Photo: Participant Media/Food, Inc.
Joel Salatin, 53, is a fulltime third generation alternative farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. His 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.
In addition to open pasture, Polyface has 450 woodland acres, that Salatin refers to as a “forest farm.” Besides selling firewood and lumber, the farm’s pigs are finished on acorns for a month before slaughter, which saves money on grains and feed. Salatin claims that running pigs in the woods (George Washington did so with his own swine herds), and being able to manage and control this technique, will eventually make confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) obsolete.
