Selling Sustainability

Joel Salatin is the owner and operator of Polyface Farms in Augusta County, which focuses on sustainable, environmentally friendly agriculture. He has authored 11 books, including “Salad Bar Beef,” “Pastured Poultry Profit$,” and “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.” He was featured prominently in Michael Pollan’s New York Times best-seller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and the Academy Award-winning documentary “Food, Inc.” VEDP President and CEO Stephen Moret spoke with him about how he runs a successful farm without betraying his operating principles.

Stephen Moret: Joel Salatin calls himself a Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer. Those who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest or the pastor of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Can you share a little about the story of Polyface Farms?

Joel Salatin: Our family came to Virginia in 1961. My parents were from the Midwest. Dad flew in the Navy in World War II. After the war, he went to Indiana University, got a business administration degree, and then always had a dream of doing something in a developing country, so he went to Venezuela as a bilingual accountant with Texas Oil Company, and in seven years saved up enough to buy a 1,000-acre farm in the highlands of Venezuela, and we were there, going right along, until the Junta in 1959 of Perez Jimenez. We had left Texas Oil at that time. We were not diplomats, not missionaries, and were not tied with any American business. We were just ex-pats out there on the land, which made us very vulnerable to the revolutionaries in the Junta, who of course hated Americans.

That was the beginning of the ugly American capitalist pig at that time, and so basically, we fled the back doors, the machine guns came in the front door, we lost everything, spent another year trying to get protection and stay, couldn’t make anything work, so we came back here in 1961 and settled here. So we settled here in Virginia on the most gullied rockpile, a little farm, 550 acres here in the Shenandoah Valley in Augusta County near Staunton, and initially began a lot of conservation work trying to stop the erosion. We just had rocks, and so the first 10 years were primarily conservation, and Dad sought counsel.

How do we make a living on a small farm? We had numerous both public and private counselors come, and the universal advice was, “Graze the forest, borrow more money, plant corn, build silos, buy more chemicals.” And my grandfather had been a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming magazine in 1948, when it started, and had a large compost pile and was very non-chemical at that time and Dad kind of got that environmental bent from him, and of course I got it from my dad. And so Dad instinctively knew that we couldn’t make enough volume to make it on low margin, which is of course what commodity agriculture runs on — high volume, low margin.

We had to somehow figure out how to get a higher margin and wear all the hats of marketing, distribution, processing, so that we actually owned a brand, and so we started experimenting with all sorts of non-chemical farming methods those first 10 years. So by the time I was in high school, we had a plan. We needed to direct market, we needed to run the farm on carbon, not petroleum — or at least real-time carbon, not petroleum — and do more for ourselves. And with that background, when I came back from college, the mortgage was done. We didn’t owe any money and we were able to take this raw land, as poor as it was, and essentially build a pasture-based, multi-speciated, direct-marketed, carbon-run farm on the raw land base.

Moret: It’s a remarkable story. How did your childhood growing up in that context inform your career path and how you thought about building the business?

Salatin: Dad was in business administration, he was an accountant, and very entrepreneurial out of the box. He always said in his accounting practice, his goal was to always work himself out of a job. He wanted small businesses to do books in a way that they could understand and see their own numbers so they didn’t have to spend so much time on his professional expertise. And so that entrepreneurial spirit bled over into our family. My older brother started a rabbit enterprise when he was, I don’t know, 12 or so, and I turned 10 and I said, “Well, I want an enterprise,” and I had a great-uncle that had a chicken farm in Indiana.

So from Sears & Roebuck, the big catalog, I got 50 little chicks and began a chicken enterprise at 10 years old. By the time I got to be about 12, 13, or 14 years old, and I had these eggs and I had a garden, I had my own little business enterprise going there, and Dad, again, saw the potential of direct marketing. We found this local market that was down to two elderly matrons, and we joined the curb market, and I was the main seller and I loved it.

And so all through from eighth grade through graduation from high school, every Saturday morning of the year, I’d get up at 4 a.m. and be down there selling stuff, selling what I had gardened. We had beef, pork, chicken, eggs, produce. We milked a couple of Guernsey cows. We could sell butter, buttermilk, cottage cheese, and did that throughout my school years. And that entrepreneurial, direct-market business interface, I wouldn’t trade it for a million dollars today. And the mentoring of these two elderly matron ladies who took me under their wing — they were probably in their 70s at the time and took me under their wing as a little 14-year-old, and shepherded me into how you display your stuff, how do you talk to happy customers and to disgruntled customers — it was just invaluable, and truly informed us.

Moret: Talk a little bit about the difference between how you run Polyface Farms, and how a more conventional farm might be operated.

Salatin: There are some pretty significant differences and if you boil them down to pretty simple ideas, the first thing is animals move. We live in a culture that doesn’t believe animals need to move, we can lock them up in feed lots and factory houses, and in tiny pens and they don’t have to move. But essentially, we’re looking at nature as a template, and it should give us all pause to realize that, 500 years ago, North America actually grew more animals, more nutrition, than it does today, even with modern methodology.

And so we look to those patterns and say, “What were the templates of that abundance that greeted the Europeans when they arrived here with all the deer, the bison, the turkeys, the pheasants, the flocks of passenger pigeons that John James Audubon said in 1820 covered the sky for three days?” He couldn’t see the sun for the flock of birds that flew over. They weren’t chickens, but it was a lot of birds. If animals move, then you have to have mobile control, because the neighbors don’t want them, and we don’t have migratory things anymore.

So we’ve got to control them, we’ve got to have mobile water because they can’t always walk to the water, and we’ve got to have mobile shelter to protect them from the sun, for example, or inclement weather. And so mobility became, if animals are going to move, you need mobile infrastructure.

And sometimes I think they think we just sat down one day in a focus group and all got into a trance and said, “How can we have a different-looking farm?” And actually, all the innovation that we’ve done in infrastructure has been a natural, physical function, or manifestation of a simple idea, looking at nature as a template and saying, “Oh, animals move.” For example, even when we’re grazing the cows, we don’t just have a hundred acres with cows running around in them. We’ll take 300, 400 head and put them in two acres for one day, and we move them every day like the ancient bison being pushed by wolves and flies to mob them up, and that creates a mosaic across the landscape where there’s always something growing, something mature, something blossoming, something dropping seeds, and so this stimulates the wildlife and the pollinators because there’s always something in bloom because of the mosaic effect of moving them across the landscape in a very systematic way.

So that’s one thing. Another one is that our fertility is based on carbon, and so we do have a lot of forest, a lot of woods, and rather than a fertilizer truck coming in, we have a large industrial chipper that we then can chip diseased and crooked trees, and essentially weed the woodlot like you’d weed green beans.

And so those are just some basic things: carbon-centric, animals move, and then direct market. We’re not selling into a commodity stream. We actually have our own brand. We service 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, numerous institutions, and now we’re shipping nationally. That started last July.

Moret: The Polyface Farms website lists 10 guiding principles: No sales targets, no trademarks or patents, clearly defined market boundary, incentivize workforce, no initial public offerings, no advertising, stay within the ecological carrying capacity, people answer the phone, stay seasonal, and quality must always go up. How do you bring those principles to life on a day-to-day basis in the company?

Salatin: Well, it ain’t easy. Let me give you an example: No sales targets. So how do you run a business without a sales target? That’s such an elementary thing. Let’s say we want to hit $3 million this year. What happens is, it tends to cheapen your view of a customer. The customer is now simply a notch, if you will, another notch as you move to your goal, as opposed to with no sales targets. So what do you have to do? Well, that means you have to actually look at your customer as a person. It’s a relationship, and so when our sales are down, we don’t look around and say, “Well, we must not be doing enough advertising.” We look around and say, “Why aren’t we making people happy anymore?” And that, I understand, is a nuance, and some people could accuse me of parsing semantics, but we think it’s a pretty big deal.

So we view sales not as something that we have manipulated, but as a manifestation of the whole persona that we’ve presented, and if we’re presenting an attractive, magnetic persona with obviously good service and a good product, then we think that it’s going to expand or grow or be wherever it’s supposed to be.

Moret: You’re located in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. How has that location contributed to your success and are there any enabling factors for food production or just general business operations inherent in that location?

Salatin: You know what they say? There are three things important about business: location, location, location. We are located strategically to be eight hours away from half of the nation’s population. We’re eight hours from Atlanta, we’re eight hours from New England, what, six, seven hours from New York? We’re strategically located that way. We’re on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It was wonderful to be able to do all this experimenting out of sight, out of mind, where people didn’t see your mistakes and failures.

We’re a destination place. We very much appreciate that. We’ve got a corn box for kids to play in, we’ve got a little playground, we work at being people-friendly and -centric, we have a nice parking lot, we have a store here on the farm. We collaborate with neighbors, other people in the community, to offer what they have that we don’t have to complement the store so a person can come and get a lot more stuff than they would if we just sold our own things.

Moret: You guys were really ahead of the curve and advocating for what we now think of as the farm-to-table movement. Talk a little bit about that and whether has that been gratifying to see the popularization of that concept.

Salatin: We always said that we were about 10 to 15 years ahead of the curve, and so now, as that has matured and people are more and more — not everybody by any means, but more and more people — are aware that there is a difference in a potato, there is a difference in the steak, and we do care how the land is handled, where this was produced. It is incredibly gratifying and joyful to see. I enjoy seeing, if you will, this ripening of the movement into not just sitting around smoking dope and wearing peace symbol signs, but actually saying, “Okay, how can we participate in this?” We’re going to participate on farm tours, we’re going to participate with our money, we’re going to become patrons of a land-healing, nutrient-densifying movement, and that’s a wonderful trend. It’s extremely small still, but it has certainly gained traction and it’s definitely not going away. We simply see it growing a little bit each year.

Moret: Thinking about that, kind of building on that and shifting consumer preferences, what do you see as the next major trends for your space, and what are the issues that keep you and others in the industry up at night? What are you excited about?

Salatin: Let me do the good news first. That the exciting thing now for the future is in fact that as the industry becomes worse and worse, and as the Uberization of everything accelerates, it is fragmenting commerce into niches of smaller brands and authenticity. This year, I think supposedly someday in the next four or five months, the millennials will pass the baby boomers in buying power. And if you read Simon Sinek, the guy who studies these things, his three catchwords of the millennial are community, care, and convenience.

So if you’re in marketing, if you’re in sales, you’d better be thinking all three of those very much drive the local, authentic, land-healing, networked, relational kind of marketing thing that we espouse. That’s an extremely hopeful thing. Remember, I cut my teeth on this back when the word “organic,” nobody even knew what it was. Now it’s gone full circle, everybody found out what it was, then the government owned it and certified it, and now people are running away from it because of the compromise in the organic industry.

So it’s been interesting to watch that whole cycle move, but that’s ultimately helpful and hopeful to see the number of people in the country that are looking for authenticity. All the big brands are struggling now because people are beginning to realize that there’s something more to life than simply cheap pounds of stuff.

What keeps me up is the steady march of government regulations and intrusion in business, in the marketplace, in licenses and forms and compliance, and now we’ve got the whole sales tax thing. It’s catching small businesses like us. That’s practically bankrupting us to try to stay compliant with, especially if you’re in shipping. Teresa and I started this business on a shoestring 40 years ago with no money, and that’s been a blessing because it made us hungry, which made us creative. You get really creative when you’re hungry.

Moret: One of the things I’ve really grown to appreciate over time, working with hundreds of companies, is just how a big company, it’s just a matter of adding some other compliance person or staff, and they don’t even think about it, but sometimes small businesses, it can really, really be tough. Looking back a little bit, how did being profiled in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” affect your reputation and the work you do at Polyface Farms?

Salatin: The trajectory of any business is never some straight linear thing from left to right, going across the graph. It’s a sawtooth. It’s a stairstep, and so “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” for us, was definitely one of those vertical steps in our overall trajectory. We were rocking along, we were doing very well. I’d already written three or four books, and they’d been very well received by that time. So it wasn’t like some people think that “Omnivore’s Dilemma” made you. No, it didn’t. The trajectory was moving. What it was was one of those vertical spots in our overall trajectory. Would we be where we are today without it? Probably not.

You can never go back and un-ring or re-ring a bell, so that is what it is. But “Omnivore’s Dilemma” definitely opened up platforms, opened up worlds for me, that we would not have had. It gave us a place of exposure and credibility in the overall authentic food movement that we certainly would not have had otherwise.

Moret: In addition to your farming career, you have a fairly extensive sideline as a writer. I’m curious, what ideas have you focused on in your writing?

Salatin: As Teresa and I moved forward with the farm, my dad died very, very early in 1988. So he’s been gone for a long, long time, but we were moving. We didn’t know at first if we’d be successful, but we were, and the idea of a very, very small farm making a nice living and we weren’t rich, but we weren’t subsistence, either. We were putting money in the bank and it was all good. That was an incredibly hopeful story in the late 1980s all right. A young couple without outside income earning a nice living on a small farm. And so we started getting publicity, media, different things, and then I started getting asked to speak at different conferences and things. And people were asking, “Well, how do you do this?”

My writing came straight out of trying to serve people. Look, I can’t sit here, work outside all day, come in and spend three hours on the phone at night telling people how to build a chicken shelter. And so I did the first book, “Pastured Poultry Profit$,” about the pastured broiler enterprise, strictly as a way to reduce the phone calls and say, “Look, just buy the book and it’ll go.” Well, the book sold, we self-published, and the thing, it just went. And so there’s a lot of money to be made in this, and so then the people started, “Well I got the chickens, but how do you do the cows?”

And then I wrote the “Salad Bar Beef ” book. People still said, “Well, I don’t have beef or chicken. I just need to know how to start. How do you start farming?” And I did “You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise.” And the books have simply followed what I feel like either our culture needs to hear, or what people tell me they need, or want to hear, what do they really need it. It’s about meeting needs, and this all boils back to service. If our life is really wrapped up in serving our fellow man, serving the needs of a community, our ear will be open and attuned to, “What is it the people need? What will serve them at this point?” And I’m sure I don’t always get it right, but that is the impetus for every title that I’ve written.