Virginia Farmer Joel Salatin: Scaling by Creativity, Not Consolidation

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For many farm owners today, the question isn’t whether change is coming; it’s how to respond to it without jeopardizing everything they have built. Commodity markets remain volatile, input costs stay stubbornly high, and consolidation continues to squeeze margins.

Virginia farmer, author, and outspoken agricultural thinker Joel Salatin offers a significantly different perspective for thinking about growth, resilience, and transition.

Joel Salatin bio:

• Farmer – Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia

• Author -- 17 books

• Editor -- Stockman Grass Farmer 

• Recipient -- 15th Annual Heinz Award for his commitment to the environment

• Recipient --American Pastured Poultry Producers Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the pastured poultry movement

Although, the fact that he describes himself as a "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer" should give you a strong inkling that he is a non-traditional thinker.

Salatin’s Polyface Farm is a 550-acre operation in Swoope in the Shenandoah Valley that features a farmhouse built in 1750. It is his connection to generations past while focusing on the farm generations ahead.

Scaling the Farm

Salatin challenges one of the most deeply ingrained assumptions in modern agriculture: that scale requires consolidation.

“Nature does not increase with consolidation and centralization and concentration,” Salatin told American Farmland Owner.

“Nature scales by duplication,” Salatin continued, “If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn’t make a great big tomato plant, it plants more tomatoes. If we want more beef, we don’t make a great big cow, we have calves, alright?”

That idea—scaling by duplication rather than expansion—has profound implications for farmland owners who feel trapped by the economics of large-scale commodity production.

Salatin argues that feeding the world doesn’t require fewer, bigger farms. It requires more participants. “What you do is you bring in more players,” he explained. “You bring in more players, and suddenly, you’ve got food running out your ears.”

Farm Transitions

He acknowledged how challenging it could be to transition the focus of a farm when families may have massive investments like equipment, specialized buildings, or livestock facilities.

Salatin didn’t sugarcoat the challenge. “It ain’t easy,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to turn a speedboat around than an aircraft carrier.”

The bigger and more specialized the operation, the harder it is to pivot. But difficulty, he insists, does not mean impossibility.

The key, according to Salatin, is incrementalism. “Just start something new,” he advised. “Maybe it’s a little quarter-acre apple orchard. Just start something different, start something new.”

Rather than dismantling an existing operation overnight, Salatin encourages producers to layer new enterprises alongside old ones, testing ideas while cash flow from the primary operation continues.

Rethinking Farm Infrastructure

One of Salatin’s most striking examples came from a consulting project in North Carolina involving a family with four turkey houses. Locked into debt and contracts, they wanted out but didn’t know how.

Instead of asking how to raise turkeys differently, Salatin posed a more disruptive question: what else could those buildings become?

“We brainstormed all the things you could do with a turkey house,” Salatin said, “…except raise turkeys.”

They came up with 25 income-generating ideas, he said. Five years later, the family is still paying down some debt, but Salatin believes that they are making progress. “They are full-timing it,” he said. “They are crushing it, doing great, and they were able to extricate themselves.”

The list of possibilities was intentionally expansive: mini-storage, event centers, nature schools, flea markets, indoor dirt bike tracks, worker housing, and more. Salatin’s point wasn’t that every idea fits every farm, but that imagination is often the most underutilized asset on the balance sheet.

He shared similar stories from Australia, where collapsed wool markets left sheep-shearing sheds obsolete, and from British Columbia, where a farmer transformed an old bank barn into a juried art show drawing nearly 30,000 visitors over two weekends.

“There’s just a ton of things that can be done that are as wide open as your imagination,” Salatin said.

Skills Needed to Change Farm Operation

Creativity alone, however, isn’t enough. Transitioning toward direct marketing, agritourism, or diversified enterprises requires a skill set many farmers never planned to develop.

“That creativity and people skills don’t go on the average farmer’s resume,” Salatin noted. “Most farmers don’t like people. I mean, that’s one of the reasons they’re farmers.”

Yet retail dollars demand human connection. “If you’re actually going to create a brand, you need to interface with people,” he said.

At Salatin’s own farm, 12,000 to 15,000 visitors come through annually. Farm tours alone generate roughly $40,000 a year.

Merchandise, food sales, and events compound the effect. “Once you start down this path, it just dominoes,” Salatin explained. “You listen to people. What do you need? What do you want? And you respond.”

Ultimately, Salatin argues the greatest barrier to transition isn’t financial or logistical—it’s mental. “We talk about climate change,” he said, “the hardest climate to change is the climate of the mind. If you can get the climate of the mind changed, there’s no end to the things that you can do.”

Joel Salatin will be one of the keynote speakers at the Land Investment Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 13. In-person tickets are sold out but virtual tickets remain.

American Farmland Owner is a media sponsor of the Land Investment Expo.