A New Year

written by

posted on

January 14, 2025

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here on the farm, we're reeling from the equivalent of a run on the bank. A combination of things created a run on our inventory after mid-season, 2024.

Unlike industrial food systems, we don't go out and buy inventory in the market when our inventory runs low. We grow our animals, harvest them, store them, and it's a seasonal cycle that has a replenishment lag if we misjudge.

At Polyface, we try to plan to grow enough animals to meet the market, but not too much over that. Feeding eggs to pigs is expensive. We've done that.

As 2024 moved into late summer, we realized we had underestimated our market. In a perfect world, we'd hit our inventory expectations on the nose, every time. But this isn't a perfect world.

I'm here to explain, in full transparency, how we got into a deficit inventory.

Be assured that the 2025 season will see some major production increases to respond to this exciting new reality.

So here we go, three things.

First, our new website.

Throughout 2023, we invested in revamping our website to make it more intuitive, to flow better, and to capture more precisely all the different faces of Polyface. We had no idea how that investment would pay off.

Once those improvements were made, a trickle of efficiency turned into a gusher.

Second, MAHA.

MAHA is Robert F. Kennedy Jr's (known as RFK Jr) movement to "Make America Healthy Again".

The media, podcasts, and conversations surrounding the MAHA agenda created an unprecedented interest in everything health-related, especially the "unorthodox". People found us.

The entire alternative health community, from crunchy moms to herbalists to naturopaths to functional medicine doctors to acupuncturists and iridologists is enjoying new interest like never before.

On the heels of Covid, the quest to bolster immune function awakened a new cultural search for wellness. People are asking: What is wellness? How do I stay well?

The MAHA discussion is now launched in earnest, and it's not over by a long shot. At Polyface, we did not foresee the magnitude of this discussion nor the effect it would have on our late summer sales.

Third, reputation and podcasts.

I'm lumping these together because they are absolutely related. The podcast phenomenon, or what is called non-mainstream media, is taking over Americans' informational conduit.

Joe Rogan's podcast reaches millions more people than all the mainstream TV networks combined.

RFK Jr. told a funny story about something he'd seen on TV news and his son asked, totally serious, "Dad, is there news on TV?" For real. People under 40 don't get their information from TV.

The Polyface brand is now a sought-after voice in the podcast world.

Often the podcast hosts ask "Where can people get your stuff?" The answer is simple: "Polyfacefarm.com."

Suddenly, we see a bump in sales.

Here's a Polyface fact:

Our "production pipeline" is long. This is the time it takes to start with a young animal and end with food on the shelves or the website for you.

For beef it takes three years. Pigs are nearly a year. Chickens are about four months old.

Right now, we're planning all the animals we'll raise for all of 2025.

The fastest item we can "restock" is broilers (meat chickens). They grow the fastest once spring arrives. Second is pork and third is beef.

We have the capacity to increase everything except beef. (And we're continuing to work on the issue: enough land to raise them.)

Both over- and under-inventory are problematic, so it's a delicate balance. Be assured we are doing everything in our power to adjust; to eliminate disappointment without creating an overage problem.

Thank you for hanging in there with us. This is a good opportunity to try something perhaps you haven't used before. We always have some things; just not everything at every moment.

Be adventuresome and try a new cut, a new product. You might be surprised what a joy it is to add it to your culinary portfolio. Feel free to reach out to our team if you need ideas for how to use one of our meats. We have so many cooks among us.

Again, HAPPY NEW YEAR! Thank you for your loyalty and faith in us. Polyface is working hard to earn and keep your trust.

Blessings to you and yours in the coming year.

-Joel

inventory

methods

beef

Pork

Chicken

poultry

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

A New Year

More from the blog

Food Shortages

Choosing Your Farmers

The Crisis Beneath Our Feet

About

Education

Polyface Farms

Healing the land one bite at a time!