A Farmer’s Approach to System Design
Joel Salatin runs Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia. He raises cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits there but considers himself mainly a grass farmer. The grass is the hero of his operation, converting solar energy into the foundation of the food chains at Polyface. On the subject, Joel likes to say: “to be even more accurate, we should call ourselves sun farmers. The grass is just the way we capture the solar energy.” The food chains aren’t the richest units to focus on in Joel’s operation — his holons are. For Joel, holons represent each synergistic unit that he has running on his farm that mimics the natural relationship between animals. An example of a synergistic unit is to think about the chicken beyond the egg producer but as the clean up crew of herbivores. So you could make the chickens happier and more productive if you have them work together with the cows — this is an overly simplistic example of a holon that I’ll share more about. Joel has a dozen or more holons throughout the seasons — “I’m just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody’s in the right place at the right time.” The right place for a cow is an open field of mixed grass. Joel’s cows get to dine on fresh servings of grass thanks to the practice of rotational grazing. With the help of a portable fence, Joel moves his cows to a new patch of grass at the of the day, when the sugar levels in the grass hit their peak after collecting the sun’s energy earlier in the day. Three days after the cows have moved out of a given lot, Joel brings in the sanitation crew — the chickens. By day three, the worms in the manure are at their peak for the chickens to grub on, converting the cow’s waste into a free high-protein meal for the chickens. So the chickens feed themselves, clean the field, and feed the soil by working in the manure with their claws. Joel’s use of holons throughout his farm is inspiring. He takes the complexity of a system comprised of animals from a variety of species and orchestrates the relationships in a way that allows them to live their “happiest” lives while compounding the value of their nearest neighbor. I’ve been using this inspiring approach as a check to the durability and quality of systems that I design at work or in my home practice.
