Recently, a friend and I visited Polyface Farm outside Staunton Virginia. Polyface is owned and operated by Joel Salatin, whose parents started farming these verdant five-hundred acres in 1961. Polyface is not simply a farm. Salatin refers to it as a ministry, and he describes the various facets with the zeal of a missionary. The website includes a mission statement: “to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.”

Although he sells beef, chickens, eggs, turkeys, pork, and rabbits, Salatin calls himself a grass farmer. That is, he is in the business of raising meat and eggs for sale, but he realizes that the quality of his products, and ultimately the success of his farm, depends on the quality of the grass in his pastures. Unlike the vast majority of meat products in the U.S. today, Salatin’s cows are raised and finished on grass; his chickens are pastured; his hogs are happy, and his turkeys, well, they seem friendly. The Polyface website affirms their belief that the natural world is the model they seek to emulate: “Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission.”

Salatin has developed innovated methods of enhancing his grass farm and thereby providing a good place for his animals. For example, his cows are moved to new pasture almost daily, and these docile beasts are anxious to move, for each fresh pasture represents, in the cow’s mind, what Salatin calls “cow ice-cream.” As in nature, once the herbivores (in this instance, cows) have moved to another field, the birds (in this case, chickens) come next. Portable chicken coops make it possible to move the chickens through a recently grazed pasture. The chickens flourish on the cropped grass, and they pick through the cow dung, eating bugs and parasites, and in the process spread the manure over the field, while depositing plenty of their own. The symbiosis of this relationship between cows and chickens replenishes the pastures even as it sustains the animals living there. This is just one example of how the people at Polyface seek to work with the natural world to raise healthy animals while simultaneously sustaining and even improving the land on which they farm.

A central element of their mission is a commitment not to ship their products. There is a small store behind the main house and directly adjacent to the open-air concrete slab where the chickens are dressed. The intrepid or the curious can find their way to the farm over winding country roads to purchase meat and eggs as well as wander around the farm, which is open to the public. Polyface delivers products to a variety of locales as far away as Washington D.C., but they will not ship. They seek relationships with their customers believing that personal trust between individuals is the best way to conduct business. This personal (and necessarily local) touch has served Polyface well. They have a growing number of loyal customers who appreciate the humane way the animals are treated during their lives, the conscientious way they are slaughtered and packaged, and last but certainly not least, the superb quality of the products, which are free of growth hormones, steroids, and antibiotics. Indeed, the steaks my friend and I grilled that evening were delicious.

The no-shipping policy, ironically, put Polyface in the national spotlight when food writer Michael Pollan tried to get Salatin to ship him a chicken and a couple of steaks. Salatin refused. Pollan was intrigued. He paid Polyface a visit, and Salatin and his farm were prominently featured in Pollan’s 2006 best-seller The Omnivore’s Dilemma. [1] In the same year, Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons [2] contained a chapter on food where an interview with Salatin plays a central role. The books by both Pollan and Dreher contain sections that describe the meat industry in modern America. They are repeating the nastiness described in graphic detail by Eric Schlosser in his muckraking exposé Fast Food Nation [3], which, itself, harkens back to Upton Sinclair’s classic The Jungle. A tour of an industrial meat-processing plant would, these authors are convinced, shake most meat-eaters to the bone (pun intended). That we tolerate such a system is only possible because of our separation from any awareness of the history of our food. For the vast majority of Americans, food comes from the grocery store. We give little thought to the methods and miles that brought all that we eat to the shiny shelves of our neighborhood Food Mart. Salatin and others in a small but growing band of farmers and consumers think that this radical separation between food and eater is indicative of a serious cultural and political breakdown. On this matter, Dreher quotes Salatin:

You know what we’re losing? Common sense. There is wisdom that comes into a culture when many of its people have a direct connection to the land and to life, to the living cycles. I see many of the political agendas today as being a total failure to understand life, seasons, accountability, and the connections of life and people to our community. There’s just no connection, and so there’s no reason, there’s no common sense. You can blame as many people on the right as on the left.