It’s just past dawn, and the evidence is everywhere.

A violent July thunderstorm crackled through here last night, booming like a cannon, sending strobe lights from the heavens and driving rain sideways into the hillsides. Limbs now litter the narrow, winding roadways, and water has collected in pockets and puddles. Off on the horizon, wispy clouds peek from between dark mountain ranges.

At Polyface farm, there’s mist in the air, and a chill. The rich, dark earth is moist for the first time in weeks.

No one working on the farm has had breakfast. Most are on a grassy hillside with a white dog named Jack, extracting broiler chickens from a diagonal line of square, knee-high pens. The Polyface interns and farmhands mostly use gloves to gather three, four, five squawking, flapping birds by the legs. They turn them upside down and push them into yellow plastic crates stacked on a flatbed trailer.

The birds have spent the last 35 days of their lives outdoors on this hillside in Swoope (rhymes with rope), west of Staunton. Each day the diagonal row of pens, which are half covered, has been moved exactly one length down the hillside, advancing like pawns on a chessboard.

The constant movement means the chickens have a fresh “salad bar” and new ground to forage for bugs and worms and clover each day. In turn, they have fed the field with their nitrogen-rich poop so that the grass will flourish and nourish the next flock.

It’s an endless circle of life at Polyface, a 550-acre farm that has become a bellwether in the nation’s sustainable food movement. Here, on land passed down from father to son, owner Joel Salatin promotes, practices and tweaks a method of farming rooted in the symbiotic relationship between the sun and the Earth and the plants and the animals.

Without chemicals or pesticides or tons of fancy feed, Joel and his family raise pastured cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits and turkeys that he says are one step better than organic – safer, more nutritious and more respectfully treated.

Joel says what he’s doing, stripped to its core, is what farmers have done since the beginning of mankind: “Turning solar energy into meat.”

While all that might sound swell, even trendy, Joel says Polyface thrives in spite of, not because of, governmental food safety regulations that are supposed to keep the food supply safe. He was railing against “industrialized” farming long before it was fashionable to do so. He’s written countless treatises about it for magazines and trade journals; he’s self-published books, too, including “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal – War Stories From the Local Food Front.”

Joel’s name catapulted from cult status into the national limelight with the 2006 New York Times best-seller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which in part portrayed a week at Polyface and posited the idea that at this point in civilization, what we choose to eat each day – industrialized fast food, organic, homegrown or otherwise – will affect the survival of our species.

Get Joel going, and you’ll soon hear an earful about how government regulations have made it nearly impossible for small farmers to get their goods to the consumer, or what he calls from “teat to table.” You’ll hear about how selling raw milk is illegal, and that slaughterhouses must have a bathroom just for the USDA inspector. Or how bacon cured on the farm cannot be sold because it wasn’t done under USDA inspection.

“It’s illegal,” Joel says, “yet humankind has been eating this way for centuries…

Video and Full Story: http://hamptonroads.com/2008/09/fighting-keep-food-local-virginias-polyface-farm-0