Homecoming...Polyface Farm 25 years later

(Just getting around to publishing this now…)

This weekend (June 4-6, 2026), I had the opportunity to spend 3 days at Polyface Farm for the first New Biology Experience, as part of the New Biology Clinic team. I had no idea how much it meant to me, until I started sharing my story with my colleagues and friends. They suggested that I share it here. So here goes!

Polyface Farm. Who knew it would play an integral part in the story of my life for the past 25 years? It all started in the Washington, DC area – and all around the same time. I started my organic and biodynamic catering company, The Basic Feast. I met Sally Fallon (now Morell), who had just published the Nourishing Traditions cookbook. She also started the Weston A. Price Foundation, where I met Dr. Tom Cowan, as he was a member of the Board of Trustees. And Polyface Farm.  

In July 2000, Polyface Farm and Joel Salatin were on the cover Smithsonian Magazine, hailed as “The Best Tasting Chicken in America”. I owned an organic and biodynamic catering company at the time, called The Basic Feast. We were located in Takoma Park, Maryland, and served the greater Washington, DC area. We cooked according to Weston A. Price principles and were at the forefront of the local food movement. I read the article and wanted that chicken for my catering company. So, I called Polyface, spoke to Joel, and asked if I could drive down and visit. He said sure, anytime during normal business hours (Monday – Friday, 9-5), and come for lunch.

I made the 3+ hour drive from my home down to Swoope, Virginia, met Joel, and had a tour of Polyface Farm. I saw the reasons the farm is named “Poly – face”, the “farm of many faces” – pigs, cows, rabbits, chickens – and Joel explained to me the choreography of the place. I learned about the grand dance and “moving” the animals all over the fields, mimicking Nature – eat, poop, move. The pigs break up the land with their snouts digging for roots, the cows grazing next, leaving their cowpies filled with larvae for chickens to eat. A symphony. A dance choreographed by Joel and some electric wire fencing. By allowing the pigs to express their “pig-ness” and the cows to express their “cow-ness” (as they grazed on 50+ species of plants, earning them the title of “salad bar beef”), the animals thrive, the land thrives, and the meat that is produced is superior – nutritionally and energetically. (This past Thursday night, during his speech opening the New Biology Experience at the Farm, Joel called it “eating happiness” – that’s what they are producing at Polyface. Happy cows (and other animals), living on green pasture, in beautiful, bright Shenandoah sunlight, with fresh water to drink. There was nothing more there – really just pasture and animals (this distinction will be significant when we fast forward to this past weekend).

Joel made me a “Polyface burger” that day – I don’t remember if he called it that, or I dubbed it that – beef and sausage. Delicious.

Joel was only selling whole birds at that time – no individual chicken parts like “boneless, skinless chicken breasts”, or packs of thighs or quarters. So, if I wanted Polyface chicken for my catering company, I would have to by whole birds and cut them up myself. A lot of work, but I was in! I could get my orders from a farmer who had just started selling Polyface meat and chicken at local farmers markets throughout the DC area. He would “piggyback” my chickens on the other items he was driving up, and I could pick them up at one of them. The need to use whole birds resulted in very creative menus – sell the chicken breasts to one party, the quarters to another—perhaps as a stew or curry – and use the carcasses for stock, aka long cooked bone broth. And so, it began: a long relationship with Joel and Polyface Farm.

In the fall of that same year, Sally Fallon hired me (The Basic Feast) to cater the first Wise Traditions Conference, which turned out to be 23 people in a church basement in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She knew about my catering company, that I sourced the cleanest food available and cooked following the principles in the Nourishing Traditions cookbook. I went on to cater the next two conferences, which continued to grow until they were too big for my little company to handle. However, the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) would continue to play a very important role in my life, as a member of the Honorary Board of the Foundation, as a local chapter leader, and for all the years since, writing books and teaching cooking classes based on NT!

Over the years since 2001, I would see Joel when we spoke at Wise Traditions Conferences. I made jars of fermented chutneys for events at Polyface. I would help coordinate cooking dozens of Polyface eggs at other real food events. I was in on the idea of starting buying clubs, so people and families in the DC metro area could have access to Polyface meat and chicken. Those were the days. Those were the early days! My catering company was short-lived. Due to the death of my infant daughter and the need to tend to my heart, I closed the Basic Feast. A few years later, I began teaching traditional food cooking classes and loved it. Teaching was my calling. I could “spread the good news” of real food, cooked in traditional ways…Cooking for Well-Being was born, and I continued to point my students (and anyone who cared and wanted clean meat and chicken – heck, the “best tasting chicken in America”—to Polyface Farm).

In 2011, I moved to Colorado for family reasons. I hosted Joel at a Farm-to-Table event at Sunrise Ranch in 2103, along with the local WAPF chapter. In 2015, I returned to Virginia to teach some of my Cooking for Well-Being cooking classes at my friend Eileen Boland’s Fields of Athenry Farm. We took a trip to down to Polyface and Joel gave Eileen and her family and farm manager a personal tour. That was the last time I was at Polyface – 2015. When I went this past weekend, I had not been to the Farm since then – 11 years. So, it was “old home week”, or a homecoming.

I nearly kissed the ground.

New sign.

Cows on the hill, in the dazzling sunlight.

Joel Salatin, self-proclaimed “Lunatic Farmer”. The “High Priest of Pasture”. A visionary. A leader. An inspiration to me and so many others since those early days, 25 years ago. When I wrote to Joel earlier this year to let him know I was coming, he thanked me for my “continued leadership and wave-making in this space”.  When I saw him, it was like no time had passed (though we both have more gray hair).

So much gratitude.

So much appreciation.

My heart is full because of this homecoming.