice they feel is necessary. For others, not so much.