From the Field

written by

Joel Salatin

posted on

December 11, 2023

Written by Joel Salatin, 2018


As a teenager in the early 1970s, I sold farm-processed beef and pork at the Staunton Curb Market. These animals never left the farm; we handled them from field to final customer. We didn’t haul them up the interstate; we just did them quietly right here on the farm, put them in packages, and handed them to our customers.

Those days are long gone. In order to legally sell your beef and pork today, those animals must leave the farm and go to a government-inspected facility. As the regulatory environment increased, the number of these neighborhood abattoirs decreased. By the 1980s, none existed in Augusta County for Polyface to use; the nearest one was in Harrisonburg, about 30 miles north.

Tommy and Erma May owned and operated T&E Meats in Harrisonburg. Although Tommy did not go to school past the 8th grade, he was business savvy and shepherded the small abattoir through those decades of increasing government regulation. When Polyface began marketing to restaurants and offering individual cuts (T-bone, pork chops) in the mid-90s, T&E became our lifeline to legal direct marketing. 

By that time, Tommy and Erma were already in their 60s. By 2000, Polyface was their largest client for custom processing and we developed a close friendship. As Tommy and Erma hit their 70s and Polyface became more dependent on T&E, their age became a point of concern. What was the succession plan? What if one or both suddenly passed away? 

Teresa and I took them out to dinner one pivotal evening to talk seriously about the future. As a result of that summit, we realized there was no succession plan. The plant would die with them. Immediately I began seeking a buyer. For the next decade, everywhere I traveled, I’d ask: “Does anyone here want to buy an abattoir?” I took many potential buyers up to meet Tommy and Erma, tour the plant, and talk about the future. Meanwhile, Tommy and Erma hit their 80s. Still going to the plant every day. Still paying the bills, but definitely slowing down.

Tommy spilled some hot water on his foot and was laid up for a couple of weeks as the severe burn healed. I was becoming desperate. Finally in about 2010 Joe Cloud entered my life. He was a landscape engineer whose parents owned a farm in Fishersville. Living in Seattle, he was ready for an entrepreneurial opportunity, especially one that would enable him to get closer to his aging parents and care for them. He said he would buy T&E Meats on one condition: that Teresa and I would join him as partners.

By this time, Polyface was nearly 35 percent of the T&E business, and he was afraid that if our family did not put skin in the investment, we might jump ship if someone built a closer facility. Of course, his fears were justified. During this time, we had pursued many options, including building a facility here in Augusta County. The partnership arrangement seemed to be the best insurance that this plant could stay open to serve not only Polyface, but other farmers in the area. To honor Tommy and Erma’s legacy, Joe and I decided to keep the name T&E, but changed it to stand for True and Essential Meats (that’s the official and unabbreviated name today).

In 2011 we organized a purchase through the Salatin-Cloud LLC partnership. Finally, Tommy and Erma could retire and know that their life’s work would continue. Needless to say, during their waning years, the plant was not upgraded: floors, electricity, boiler, wastewater, corrals. Rather than getting any investment back, the partnership has used every dime of profit to modernize the infrastructure, including the workforce. At the time of purchase, 12 of the 19 employees were more than 70 years old.

I joked that we had just purchased the most geriatric abattoir in the country. Joe immediately assumed responsibilities as general manager and the Salatin component became a behind-the-scenes partner. The business was bleeding red. Over the next three years, we eliminated what had once been a profitable wholesale delivery component. Then we eliminated the retail meat counter. Focusing completely on custom meat fabrication for local farmers, we gradually transformed the business into a new vision: the nexus of the local meat processing value chain.

As the old guard retired, we replaced them with younger and more innovative folks. Instead of being the cheapest place in town, we aspired to be the best place in town. Major upgrades created new opportunities and

new efficiencies so that today Polyface has shrunk to just 20 percent of the client business and instead of serving only three local brand-name farms, we service nearly 100. To say that we’ve grown the local food system and

enabled many farmers to access their neighbors would be the understatement of the year. But now what?

This spring, we’ve launched a $500,000 remodel for value-added products: smoked ham, bacon, charcuterie, spiral ham, jerky, lard. Part of this project includes investing nearly $100,000 in new scales, tracking, and barcoding capabilities so that Polyface and the farmers we serve can access sophisticated markets requiring deep-data electronic interfaces. Many institutional buyers like colleges, hospitals, and schools increasingly demand this information as part of liability and inspection requirements.

For the first time, rather than taking the raw product out the back door and sending it to further processing facilities, we can do this in-house without any additional carbon footprint. Logistics alone make this a fantastic project. But by keeping further processing in-house, it minimizes the chance of contamination and what we call “oopses” in the value chain. It will offer you, our valuable and loyal cheerleaders, more convenience and ready-to-eat

options. That, in turn, should stimulate sales, which means here at Polyface we can be more economically viable, ultimately touching more land with healing and germinating additional land-caressing farmers. 

Thank you for being part of that. We couldn’t do it without you. Here’s to more healthy eating and land healing. 

More from the blog

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