Mission Statement: Explained

written by

Joel Salatin

posted on

December 11, 2023

To develop environmentally, economically, and emotionally enhancing agricultural prototypes and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.



To provide intentional-thinking investment-oriented patrons with safe, dependable, nutritious, authentic sustenance that heals personally and ecologically.


That's right, we have two! 

Polyface is both an educational farm and a direct-to-consumer farm. 

Where's our passion? Both! 

Why? Because they go hand in hand.

Notice that neither mission statement says anything about sales volume. Thematically, these mission statements address farming directly and food tangentially. Good farming does not necessarily create good food systems because the food can spoil or be adulterated in processing. One thing is for sure, however: food can never be better than the farming that produces it. So while good farming can produce food that gets messed up on the way to the table, what’s served can never exceed the quality created at the farm.

With that in mind, we’d like to explain why Polyface is your best source of food not because it’s nutrient-dense; not because it tastes good; not because it has delightful texture (although all of those are also true). The reason why Polyface deserves your patronage is because it heals land. Over the years, numerous scientists have used Polyface land to study our farming principles.

Nearly a decade ago a Smithsonian-sponsored spider study concluded that our systems yielded substantially enhanced populations of spiders, the insect world’s keystone species. If you’re scared of spiders, you’re not alone: so are grasshoppers, crickets, and flies. But unless you’re really small, they won’t catch you in their web. They just catch bad guys.

More recently, another group has verified enhanced diversity in bird populations, biomass variety, pollinator populations, and soil organic matter development (you could read that “carbon sequestration”). Having been at this for more than half a century now, we can attest to the fact that every time we touch a piece of land, all of these positive things develop.

More wildlife. More earthworms. Cleaner water. More soil. Higher fertility and more dense vegetation. We do not say these things pridefully; far from it. The clear and definite developments attest to the Creator’s design that we humbly follow. If they didn’t work, we would doubt nature’s template, nature’s pattern. But the fact that they do work, and work abundantly and aesthetically, proves the authenticity, the efficacy, of living systems’ design.

Healing land is what we do. Your patronage touches land through our hands. It’s that simple. Unless you’ve been sleeping lately, you know that the local food/alternative food space is getting crowded. Just 15 years ago Polyface was the only game in town. Today, dozens compete in this space. That’s a good thing, but just like any growing movement, it comes with downsides. All sorts of different narratives, marketing phrases, and claims vie for your attention. This chorus can be confusing at best; paralyzing at worst.

Over the years, several nearby landowners have approached us about managing their land, bringing our healing touch to it, and so far we’ve generally been able to accommodate these requests. With all of our creativity, energy, and investment going into these other properties over the last couple of years, we’ve frankly neglected marketing. We’ve launched numerous young farmers through our internship/apprenticeship program and built a wonderfully efficient farm guild.

Now it’s time to leverage it with additional production. The whole goal here is not business growth, but touching land with a more significant and strategic caress. Rather than viewing our patrons as customers, we view you as fellow laborers in this land healing ministry.

Well, you might ask, isn’t everyone in this space in that business? Let’s talk about that.

Shenandoah Organics came into Harrisonburg several years ago with big money and government grants. They’re filling defunct factory chicken houses with organic chickens with lots of grain from overseas. The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) has just okayed 1 square foot per chicken for factory organic houses. Dear folks, this does not heal land. But it sure muddies the water when Polyface refuses to play the organic certification charade.

How about Animal Welfare Approved? Sounds groovy, huh? But they want their male piggies to be castrated at less than a week old. The best farrowing systems are in sow pods (6-10) where such a procedure means death to the farmer. The certification actually hurts the pigness of the pig.

And how about “we feed our pigs and chickens a vegetarian diet?” At Polyface, we want pigs and chickens to scratch and root, eating bugs, worms, and scavenged delicacies. So again, the certification denies the most basic instinctual and dietary desires of the animal. By definition, you can’t have animals on pasture and certify a vegetarian diet. And yet this is a common requirement in certification circles. That’s not healing.

Whole Foods says Kosher and Halal are animal abuse. Relay Foods sells out to Door-to-Door Organics and moves out of Charlottesville. Wal-Mart has become the world’s largest vendor of organic foods. Industrial organic dominates the food scene; farmer’s markets are in decline. Factory-farmed organics offer ultra-pasteurized (read that, dead) milk that’s shelf-stable for months. Really?

Dear folks, I won’t bore you with all the nuances of certifications, but I hope this little foray shows why we don’t participate in any of them. We’d rather touch some more land than sit at a desk all day slogging through inane paperwork. Where is our credibility? In the seeing, the eating, the smelling, the touching. That is why we have always maintained a 24/7/365 open-door policy. It’s our ultimate accountability in a world dizzy with bureaucracy and cleverspeak. The earthworms don’t lie. The bumblebees don’t lie. The spiders … well, they lie in wait. Ha!

In the cacophony of marketplace noise, then, why should anyone patronize Polyfacerather than Wal-Mart organics or anyone else? The answer is simple: we heal the land and we germinate farmers. Visitors always comment on the happy animals and happy farmers here, most of whom are under the age of 35. That is part of the healing and perhaps the most significant part. Healing requires touching and touching requires hands.

Perhaps one of the most sobering cultural statistics today is that half of all farmland will change hands in the next 15 years. The average American farmer is now 60 years old, and as they age out, many, if not most, do not have a succession plan except the realtor. Who will touch this land? Foreign interests? Wall Street investors? More orthodox farmers dumping more herbicides and planting more Genetically Modified Organisms to receive nano-particles on the way to the store?

We have reason to believe that Polyface and its cadre of new young farmers are in a perfect position to touch this land with a decidedly healing approach. In order to touch more land, however, we need more patrons. Daniel has dubbed this “The Year of Marketing.” While this may sound like some sort of shameless promotion, realize that we have never, and don’t plan to ever, create a financial sales target like most businesses.

We do, however, want to fill up the acreage we currently manage. We’ve developed extremely efficient and easily replicated production systems. The more of these we can get on the land, the faster the land will heal. The only reason for expanding our market is to open up more opportunities for land healing and germinating new farmers. Those are far more noble goals than business growth. If anyone has an idea about doing this without market expansion, we’re all ears.

Just remember, when you buy Polyface food, extending out in a direct line from that decision is an acre sequestering more carbon, producing more earthworms, supporting more pollinators, and yes, germinating more farmers. We hope this reminder of your visceral participation will combine with the nutrient density, animal welfare, and great taste to which you’re accustomed. Thank you for talking us up and sharing with your neighbors.

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