Polyface, Inc.

Joel Salatin, 53, is a fulltime farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. A third generation alternative farmer, he returned to the farm fulltime in 1982 and continued refining and adding to his parents’ ideas.

The farm services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products using relationship marketing.

He holds a BA degree in English and writes extensively in magazines such as STOCKMAN GRASS FARMER, ACRES USA, and AMERICAN AGRICULTURALIST.

The family’s farm, Polyface Inc. (“The Farm of Many Faces”) has been featured in SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, GOURMET and countless other radio,television and print media. Profiled on the Lives of the 21st Century series with Peter Jennings on ABC World News, his after-broadcast chat room fielded more hits than any other segment to date. It achieved iconic status as the grass farm featured in the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA by food writer guru Michael Pollan.

A sought-after conference speaker, he addresses a wide range of issues, from “creating the farm your children will want” to “making a white collar salary from a pleasant life in the country.” A wordsmith, he describes his occupation as “mob-stocking hervbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.” His humorous and conviction-based speeches are akin to theatrical performances, often receiving standing ovations.

His speaking and writing reflect dirt-under-the-fingernails experience punctuated with mischievous humor. He passionately defends small farms, local food systems, and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm.

His mother Lucille, wife Teresa, daughter Rachel, son Daniel, daughter-in-law Sheri, grandsons Travis and Andrew, and granddaughter Lauryn, work fulltime together on the family farm.

Joel Salatin was a great addition to our series, "The Ethics of Food and the Environment." This series brings scholars, policy makers and practitioners to campus to reflect on the ways that what we eat and consume can raise moral questions. After hearing these presentations -- from some of the world's leading climate scientists -- members of the audience often wonder what they can do. That's where Joel's talk really resonated. With great humor and passion, Joel presented an intriguing alternative to conventional food production, and inspired the audience to connect to local food systems.

Debra Satz
Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society
Director, Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, Political Science
Stanford University

Ballet In The Pasture: Polyface Farm's choreographed plant-animal symbiosis heals the landscape, the community, and the eater. A theatrical performance mixing humor and bomb-shell food system analysis, Salatin's stemwinder educates, entertains, and encourages. First rate pictures let the audience take a virtual tour around this grass-based multi-species livestock farm. Salatin's passionate explanations offer up a veritable epiphany on food and farming. Life-changing and ultimately memorable, Ballet in the Pasture is Salatin's signature performance.
Food Emancipation: Why can't you buy raw milk, ice cream with eggs in it, or home-made sausage? America's food system, enslaved by a global corporate bureaucratic fraternity, offers less choice amid the perception of abundance. The only reason the framers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights did not guarantee citizens freedom of food choice was because they could not have conceived of a day when private treaty neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce would be demonized and criminalized. In this call to grass roots food activism, Salatin seeks a Food Emancipation Proclamation, freeing citizens to opt out of the industrial food fraternity.
Dancing With Dinner: Industrial food is aesthetically and aromatically unpleasant from production to supermarket. Although eating is arguably the most intimate thing humans do--next to the act of marriage--during the last few decades Americans have lost their dinner dance partner. Culinary skills and local food connections have been replaced with "No Trespassing" signs, bureaucratic paperwork, unpronounceable labels, bar codes, and beeping cash registers. The soul-satisfying act of eating is now a sterile, manufactured to-do item snarfed up on the run. Amidst this frenetic lifestyle, the neglected dinner dance partner beckons to return . . . at the farm, at farmers' markets, Community Supported Agriculture drop points, and in the kitchen. In this eclectic presentation,Salatin links culture, agriculture, and a romantic dinner dance partner.
Relationship Marketing: For nearly half a century, Polyface Farm’s patron base has morphed and expanded with the culture and new food awareness. As a 10-year-old with a backyard flock of laying hens, Salatin pedaled eggs around his rural neighborhood in the basket of his bicycle. Mixing humorous stories with passionate “aha’s”, this presentation draws from a host of marketing venues to educate and entertain. Currently, Polyface supplies some 400 families from an on-farm store, 1,600 families in Metropolitan Buying Clubs, 30 restaurants, and 10 retail venues. Each has assets and liabilities, and Salatin freely discusses all the nuances. Heavy on hilarious stories, this talk empowers otherwise reluctant marketers to go for it.
Holy Cows And Hog Heaven: From field to fork, food carries a sacred dimension. The USDA mantra to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper views pigs as inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly the egocentric human mind can conceive. Such disrespect and dishonor carries over toward people and other cultures. A moral, ethical thread connects the field to the plate, a soul-satisfying thread that connects both farmers and eaters in nobility and sacredness.
Local Food To The Rescue: Biosecurity, food borne pathogens, energy, integrity, humane husbandry: local food can correct it all. But to really be a credible percentage of the global food system, it must develop six integrated components: production, processing, marketing, accounting, distribution, and patrons. Building a local food system that works requires aromatic and aesthetic production models that reimbed the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker into the community. Economies of scale in collaborative foodshed distribution compete with corporate volume. And patrons must rediscover their kitchens, eating seasonally and relearning domestic culinary arts.
Working With Your Kids So They Will Want To Work With You: Most farms and family businesses lose continuity because parent and child never cultivated rewarding emotional and economic relationships. Centered around 10 commandments to make the kids love working with mom and dad, this challenging and far-reaching presentation offers techniques to eliminate dawdling, cultivate persistence, and stimulate innovation. It also includes structuring and scaling the farm to make room for the next generation.
Going Full Time With Your Part-Time Farm: Too many wannabee farmers feel tapped in a farmer’s body paying bills with off-farm incomes. Scaling up with emotional, economic, and environmental integrity requires specific techniques like stacking, value adding, divesifying, and building multiple use infrastructures. You don’t need to own land to farm; all the infrastructure and customers are portable. Capital payback leases and other techniques can propel your farm to a white collar salary.
Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices. From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems dailyi face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems. A call for guerrilla marketing, food choice freedom legislation, and empirical pathogen thresholds offers solutions to these bureaucratic hurdles.
Pastured Poultry Profits: Perhaps the most doable pastured-based livestock enterprise is poultry. The reasons are numerous: lowest up-front investment, quick cash turnaround, marketability, easily differentiated, child friendly, simple and portable infrastructure, and on-farm processing. In this mature Polyface model, Salatin walks you through broilers, egg layers, and turkeys. They all have distinctive needs for diet, shelter, marketing, and processing. This talk is hard core how-to, going into the intricate details from brooding to processing. This is still the centerpiece enterprise at Polyface Farm.
Salad Bar Beef: This is the term Salatin coined to describe his pasture-finished cattle: fresh daily paddocks and lots of forage species variety. A hard core how-to talk, this one walks the audience though electric fencing, water systems, breeding, movement logistics, forage growth and rest cycles, stockpiling for dormant seasons, and processing. A permutation on the theme is mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization. Whew! And it’s all here to see.
Forgiveness Farming: The ultimate responsibility of land stewards is to build resiliency into their farms and ranches. Like it or not, nature is not always a gentle spirit. Floods, droughts, disease, winds, sickness, low prices: these and more will strike at some time or another. Preparing for these crises requires that farm businesses insulate themselves from commodity price fluctuations. It means increasing animal and plant immunity, reducing population concentrations, and storing water. This talk ranges broadly into the many vulnerabilities farms experience but offers ways to make those crises less threatening.

Scaling Up Without Selling Your Soul: Using Polyface Farm as an object lesson, this presentation offers a passionate values-based business alternative to the Wall-Streetified numerical growth, growth, growth objective. Daring to take on the very foundations of western business icons like market goals, no IPOs, and incentivized work forces. Many successful entrepreneurial start-ups morph into mercenary empires that lose their distinctives. Intuitively we all know that the most valuable things in life never get put on a balance sheet or business plan: healthy salamanders, dancing earthworms, adoring spouses. First given at the Innovation Immersion conference in 2008, this talk focuses on an alternative business philosophy that preserves the nobility of business.
Worthy Work: Meet Me In The Pasture: Using beautiful pictures of Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, this evangelical-style motivational talk seeks to empower and elevate every person in the organization to a new state of sacredness. The alliterated outline includes 7 major points:
1. Discover Your Parameters
2. Determine Your Protocol
3. Develop Your Partners
4. Define Your Product
5. Diversify Your Portfolio
6. Demand Your Performance
7. Demonstrate Your Priorities
A totally unique motivational approach, Salatin’s agrarian background coupled with his dynamic theatrical style bring fresh insight and perspectives to corporate gatherings. Guaranteed to be a presentation your people will talk about for many days. His many days working alone with land and livestock brings an integrity and salt-of-the-earth strength to any audience.
Watch Where You Step: This hilariously entertaining dramatic presentation pokes whimsical fun at communication and language confusion. All work environments suffer from technical jargon, generational misunderstandings, and assumed knowledge. Light hearted but smattered with communication insights, this presentation is great fun for any gathering. Playing off the many miscommunications in a family farming enterprise, Salatin both entertains and instructs. The simple instruction “Check pigs” doesn’t mean slow down to 40 miles an hour as you go sailing by the pasture. A great talk for after dinner or anytime you want laughs with a point.

Daniel Salatin is the son of Joel Salatin, innovative farmer, writer and speaker. As the third generation on Polyface farm in Swoope, Virginia, he has grown up in the family business.

Polyface services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products through relationship marketing. Daniel has gone from carrying freshly processed chickens while in diapers, to running and over-seeing the day-to-day workings of Polyface. As a seven-year old he started a pastured rabbit enterprise, which has had its ups and downs but continues today. Starting the rabbit business gave him first hand experience with marketing, processing, research and development, and the costs of a new business.

Today Daniel is fully employed by the farm and spends his days orchestrating animal movement, scheduling daily tasks and apprentice training. At twenty-seven, Daniel is married to wife Sheri and has two sons Travis and Andrew and one daughter Lauryn.