3 Reasons we love SPRING

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March 28, 2024

Spring is always a sweet time of year. The trees start budding, the grass starts growing, the peepers start peeping and the days get warmer and longer. The world starts to wake up after the cold, still days of winter. There are many reasons to love this special time of year, but I would like to share with you three reasons we love spring at Polyface.

1.) Compost!

Here at Polyface, we are grass farmers, which means that during the spring, when the fields start to turn a vibrant green, we all start to get excited. New energy returns to the farm as we start the process of transitioning our animals from their cozy deep bedding of winter to the sunny pastures. As the animals start their spring grazing, the hoop houses and barns where our chickens, pigs, and cattle were during the winter get emptied and we spread the beautiful compost that they left behind on our fields. Spring is the perfect time to do this with the spring rain soaking all of the nutrients down into the soil.

Our cows are on deep bedding all winter and when they come out of the barn, the pigs then move in to aerate (we call it pigaerating) and stir it all around for us. We incentivize them by spreading a layer of whole corn on every third layer of bedding. As the pigs dig for the corn, they simultaneously get our compost ready for us!

The bedding from the chickens can get spread on the fields immediately. We like to spread compost on fields where we will be making hay or areas that need the extra boost of nutrients. As our hoop houses empty out and the compost gets spread, the space can then be used on the farm for fertile gardens, summer storage or as space to host our many guests!

2.) Baby Animals!

Spring also begins our growing season. With the warmer weather, we are able to start raising our broiler chickens. In preparation for beginning our on-farm processing in May, we receive our first chicks in March. If you visit Polyface right now, you will find full brooders with both baby broiler chickens and young pullets who will grow to be our laying hens. Soon we will have young turkey poults too. We love watching our baby chicks grow!

Additionally, spring is when our cows are calving! Every year, the cycle continues as we finish off some of our fat cows and add new calves to the herd. During calving season (which is a period where all our cows are “due” to give birth), we check the cows closely, tagging any new calves and keeping track of the cow/calf pairs. These pairs will be together until the fall when the calves are weaned. Every year it excites us to see our herd grow with all these new additions and, bonus, they are pretty cute!!

3.) Inspiration!

Polyface is open all year long for visitors but summer is when we host the majority of our large gatherings and our lunatic farm tours. The springtime is when we start to prepare ourselves for the great task of inspiring others around us. Every spring, we gather as a team for a “season kick-off” meeting where we discuss changes, big events, and enjoy fellowship as a farm family. But most important is our vision to inspire people. We hope that if you interact with us in any way, whether you receive our food for your family, or visit the farm, you too will catch a little bit of that Polyface magic.

Spring is an invigorating time of year for these reasons and more. As new life blooms and grows all around us, may you feel the blessing of this lovely time of year!

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

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3 Reasons we love SPRING

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