Polyface, farmed by Joel Salatin in Virginia, is one of the most productive and influential alternative farms in America. This description by Michael Pollan is a fantastic example of what sustainable agriculture is all about.
"Though it was only the third week of June, the pasture beneath me had already seen several rotational turns. Before being cut earlier in the week for the hay that would feed the farm's animals through the winter, it had been grazed twice by beef cattle, which after each day-long stay had been succeeded by several hundred laying hens. They'd arrived by Eggmobile, a ramshackle portable henhouse designed and built by Salatin. Why chickens? 'Because that's how it works in nature,' Salatin explained. 'Birds follow and clean up after herbivores.' and so during their turn in the pasture, the hens had performed several ecological services for the cattle as well as the grass: They'd picked the tasty grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats, in the process spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. (This is what Joel has in mind when he says the animals do the work around here; the hens are his 'sanitation crew,' the reason his cattle have no need of chemical parasiticides.) And while they were at it, nibbling on the short cattle-clipped grasses they like best, the chickens applied a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture--and produced several thousand uncommonly rich and tasty eggs. After a few weeks' rest, the pasture will be grazed again, each steer turning these lush grasses into beef at the rate of two or three pounds a day.
"...Salatin's audacious bet is that feeding ourselves from nature need not be a zero-sum proposition, one in which if there is more for us at the end of the season then there must be less for nature--less topsoil, less fertility, less life. He's betting, in other words, on a very different proposition, one that looks an awful lot like the proverbially unattainable free lunch."
(from The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan)
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