Though many of the animals do a lot of the work in Polyface Farms’ natural system, the farmers do all of the heavy liftings. It can be easily seen that the animals do all of the work for the farmers instead of the other way around. This can be hard for the credit of the farmers. The animals are doing what is natural to them, which in turn helps the whole process. But every day from dawn until dusk the farmers are out on the field moving the cattle, moving the pens, resetting all of the wire bailing the hay and stacking it, and so on. Animals keep the process running, while the farmers are the ones who start and finish it. The farmers at Polyface are doing more work than the average industrial farmer who has to just press buttons on machines in a way that does not require any thought process. They are recalling knowledge about agriculture and coming up with ways that can help the farm to prosper in the natural way that is intended. Farmers such as the ones at Polyface know what each and every animal’s needs are and what to do to care for them and make sure that they are living homogeneously and peacefully.

Monoculture farming is the practice of farming, producing, or raising only one crop or species of animal in the farming system one at a time. A monoculture can be a referral to a single species in a farming system. Maintaining this kind of single-species farm is hard to maintain on an industrial level without the use of pesticides, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. This is because with how closely confined the animals are, there is no room for them to get the natural environment that they need. Because of this, animals’ immune systems do not respond so well since they are so close together with no fresh air. The practices of industrial food production are dependant on the monoculture because they must release products in a huge quantity in a timely manner. Since they are producing on a huge level, animals are not treated so humanely as the animals on Polyface Farms are. Keeping the animals in such a way, to the food industry, makes production easier so that the animals are all in one easy place to access without having to worry about supposedly spending more money on land for them to roam. Chemicals were invented for the sole fact of supporting industrial monocultures. They make it so that crops or animals do not die or get sick before they are made and shipped to stores. These chemicals keep the monocultures from collapsing into itself. This system of monocultures destroys the information that the farmer needs on where their farming can be improved. The chemicals that are used can “mask” genetic weaknesses that will just keep on being passed down because the same weak links are being bred, using up more and more of these chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Pollan and Salatin measure the success of the farm through the health of it. Health in the animals shows high efficiency in the way that production is going. This is because the animals and plants are behaving in the way that they were evolved to. Another way that a farm’s success can be measured is by how much food it produces per unit of land. If you have a large amount of land, but a small amount of food produced, then you really are not making while of what you have. But if you have a large amount of food produced on a small amount of land, this may seem as good, but there comes a point on whether the animals were treated right or not on such small quarters.