Workshop Description
Turning your part-time farm enterprise into a bona fide full-time business can be a fearful proposition. What about land, working with people, managing a business, regulations and strategic planning? Using his own Polyface Farms experience as an object lesson, Salatin will address these concerns head-on with humor and encouragement. You'll come away ready to pursue an agrarian farm business.
Other Workshops
Live Poultry Processing Demo
Speaker Bio
Joel Salatin is a full-time farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. A third-generation alternative farmer, he returned to the farm full-time 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.
Salatin holds a bachelor's degree in English and writes extensively in magazines such as The 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, Salatin's after-broadcast chat room fielded more hits than any other segment to date. Polyface achieved iconic status as the grass farm featured in the New York Times best-seller The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
A sought-after conference speaker, Salatin addresses a wide range of issues, from creating a 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 herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.” His humorous and conviction-based speeches are akin to theatrical performances, often receiving standing ovations.
Visit www.polyfacefarms.com for more information.