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By Root 548 0

” Joel is fond of saying; the only genuine accountability comes from a producer’s relationship with his or her customers, and their freedom “to come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around. If after seeing how we do things they want to buy food from us, that should be none of the government’s business.” Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology. It is a compelling idea. Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface’s—if not open to the air then at least made of glass. So much of what happens behind those walls—the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth—would simply have to stop.

The customers pick their chicken out of the tank and bag it themselves before putting it on the scale in the shop next door to the processing shed. (Having customers bag their own chickens preserves the fiction that they’re not buying a processed food product, which is illegal in an area zoned for agriculture. Rather, they’re buying the live bird, which Polyface has slaughtered and cleaned as a courtesy.) If you buy one at the farm, a Polyface chicken costs $2.05 a pound, compared to $1.29 at the local supermarket. To keep that premium as low as possible is yet another reason for processing on the farm. Having to take beeves and hogs to the packing plant in Harrisonburg adds a dollar to every pound of beef or pork Polyface sells, and two dollars to every pound of ham or bacon, which regulations prohibit Joel from smoking himself. Curing meat is considered manufacturing, he explained, smoking slightly now himself, and manufacturing is prohibited in an area zoned for agriculture. Joel is convinced “clean food” could compete with supermarket food if the government would exempt farmers from the thicket of regulations that prohibit them from processing and selling meat from the farm. For him, regulation is the single biggest impediment to building a viable local food chain, and what’s at stake is our liberty, nothing less. “We do not allow the government to dictate what religion you can observe, so why should we allow them to dictate what kind of food you can buy?” He believes “freedom of food”—the freedom to buy a pork chop from the farmer who raised the hog—should be a constitutional right.

While Theresa chatted with customers as she checked them out, occasionally dispatching Daniel or Rachel to fetch a dozen eggs from the fridge or a roast from the walk-in freezer, Galen and I helped Joel compost chicken waste. This just may be the grossest job on the farm—or anywhere else for that matter. Yet I came to see that even the way Polyface handles its chicken guts is, as Joel would say, an extension of his worldview.

Joel went off on the tractor to get a load of woodchips from the big pile he keeps across the road, while Galen and I hauled five-gallon buckets of blood and guts and feathers from the processing shed to the compost pile, which is only a stone’s throw from the house. The day was getting steamy, and the heaping mound of woodchips, beneath which simmered earlier installments of chicken waste, exhaled a truly evil stink. I’ve encountered some funky compost piles, but this one smelled like, well, exactly what it was: rotting flesh. I realized that this was what I had caught the occasional waft of during my first sleepless night in the trailer.

Beside the old pile Joel dumped a few yards of fresh woodchips, which Galen and I raked into a broad rectangular mound about the size of a double bed, leaving a slight depression in the middle. Into this dip we spilled the buckets of guts, forming a glistening, parti-colored stew. On top of this we added the pillowy piles of feathers, and finally the blood, which now had the consistency of house paint. By now Joel was back with another load of chips, which he proceeded to dump onto the top of the pile. Galen climbed up onto the mass of woodchips with his rake, and I followed him with mine. The top layer of woodchips was dry, but you could feel the viscera sliding around underfoot;