Know Your Farmer: Questions to ask at the market

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July 29, 2025

Both sustainable farmers and conventional farmers bring their goods to farmers markets, so the first time you visit a market you need to find out who’s who. Here are some suggested questions to pose, with possible responses:

Q: How do you fertilize your crops?

A: A sustainable farmer will avoid using petroleum based fertilizers. The farmer’s answer to this question might include compost, manure, biochar, worm castings, word chips, soil microbes, minerals, and humus.

Q: How do you control pests?

A: Some farmers spray with vinegar or cayenne pepper in water. Others use insecticide only if they see aproblem. In the case of orchard fruits, the farmer may spray up until the time of blossoming and then stop, so the fruit doesn’t get sprayed.

Q: Do your chickens eat grass, worms and insects?

A: Chickens should be outside on pasture. They may consume grains as a supplemental feed, but their entire diet shouldn’t be grains. If a farmer uses the term “free range” or “cage free”, ask if the chickens are out on grass. In conventional poultry operations, “free range” and “cage free” mean inside a chicken house. Avoid birds raised on “100% organic vegetarian feed”. Chickens are omnivores, not vegetarians. They need grass, insects, worms, and small rodents.

Q: What do you feed your cows?

A: 100% grassfed is best. Grain finished beeves are fed grains for 3 to 6 weeks before slaughter. You would think that after years of being fed only grass, 3 to 6 weeks of grains wouldn’t matter. Think again. In about 10 days to 2 weeks, all of the conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) disappears from the fat of cows eating grains. This also applies to chickens, pigs, and other herbivores. CLA is an important nutrient that protects against many of today’s prevalent chronic diseases.

Q: What do you feed your pigs?

A: Pigs should be raised in forests and pastures. Pigs root for tubers, munch on mushrooms, catch small rodents, and forage for nuts and a variety of plants growing wild in the shade of trees.

Q: Do your animals receive hormones or antibiotics?

A: When raised properly on pasture accessible to grass and sunlight, antibiotics are unnecessary. Even on the best farms, sometimes an animal becomes ill. Antibiotics might be used to save its life. Once it recovers, antibiotics are discontinued. But if daily antibiotics are routinely given to all animals throughout their lives, there’s something wrong with the operation. Good health is normal. If animals are prone to illness every day, their food and living environment need improvement.

Q: Are you certified organic?

A: Certification fees are expensive. Required paperwork and record keeping is time consuming. Small farmers would rather use sustainable, regenerative, better-than-organic farming methods, produce higher quality food, and pass the savings on to you. Local grocers or farmers market prices are more reasonable than certified organic.

Local, non-certified foods aren’t shipped long distances or kept in storage for months before distribution.
They’re often picked the same day they’re sold, or the day before. You get fresher, more flavorful and
nutritious, higher quality food at lower than organic prices.

Enjoy your conversations with your farmers, and be on your way to a healthier, tastier menu.

May you be deeply nourished!

All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together. Which brings me to my thought this month: it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation. I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart. We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food. Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things. They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state. Then they put all these pieces together and call it food. But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons. First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm. Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments: water, land, and forest. For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind. The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc." It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted: "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces." Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals. As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them. The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies. We use pigs to aerate compost. Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism. "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud. He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied: "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate." Folks, I had not prepped him for that question. When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion. They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills. Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity." She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach. This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do. It's that simple. Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything. You can't just eat well and not exercise. You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight. Hydration. Sleep. Stress. Forgiveness. Gratitude. It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together. Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price. And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome. We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface. Thank you. Joel