Diversified Everything

Swope, Virginia

On one 550-acre farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, there’s not much that isn’t diversified. The nationally-recognized Polyface Farm is owned by Joel and Teresa Salatin, Joel’s mother Lucille, and includes their children, Daniel and Rachel, and two apprentices who have woven an ecological approach to farming that is convincingly more profitable, healthful, environmentally sustainable and emotionally satisfying than what many think of as American farms.

For the Salatins, it’s not just what you raise, or how you raise your pork or beef or eggs, just to name a few of their many products. Diversification is the fundamental basis of their holistic operation, cultivating a diversified customer base in diverse geographic markets. Joel Salatin calls this diversified marketing “relationship marketing,” which includes farmers’ markets, on-farm sales, agents for farmers’ markets, restaurants, delivery subcontractors, and his fastest-growing new niche, buying clubs.

“What we have at Polyface Farm is a holistic, connected product,” explains Joel. “We’ve searched for and helped create sales avenues that maintain this holistic, connected paradigm. We’ve connected with people who want to opt-out of the Wall Street-managed food system and who foster word-of-mouth advertising for our products that are tastier, healthier, safer, and fresher.”

“The buying clubs,” continues Joel, “are really nothing more than refinements of the mushrooming Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement. The clubs make transportation — a real challenge for farmers to get their product to market — pay for itself through the volume of sales.” Buyer clubs are groups of customers in a specific geographic location who pool their retail orders into one order every couple months. Polyface Farm’s customer base includes about four hundred individuals, thirty restaurants, seven drop points for buyer clubs, and five stands at farmers’ markets in Washington DC and Arlington, Virginia.

You could say that Joel and Teresa had a nutty start in farming as adults (Joel has been farming with his family since childhood). Following an opportunity in 1982, they became walnut processors, hulling in the high margin nuts under contract for Hammous Products Company in Stockton, Maryland. When sales fell far short a year later, they switched to raising chicken broilers, picking up a business dropped by a nearby Amish farm. From then on, they kept on diversifying their farm operations into other livestock, always endeavoring to sell directly to their customers, with no middlemen.

“A lot has changed for our farm over the last thirty-five years,” says Joel. “When we started out, we sold everything from the gates of our farm. Now our sales break down roughly as 35 percent from restaurants, 35 percent from the farm gate, 20 percent from metro farmers’ markets through brokered sales and 10 percent metro buying clubs.

While farmers have a long history of self-reliance when it comes to machine maintenance and repairs, Salatin believes that for farming to sustain the farmers, the farmers need to reclaim control over the rest of how the products — regardless of whether it’s pork, eggs or tomatoes — reach the dinner table of the people who enjoy eating them.

“The small farmer has to get retail prices for their products,” concludes Joel. “We have to secure the higher margins that retail prices bring. Therefore, we’ve learned to wear lots of hats. We’re farmers, yes, but also accountants, marketers, negotiators, graphic designers, public relations people. By diversifying skill sets within your farm — doing what other farmers often let others do for them — we can keep more of the money ourselves.”

Polyface Farm’s retail sales plan worked and dispels the popular myth that farming families can’t make ends meet. Their diversified operations, structured as a non-public corporation, gross over $300,000 a year, netting about $100,000 before paying four full-time salaries of family members and apprentice stipends. Some of Polyface Farm’s premium products command retail prices two or three times more than typical grocery store prices, and others approximate typical name-brand prices.

Diversification is most visible, however, in Polyface Farm’s processing and innovative animal husbandry practices. The family raises “salad bar beef,” a natural, grass-fed beef production system with intensive rotational grazing, premium chickens and turkeys on pasture, pastured rabbits and turkeys, feature “pigaerator pork,” whereby the pigs root around to create compost, and layer chickens that are moved around the farm in an eggmobile. As if that’s not enough, there’s the on-farm processing of chicken broilers that the whole family participates in and cutting of firewood from their forests for cordwood sales. A bandsaw generates revenue from lumber and custom sawing. One of Joel’s other talents, writing, has led to numerous books detailing Polyface Farm’s approaches: Salad Bar Beef, Pastured Poultry Profits, and You Can Farm: The Entrepreneurs Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farming Enterprise. His newest release is Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer’s Guide to Farm Friendly Food.

“We’re beyond organic,” comments Joel, noting that his operations have never been or ever will be USDA-certified organic. “We believe animals were meant to be raised in pastures. The present standards compromise too much by way of the nuances for farming ecologically. I don’t want to sterilize my compost pile, for example, killing beneficial insects and destroying important nutrients. Yet present organic certification standards call for high compost pile temperatures.”

While not jumping on the certified organic bandwagon, Joel is quick to recognize other complementary enterprises to further bolster his balance sheet. Polyface Farm is diversifying its portfolio of products to include niche fruit crops like apples, blackberries and seedless table grapes. Following the national trend of specialized cuts of meats, the farm has started to offer specialized chicken processing, featuring breast and boneless cuts.

Diversification has also provided two other key benefits. “First,” says Joel, “our processes have broken the disease-causing pathogen cycles that might otherwise be found on farms that opt for more industrial models of production. Secondly, to take the drudgery out of farming, running a farm with so many facets results in you never doing the same thing every day. Diversity creates an incredible emotional newness.”

Confides Joel about his learning through the years: “If you raise one more pig or rabbit or beef cow than you have a market for, its value is zero. So avoid growing faster than your market. There’s a tremendous balancing act between production and sales. You need to keep your customers hungry.”

For now at least, in parts of the Shenandoah Valley and nearby communities there seems to be an insatiable appetite for more of what Polyface Farm has to offer.