Happy Steak

If you've ever read Omnivore's Dilemma or seen Food Inc., you've heard of Polyface Farm. Without getting into all of the details, Polyface is essentially a farm that seeks to produce food in a sustainable way that heals the land, and just generally produces healthier food. As a quick example, most of the beef produced in the US comes from large "concentrated animal feeding organizations" (CAFOs) which feed cows corn and, well, other cows. Corn-fed beef is less healthy for a variety of reasons, the most important being that cows are supposed to digest grass... and all of the complications that come from attempting to feed cows corn produce less than healthy beef. Basically, the idyllic picture of cows standing in the grass is really just an old image in the US. Unless, that is, you go to a farm like Polyface, which seeks to raise animals the way they were meant to be raised.

Anyway... Saturday was a crazy busy day, but when the opportunity to visit Polyface Farm came up, I knew that I had to take it before heading away from Charlottesville. While there, I got to see where they have the chickens and the pigs and the cows... and spent a bunch of money on delicious grass-fed beef and piggy bacon. I've included some pictures for your viewing pleasure. Most of them are self-explanatory (chicken, pig, cow), but the last is part of the "Egg-mobile," which is part of the plan to move chickens around behind the cows so they can eat up the insects that come from having cows in the area and start to churn up the grass so it can re-grow.