Choosing Your Farmers

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posted on

August 26, 2025

Here at Polyface, we believe transparency is the cornerstone of trust. Whether you're a long-time follower/supporter or just discovering our farm, we're glad you're here. Whether you're a current patron or just interested in learning more, we hope we can help.

We're firm believers in folks finding a food treasure map made up of farmers whom you know and trust; farmers you can have access to and get to know.

Today, I decided to offer 10 questions (plus our answers) to help you decide where to buy your food!

These are questions we either hear often or believe are important in choosing a farmer.

Can I visit your farm?

Yes! We welcome visitors and have a 24/7/365 open-door policy. In fact, we encourage people to come and see how and where their food is produced.

From self-guided tours to in-depth educational experiences and large events, we offer several ways to explore the farm. Keep an eye on our website or social media for upcoming events and details.

Do you grow or raise everything you sell?

Everything we sell is raised or produced right here on the farm or in partnership with nearby farms that meet our standards. We believe in short, transparent supply chains. That means you’re not only buying food—you’re investing in a local, regenerative system you can see and trust. Even though we trust them and they meet our standards, we clearly label all products that are not grown by us, so that you can check out those small businesses for yourself.

What is the mission of Polyface Farm?

Our mission is to heal the land, nourish people, and build community through regenerative farming. You can read our full mission statement and guiding principles on our website!

We strive to model a sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture—one that prioritizes soil health, animal welfare, and local food economies; that mimics nature and encourages ecosystems. We want to inspire others to reconnect with the land and take control of their food choices.

How are your animals treated?

We raise our animals with the utmost respect and care for their individual uniqueness and original design. Our animals are rotated frequently on fresh pasture, which lets them express their natural behaviors. Chickens scratch, pigs root, and cows graze—all in clean, open-air environments. We don’t use confinement systems or subject our animals to unnecessary stress. Happy animals are essential to healthy ecosystems and nutritious food.

What do you feed your animals?

Our animals eat what nature intended. Cows and sheep are 100% grass-fed. Chickens and pigs are given non-GMO grain supplements but spend their days foraging outdoors on pasture or in wooded areas. This diverse, natural diet produces healthier animals—and healthier food for you. You can find detailed breakdowns of how we raise our animals in the older posts on our blog. Have fun exploring and learning more.

Is your meat organic?

We are not USDA certified organic. We like to call ourselves "Beyond Organic" because our practices exceed 'organic' standards in many ways. We don't use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or GMO's. Our animals live on pasture. We do not use vaccines or antibiotics. You can read more about this in our blog post "Why is Polyface not Organic?"

How do your farming practices support the environment?

Everything we do is centered around regenerative agriculture. By rotating animals, composting manure, and avoiding chemicals, we improve soil health, build biodiversity, and reduce carbon emissions. Our goal isn’t just sustainability—it’s restoration. We want to leave the land better than we found it.

How do customers purchase your products?

We make it easy to buy directly from us. Customers can:

Visit our on-farm store

Join our neighborhood delivery clubs across the region

Order for convenient UPS delivery to your door across the contiguous USA.

Find our products in retail stores in select areas of Virginia

What factors affect your pricing?

Our prices reflect the true cost of ethical, regenerative farming. That includes fair wages, humane animal care, and environmental stewardship. We don’t cut corners to compete with industrial prices to make more, faster, cheaper, but we do everything we can to stay affordable while maintaining quality. One of our guiding principles is that quality must always go up. Think of it as an investment in your health, your community, and the planet.

Can I learn more?

We’re here to help! We have educational events, this blog, books, and you can find tons of Youtube videos about us because we're not hiding or patenting what we do.

If you have questions, feel free to email us anytime! You can find the best person to answer your questions on our contact page.

You can also call the farm directly. (Please remember that we are a working farm first and foremost. Our store/phone hours are limited because of our busy schedules. We ask that you leave a message and be patient with us.)

You can visit us whenever you'd like to talk to our team at the farm store or during events where you'll find us all in matching shirts.

We love connecting with people who care about food, farming, and the future.

Polyface exists because people like you believe there’s a better way to farm—and eat. Thank you for your curiosity, your support, and your willingness to ask questions. Write these questions down and save them for future use as you build your own food treasure map.

Blessings,

Hannah

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

Choosing Your Farmers

More from the blog

Tour Bus Chef

Food Shortages

The Crisis Beneath Our Feet

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