Resilience

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posted on

July 16, 2025

RESILIENCE

Lots of evenings recently have featured a beautiful heavenly show of thunder and lightning. Beautiful, yes, but also usually preceded by heavy winds and a quick downpour. It reminds me of how crazy weather can be. Each year differs from others. Each day also differs from others. We all joke about our crazy Virginia weather and we wear our hoodies in the morning and our tank tops in the afternoon.

This year is the first year that I have been at Polyface where we have had the creek running into July. It has been an abundant year with plentiful rainfall and fertile grass. Last year however we worked through drought-like symptoms.

The crazy thing about weather is that we have no control over it at all. What we can do is adapt and prepare. We can pivot priorities as needed and set up infrastructure that allows for us to thrive when the unexpected happens.

Lots of farming is learning to be prepared yet also flexible. Farming is about picking up the pieces from a storm and figuring out how to do it better next time.

It is a lot like life, isn’t it? Just like the weather, life can throw you unexpected curve balls. It can bring abundance one year and the next can leave you wondering if there will be enough.

As a farmer, I plan ahead and batten down the hatches when I see heavy winds on the horizon or prepare for frozen water pipes when it dips below freezing in the winter. As a human, I can pick up the phone and check in on my close friends and family, I can plant a garden and source good food to prepare myself for the storms of life.

I am quickly learning that resilience is an essential quality in life. Don’t just ask yourself the question: “Do I have what I need for when a crisis comes?” but also: “Am I the type of person that I need to be for when a crisis comes?”
Being a resilient person is still being your true person in a crisis. What does it take to keep you kind, calm and joyful despite change and loss? You don’t want to turn into a stressed and angry presence as soon as things are upheaved in your life. But this doesn’t just naturally happen. Take three steps back from a crisis and ask yourself, how do I prepare now to be that person then?

Here are some questions to get you started as you contemplate how to be the person you need to be for whatever storms life throws at you:
Do I know what I believe? Am I grounded in the truth? Do I have community around me? People that I love and that love me? How can I now grow those relationships? Do I need to forgive anyone? Is there anything that I need to cut out of my life that is causing me to be unhealthy? What are my values? How am I living them out? Is my lifestyle sustainable and aligned to my values?

There are many other steps we can take to grow into the people we want to be but hopefully this can get you started.

I must confess, I am not naturally inclined to check the weather, I am much more of a take-it-as-it-comes kinda girl. Maybe “fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants” is a more accurate description! But in order to be a good farmer, I have disciplined myself to prepare for weather patterns, checking high and low temperatures for the day and planning ahead for rain and wind. I am not perfect but I had to start where I was and just begin showing up and doing the best I can.

That is all I am encouraging you to do. Give yourself grace, commit and just show up. Don’t let the storms of life have control of you but instead find your footing and press into resilience. We can’t predict the weather outside or life circumstances but we can prepare our hearts for when the storms come!

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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

Resilience

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