by This video shares 3 business tips for new farmers from Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms model!
1 HOUR INTERVIEW WITH Joel Salatin: https://bit.ly/2022atPolyface
Finding Lease Land using onX: • HOW TO FIND LEASE LAND FOR FARMING & RANCH…
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How to Go Full Time in Farming (from the Polyface Farm Business Model)
There are three primary challenges small farms face today if they want to be profitable — not just an expensive hobby:
- Access to land
- Human resources
- Cashflow
During my visit to Polyface Farm, I saw firsthand how Joel Salatin’s unique business model tackles all three of these obstacles. In this post, I’m going to show you how the Polyface example can help beginner farmers break through these same barriers.
How Polyface Inspired My Own Farm Journey
When I first jumped into agriculture, Joel Salatin’s book Salad Bar Beef gave me the confidence that I could raise livestock profitably on just 30 acres — even as a complete beginner.
I read that book nearly six years ago. Three years later, I went full-time in agriculture on my own 30-acre enterprise. I had zero prior experience, and while my journey took a turn away from beef and toward sheep (a better fit for small acreage), I scaled my revenue and built a full-time farm by mirroring key parts of the Polyface model — not just the meat production side, but also Salatin’s value-added enterprises.
For those unfamiliar, the Polyface business model is radically different from the conventional farm model. Joel routinely catches criticism from the “farm establishment,” largely because he refuses to leave money on the table. Polyface isn’t just a meat farm — it’s also an agritourism hub, an educational platform, and a mentorship ecosystem.
Small farmers willing to follow this example quickly discover something powerful:
Inviting people to interact with your farm not only widens margins — it fulfills a deep cultural hunger for connection to land.
As you read through these three challenges and three Polyface-inspired solutions, I encourage you to identify at least one unconventional idea you can apply to your own farm. Drop a comment telling me which one resonates most with you.
1. Land Access: Getting a Foot in the Door
The price of land today makes it nearly impossible for a beginner to purchase acreage outright — at least, not with farming income alone. Thankfully, Salatin highlights three practical pathways for securing land access without shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Option 1: Steward Family Land
Landowners are aging, and many end up selling only because no one is willing to carry their vision forward. This was my route.
I don’t own my farm. I lease 30 acres of family land for my sheep enterprise.
It has been a win-win: I have access to land I could never afford to purchase, and my family has someone maintaining the property.
Option 2: Lease Land from Strangers
This option is similar to the first — just without the family connection.
I’ve secured several short-term leases this way (I’ll link the full step-by-step video below). Yes, cold-calling landowners is uncomfortable… but you get over it.
My method:
- Use OnX Hunt to find the landowner’s name
- Track down a phone number through community connections or
- Send a letter requesting a lease
Option 3: Inheritance
This is the least common path — most of us aren’t inheriting hundreds of acres.
Joel himself took over Polyface from his father, who purchased it as a worn-out, degraded piece of land. Joel chose to carry forward his father’s vision and build upon it. That willingness to steward legacy is often lacking today, which is one reason many landowners choose to sell rather than leave property to their children.
2. Human Resources: Solving the Labor Crunch
New farmers often start with enthusiasm, juggle every role themselves, and burn out within a few years. The Polyface model solves this through a self-feeding labor pipeline built around two components:
- Seasonal mentorship programs (“Stewards”)
- A small core of year-round staff
The Steward program brings in young people to live and work on the farm during the busiest season: late spring through early fall. These individuals gain hands-on experience and contribute enormous labor value exactly when the farm needs it most.
Stewards work for room, board, food, and mentorship rather than cash — and the very best are sometimes invited to join the full-time paid staff.
This model is ingenious, sustainable, and absolutely repeatable — even for tiny farms.
3. Cashflow: The Polyface Superpower
Cashflow is my favorite topic — and the one I studied most closely while building my own enterprise.
Polyface is not a commodity farm. They don’t sell grain to elevators or livestock at auction. Instead, they operate a direct-to-consumer meat business, selling:
- Pork
- Chicken
- Eggs
- Lamb
- Turkeys
- Rabbits
These are sold through online ordering and local buying clubs, with scheduled delivery drops in affluent, health-conscious communities in Virginia.
But what really widens their margins is the value-added enterprise stack layered on top:
- A farm store with merch and local goods
- “Lunatic Tours” at $25 per person
- Multi-day on-farm seminars
- Self-published books (over 100k copies sold)
- Paid speaking engagements
Not all of us are Joel Salatin–level personalities, so some of these opportunities may not translate directly.
But after interviewing Joel in 2021, I challenged myself to see how many I could adapt as a complete nobody — a brand-new farmer with no credentials.
Here’s what that looked like for me:
- Instead of a physical farm store → I built an online store with handcrafted merch
- Instead of weekly on-farm tours → I publish weekly YouTube videos (digital agritourism)
- Instead of hosting on-farm seminars → I host live online workshops
- And I self-published a book on sheep farming
All of these became meaningful revenue streams that buffer my farm income through the ups and downs of startup life.
If you can find even one unique income stream outside raw food sales — a value-added product, an educational angle, or a digital version of agritourism — your farm’s cashflow becomes far more resilient.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If you want to see exactly how I scaled from $0 to $100k on a 30-acre beginner farm, watch the next video where I break down the entire process step-by-step.
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