Like most of you, I was anxiously awaiting the epic conclusion of the Polyface Farms Field Day saga. Unfortunately for me, I was tasked with writing it rather than just waiting to read it. Nonetheless, I believe Diana left off on our quest toward lunch. The picture above demonstrates this as we finished our tour with Joel and headed with the crowd. As you can see, I am on the left side of the picture still in a walking boot. This definitely added to the complexity of the field day. I got good with the boot in the previous six weeks, when on flat ground. However, rolling pasture is a different story. Because of this, we were one of the last to get food. That was not a problem as there was plenty to go around for everyone, but was a problem for us as the two farm-fresh eggs that were consumed at 6 a.m. that morning had been absorbed hours before this picture. 
NOTE: The older gentleman in the orange hat just in front of me is packing an iPad. I thought that was pretty cool!

More drone pics of the Field Day from Darren Doherty.  The first two are of the last stop on the morning tour at the pig glen and the last one is a high overhead view of the lunch lines.

This picture is awesome, again from Darren Doherty. This is the primary 100 acres of Polyface Farms, give or take a few acres.  If we start at the pool in the middle area, that is the Salatin house. Directly left is their new store and chicken processing shed with the large pond behind it. The three grey rectangles are hoop houses where they over-winter their chickens and pigs. The four lines of white boxes are the broiler chicken shelters. Notice immediately behind them it's brown from chicken droppings, but if you follow it back you notice the tracks disappear and the grass gets greener. Another strip of chicken shelters is below them and to the left. In the lower left-hand corner is where we stopped to see the cows. The Eggmobiles and the Millennium Feathernet are all in that area. That grass looks different because of it being grazed. Turkeys were in the very bottom left corner and we continued the counterclockwise walk to the food tents. It looks like the tour was with the chickens at this time. The "parking lot" is usually a grazing area and the cows were in that area up until about two days prior to the event. This is why it is not as green, but I'm sure the 2000 people didn't help either.

After lunch we had a protein coma and viewed some of the vendors that were there.  Not just any vendors, only Salatin approved vendors.  We noticed their "Carbon Shed" which is an area where they dump all of their chicken offal for composting with as much carbon (i.e. wood chips) as they can.  We walked by it and while there were a few flies, no odor was noticed.

The afternoon started with Daniel Salatin talking about his experience with rabbits. Daniel has raised rabbits for meat since he was nine years old and all of his rabbits today are direct descendants of the ones he first received from some family friends. This is called line breeding and essentially, he "ruthlessly" culled rabbits in his first few years to select for the "best" rabbits. Many would think the "best" would be the larger rabbits with more meat, but that does you no good if they don't eat the "free" food (i.e. grass/pasture) and if they aren't hardy. So Daniel selected for ease of transition to pasture and healthy rabbits that had good litters. Good litters means more rabbits. Any rabbits that had teeth problems, sniffles, health issues, poor transition to pasture and a variety of other things were culled out. Now, he has rabbits that do not have teeth problems, do not have sniffles, eat grass the moment they can and have great litters.  

The rabbits are housed in cages that are installed several feet up off the floor in the Raken (rabbit/chicken) House. Chickens are kept at ground level for the purpose of utilizing their handy rakes (feet) to scratch the rabbit poo, which falls from the cages above, into the bedding. Therefore, there is no build-up of rabbit droppings and the bedding is aerated and easily transformed into usable compost.

What we did not know was that he had some breeding pairs for sale.  There was no way we could get some as we had a 12-hour drive home and weren't leaving for two days. However, it would have been fantastic to start our rabbit venture with Daniel's rabbits. 

Diana attended a seminar on their chick brooding.  They have a giant shed that broods their chickens and the pictures show how they send feed on a pulley system and separate out the chickens into batches so as not to have too many together.  This avoids piling up and suffocation. She learned a few pointers from their brooding operation. First, she noticed that the wood shavings used for bedding were of a much finer grade than what we use. Even though the chicks pictured were only a couple days away from going to pasture, the bedding was still clean and there was very little odor, and no new shavings had been added. This led Diana to conclude that we needed to switch to fine-grade shavings for our brooder, since we were constantly having to add fresh bedding to our brooder. She also took note of the clean, convenient method of offering water to the chicks through the use of a nipple waterer and learned about a simple schedule to use for offering grit to the chickens.

We also received a tour of their chicken processing station. Past movies have shown the Salatins processing out in a field, but now they have an open air processing structure that is connected to the Polyface store. Not surprisingly, the processing area is well designed and when all interns and apprentices are there, they can process up to 500 chickens in 120-150 minutes. 

We also learned a bit about the use of their hoophouses throughout the year, follThen the day ended with a Q&A event with Joel Salatin, which was both informative and entertaining.

An exhausting day ended with us buying some Polyface bacon to go with the farm-fresh eggs at our rental house.  It was a fantastic day and one that I hope all of you can experience at some point. While the Field Days will not be offered again, Polyface Farms is open 24/7, 365 days a year to visitors.  As Joel states, he desires to be fully transparent and in order to do this, you have to be willing to see people whenever. We plan on going back to a smaller event or just to visit the farm again some day with the kids. 

When we do, we plan on staying at the same rental house again. Breezy Hill was a fantastic place to stay and only a mile or so from Polyface Farms. We felt very lucky to be one of the first families to stay there and to be so close to the farm. 

I could go on longer about what it "felt" like to be at Polyface, or for the Shenandoah Valley for that matter. However, that becomes hard to explain when you talk about "good energy" and stuff.  Just experience it for yourself. While Polyface is a long way away (for us, at least), my guess is that you can get that feeling by visiting any farm that is focused on doing things the "right way" and working to maintain happy animals, happy people, and happy plants.

Trevor
+ Diana

Originally, Trevor and I were planning to celebrate our 10-year anniversary in Las Vegas, but instead decided to take a short trip to Virginia and attend the 2014 Polyface Farms Field Day. Polyface Farms, a multi-generational farm run by the Salatin family, is a self-described "non-industrial food production oasis" that is known for its holistic animal husbandry practices and its use of perennial polycultures. Polyface Farms has been featured in documentaries such as Food, Inc., Farmageddon, and Fresh, the Movie. Joel Salatin has written nine books including The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer and Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World.

We arrived at the farm at 6:30 a.m. prepared for a long day of touring and  workshops. Since none of the scheduled activities took place until 8:00 we had some time to wander around the farm and peek at the buildings, gardens, and animals. It took me all of 30 seconds to get cow poo smeared on my leg.

At 8:00 a.m. we started the walking tour with Joel Salatin and about 900 other guests.

First we visited the pastured broiler shelters. These shelters are also currently housing pullets that just started laying eggs and will soon be replacing old layers in the Eggmobile.

We have studied extensively the Polyface model of raising pastured poultry and were already very familiar with this operation, though it was interesting to witness the perfectly staggered pattern of all the shelters on pasture. We currently have one shelter that is nearly identical to those shown here, only 60% the size.

One helpful bit of information we gathered is that these shelters are held together by a wire that runs across the ground, halfway through the length of the shelter connecting the two sides. We use a 2'x2' for this same purpose but have had problems getting chicks stuck under the 2'x2' when we are trying to move the shelter. The wire also has the added benefit of cutting down on the overall weight of the structure.

The next stop on the walking tour was a scenic 15-minute hike across a walking bridge and up the hill to visit the cattle. The cattle are contained by 2 strands of electric wire in a long, narrow paddock. They are moved to a new paddock every day. It sounds like a fairly simple operation of moving the stakes, running the wires, moving the basic shade structure, and calling over the cattle (who are eager to move to a fresh "salad bar").

Joel Salatin considers himself to be a grass farmer. His goal at Polyface is to properly manage the pasture by introducing cattle to pasture when the length of the grass is in its "teenage" stage--not too short and not too long, and where grazing results in rapid regrowth. The paddock size should be just right so as to graze every bit of pasture once. If there are lots of areas that are left ungrazed, the paddock size is too large, and if there are areas that are grazed a second time and are too short, then the area is too small.

The "Eggmobile" always follows behind the cattle. Layers in this system are free-ranging birds that earn their keep on the farm by working as the pasture sanitation crew. They scratch out the cow patties to help even out the manure load on the pasture and they gobble up bugs, worms, and fly larvae (maggots). The Eggmobile is always three days behind the cattle specifically because fly larvae turn into flies in four days. Eggs from these birds are just a bonus.

For some reason it just really tickled me to watch the free-ranging layers out amongst us, scratching for bugs and totally oblivious to the 900 people standing around.

The Millennium Feathernet is a large structure at Polyface that houses chicken layers whose purpose is to produce eggs. The large structure is surrounded by a very large electric poultry net and the entire paddock is moved every three days. We use a scaled-down version of this same model for our layers.

Next, we visited the turkeys on pasture, which are raised in a similar system as the chicken layers. They have a very simple shelter for roosting and an electric poultry net for "free-ranging" that is moved every few days. We learned that turkeys are very sensitive and prone to illness and death while in the brooder during the first several weeks of life, but after seven weeks of age they are hardy birds that can tolerate a wide range of weather conditions on pasture.

Right next to the turkeys is the simple barn that houses cows in the winter and pigs in the spring. The barn is completely open on one side and has many open areas to allow great ventilation for the animals. The cattle are fed hay in the harshest winter months and are kept on a deep straw bedding. As the cattle add manure, more layers of straw and corn are added to the bedding. The deep carbon bedding keeps the cattle dry and healthy, and the corn slowly ferments in the anaerobic bedding. As soon as the cattle are put out to pasture in the spring, pigs are moved in. They root through the bedding digging for the fermented corn, aerating the litter in the process. The bedding is then turned into a nice compost which increases the farm's fertility. Polyface originally acquired pigs with the intention of using their "pigaerator" qualities. Pork was just a delicious bonus.

Pigs are also kept in wooded paddocks and are rotated every 5-10 days. In order to consistently monitor the amount of animal pressure on this land, the determination of when to move the pigs is simply based on when their feeder runs out.

As the pigs have rooted around in the paddocks they have cleared areas in the previously-forested land, which has naturally filled in with grasses, herbs, and weeds. Joel Salatin referred to this area as a pig savannah. What really impressed us was the complete lack of pig smell; it was a beautiful area that had no odor whatsoever.

The tour ended right before lunch. The rest of our day spent at the Polyface Farms Field Day will be included in Part 2.

- Diana