2019 SPGCA Field Day

The 2019 SPGCA Field Day
will be hosted by

Glenn & Becky Szarzynski

on

June 21st & 22nd, 2019

at

Mountain Glen Farm
372 Jonestown Road
Fairfield, VA 24435

Mountain Glen Farm, established in 1989, is a 400-acre South Poll cow-calf operation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. MGF is owned by the Szarzynski family. It is operated by Glenn Szarzynski and his daughter Becky Szarzynski.

Becky is a newly-appointed South Poll Board member. They intensively rotational graze their South Poll herd on cool season grasses along with planted native warm season and cool season pasture mix fields. A Purebred South Poll bull was purchased in 2009 and crossed with their pre-existing Angus herd. Now with a predominantly South Poll herd, Mountain Glen Farm runs 70 South Poll cow-calf pairs and is continuing to intensify their grazing practices and methods.

Plans include increasing herd numbers, stocking rate per acre, and optimizing animal performance and efficiency. Mountain Glen Farm is a proud South Poll cattle producer.

Joel Salatin, 61, calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don’t like him call him a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, charlatan, and starvation advocate.

With a room full of debate trophies from high school and college days, 12 published books, and a thriving multi-generational family farm, he draws on a lifetime of food, farming and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. He’s as comfortable moving cows in a pasture as addressing CEOs in a Wall Street business conference.

His wide-ranging topics include nitty-gritty how-to for profitable regenerative farming as well as cultural philosophy like orthodoxy vs. heresy. A wordsmith and master communicator, he moves audiences from laughs one minute to tears the next, from frustration to hopefulness. Often receiving standing ovations, he prefers the word performance rather than presentation to describe his lectures. His favorite activity?–Q&A. “I love the interaction,” he says.

He co-owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Featured in the New York Times bestseller Omnivore’s Dilemma and award-winning documentary Food Inc., the farm services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets, and a farmers’ market with salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. When he’s not on the road speaking, he’s at home on the farm, keeping the callouses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local, regenerative food and farming systems.

Salatin is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. He writes the Pitchfork Pulpit column for Mother Earth News, as well as numerous guest articles for ACRES USA and other publications. A frequent guest on radio programs and podcasts targeting preppers, homesteaders, and foodies, Salatin’s practical, can-do solutions tied to passionate soliloquies for sustainability offer everyone food for thought and plans for action.

Mixing mischievous humor with hard-hitting information, Salatin both entertains and moves people. Seldom using a power-point and often speaking from an outline scribbled in a yellow legal pad, he depends on theatrics, style, and compelling content to hold attention and defend innovative positions. The rare combination of prophet and practitioner makes him both a must-read and must-hear in a time desperate for integrity leadership and example.

Daniel Salatin is the son of Joel Salatin, innovative farmer, writer and speaker. As the third generation on Polyface farm in Swoope, Virginia, he has grown up in the family business.

Polyface services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products through relationship marketing. Daniel has gone from carrying freshly processed chickens while in diapers, to running and over-seeing the day-to-day workings of Polyface. As a seven-year old he started a pastured rabbit enterprise, which has had its ups and downs but continues today. Starting the rabbit business gave him first hand experience with marketing, processing, research and development, and the costs of a new business.

Today Daniel is fully employed by the farm and spends his days orchestrating animal movement, scheduling daily tasks and apprentice training. At thirty-one, Daniel is married to wife Sheri and has two sons Travis and Andrew and one daughter Lauryn.