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Concept
Polyface Farm
Summary
Polyface Farm is a farm located in rural Swoope, Virginia, run by Joel Salatin and his family. The farm is driven using unconventional methods with the goal of "emotionally, economically and environmentally enhancing agriculture". This farm is where Salatin developed and put into practice many of his most significant agricultural methods. These include direct marketing of meats and produce to consumers, pastured-poultry, grass-fed beef and the rotation method which makes his farm more like an ecological system than conventional farming. Polyface Farm operates a farm store on-site where consumers go to pick up their products.
Salatin encourages people to buy locally to save small businesses. Salatin believes it is advantageous for consumers to know their farmers and where their food comes from.
Salatin says that his Christian faith informs the way he raises and slaughters the animals on his farm. He sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God's love, and believes his method is to honor that of God. Salatin is quoted in the book The Omnivore's Dilemma as justifying the killing of animals for meat because "people have a soul, animals don't...When they die, they just die."
Salatin bases his farm's ecosystem on the principle of observing animals' activities in nature and emulating those conditions as closely as possible. Salatin grazes his cattle outdoors within small pastures enclosed by electrified fencing that is easily moved each evening in an established rotational grazing system. Animal manure fertilizes the pastures and enables Polyface Farm to graze about four times as many cattle as on a conventional farm, thus also saving feed costs. The small size of the pastures forces the cattle to "mob stock", or to eat all the grass.
Polyface raises cattle, pastured meat chickens, egg layers, pigs, turkeys, and rabbits. The diversity in production better utilizes the grass, breaks pathogen cycles, and creates multiple income streams.
Official source
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