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Going ‘beyond organic’ makes small farms profitable

US farmer Joel Salatin advocates a holistic, pasture-based approach and focuses on the local market. By farming multiple livestock species, he’s managed to cut down on artificial inputs. Robyn Joubert reports.

Joel Salatin might call himself a third-generation lunatic farmer, but to his followers he’s the ultimate role model for the pasture-based farming system. In the US, Joel is renowned for the unconventional farming methods he employs on his family farm, Polyface, in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. Small-scale grass farmers prize Joel’s no-nonsense books, including Pastured Poultry Profits, Salad Bar Beef and Holy Cows & Hog Heaven.

These offer a wealth of practical insight and strong focus on farm finances. “Everything we do is completely counter to current agricultural wisdom,” he admits. “We spurn technological advances which advocate petroleum-based fertilisers, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics. We honour the traditional patterns of nature.”

Practising what you preach
Polyface Farm, meaning “the farm with many faces”, is what Joel terms “beyond organic”. Their website www.polyfacefarms.com says, “We’re in the redemption business: healing the land, the food, the economy, and the culture.” Joel argues that animals should be grown in season, so they can develop naturally and more healthily and without expensive artificial inputs. He’s developed a pasture rotation system that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximises the composting of animal waste. Each species on the farm is dependent on another.

The farm is a family operation. Joel (52) juggles farm work with speaking appointments and is writing his seventh book. His wife Teresa does the bookkeeping. Their 28-year-old son Daniel runs the day-to-day operations and his wife Sheri handles marketing. Counting Joel’s three grandchildren and his mother, four generations live in harmony with nature at Polyface.

Polyface owns 200 acres (81ha) of land and rents another 400 acres (162ha). It supports a mixed bag of free-ranging animals. Annual production amounts to about 900 head of cattle, 30 000 broiler chickens, 4 000 layers, 800 pigs, and 1 000 rabbits, plus 450 acres (182ha) of timber.

Salad bar beef
Joel refers to his pasture as a “salad bar” for farm animals and calls beef from grass-fed cattle, “salad-bar beef”. “Our goal is to approximate nature as closely as possible,” he says. “Our cows only forage and are moved away from their manure and onto a new pasture paddock roughly every day. We use portable electric fencing to keep them herded tightly, as is their instinct. “This natural model heals the land, thickens the forage, reduces weeds, stimulates earthworms, reduces pathogens and increases the meat’s nutritional qualities.”

Joel believes salad-bar beef gives smaller beef farmers an edge, saying that a small operation can turn an excellent profit, regardless of the commodity price of calves. He reckons 95% of US cow-calf producers would be financially better off following the salad bar beef prototype than selling commodity calves or yearlings. Cattle are protected by portable shade mobiles in the summer as they’re moved between pastures. Joel measures pasture by “cow days” per acre. What one cow eats in a day determines how many cows you can put on one acre.

Stocking your salad bar
A good salad bar offers a full complement of tasty, nourishing grasses and legumes, kept fresh and appealing at all times. It’s maintained with intensive paddock management, giving grazed pasture ample time to recover, and natural refuges for birds and other wildlife, essential to maintaining ecological balance. “What goes into the salad bar is key to the happiness of your pastures and cows,” Joel says. “A cow always eats dessert first. For a cow, the choice between clover and ragweed is like the choice for a child between ice cream and liver.” To protect the tastiest morsels from overgrazing, Joel uses a rotational grazing system which follows the blaze of growth in a plant’s cycle.

“This charts the relation of root growth to top growth in an S curve,” he explains. “This growth can be helped by letting a plant grow several inches before it’s lightly grazed, and allowing it to regrow to the same length before it’s grazed again.”

Integrating chickens and pigs
Just as birds in nature follow herbivores as biological cleaners, flocks of egg-laying hens follow the cows, scratching around in the fields and spreading manure as they search for flies and larvae. They lay their eggs in the fields in Joel’s specially-designed “eggmobiles” – portable henhouses 3,6m x 6,1m. The Feathernet is a similar concept. The birds are secured inside a large electrified netting, moved every three days to offer cleaner pasturage.

Pasture-fed broilers also follow the cows, in 3m x 3,6m x 0,6m high floorless, portable field shelters, each housing about 75 birds. Broilers are slaughtered at about eight weeks. “Integrating the cows to mow ahead of the shelters shortens the grass and encourages the chickens to eat tender, fresh sprouts,” says Joel. “We want every animal to eat as much green material as its genetic potential allows.”

Animal-prepared compost
In the cold Virginia winter, the entire farm hibernates. “Even the soil needs to rest because the organisms within it go to sleep,” Joel says. Cows are sheltered in open-sided sheds and provided with winter bedding of straw. Manure and urine are covered daily with fresh wood chips. As the floor level rises underfoot, hay troughs are raised by a pulley. Sawdust and whole corn kernels are mixed in with the bedding. The cows trample the bedding and the mass ferments and generates heat.
In the spring, pigs are sent into the sheds to aerate the mixture as they root around for the corn. This helps create compost, which Joel calls the backbone of the farm’s fertility programme. The ready-mix compost is spread back on the fields to grow hay and vegetables and fertilise new grasses.

In summer and autumn, the pigs forage in separate pastures rotated every few days with electric fences. They sometimes forage in the oak plantations for acorns.
Forage-based rabbits and turkeys are the final two “faces” of Polyface. A portable hoophouse shelters the turkeys inside their electrified-netting paddock and the birds are moved every few days to a fresh pasture. They eat copious amounts of grass which supplements their grain ration.

Joel’s son Daniel has developed a line-bred genetic base for meat rabbits which are hardy and can eat forage without getting diarrhoea. They are housed in elevated shelters above the chickens in a custom-made structure. The breeding stock receives unmedicated alfalfa pellets and hay or fresh greens. In season, many of the rabbits are finished in portable, slatted-floored field shelters which are moved daily.

A way of life
While critics say this food is too expensive, and the method won’t produce enough food to feed a growing nation, Joel disagrees. He says his farm feeds more people per acre than others, although it does require more labour. “Small-scale production can work because cutting the distance between the farm and consumer reduces transportation costs and favours the local farmer. Consumers are also starting to place greater value on the variety and fresh food that local farms offer,” he says.
Joel won’t ship his food to locations further away than a four-hour drive.

The farm delivers to club drop-off points at nearly two dozen towns in Virginia and Maryland and serves more than 36 regional restaurants, caterers, bakeries and small food stores in the region (see box: Direct customer marketing). “We want people to support farms close to home and keep the money in their local communities,” says Joel. “We think there’s greater strength in being decentralised and spreading out rather than in being concentrated and centralised” (see box: Local is lekker).

Joel is romancing the next generation back into farming by offering a way to make a good living while reconnecting with the land and producing clean, nutritious food. To him, this holistic approach isn’t just the future, it’s the moral way to farm. “The greatest tragedy is that this way of farming is seen as abnormal,” he concludes.
Contact Polyface farms on (001) 540 887 8194, e-mail polyface@northriver.coop
or go to www.polyfacefarms.com. |fw

2009-06-01