Sawmill and dining pavilion.
The Mother Earth News Fair team could not be more thrilled to collaborate with the Salatin family on this one-of-a-kind adventure! The FAIR at Polyface Farm will take place July 17-18, 2020. (That’s a Friday/Saturday, by the way.)
On Tuesday, July 9, I had the opportunity to visit Polyface with my colleague and senior producer Robert Riley for a day of strategic planning along with some delicious food and kinship. The day was very productive! The team spent the morning walking the grounds, bouncing ideas around on how we would handle what we anticipate to be a substantial crowd. We connected our experience managing large events with their intimate knowledge of the land, roads, and structures around the farm. By lunch time we had an inspiring, collective vision on what this amazing event would look like.
The legendary egg washing machine.
After lunch, the discussion moved to programming. Ever since our first conversations with Joel and Daniel, we all recognized that hosting the Mother Earth News Fair on a working, living farm would present some unique opportunities to highlight some of the elements and procedures that are critical to the operation (many invented by them and now replicated at farms around the world). Sitting around the kitchen table, we talked about this opportunity to create a mix of traditional “staged” workshop areas combined with “Points of Interest” around the farm. Attendees can expect NEW workshops from both first time and returning speaker-authors as well as unique interactions with active farm operations helmed by Polyface’s legion of interns and apprentices. This is your chance to experience live chicken processing, learn about the carbon shed, view egg mobiles, and discover Polyface Farm exclusives like Rakens (rabbit/chicken hutches) and the “Millennium Feathernet”—Plus so much more!
We will be posting periodic updates about this event here on this blog. Advance registration will be open in October. If you are interested in exhibiting, shoot us an e-mail at info@motherearthnewsfair.com. If you have ideas about the programming for this unique event or things you would like to see, we want to know! Take a quick three-question survey, which will also register you to win a pair of passes!
Talking though the wagon/shuttle drop off location.
