Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/a-farmers-approach-to-systems-design-73c8302e32d2?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Hoyd Breton <img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/485/1*qd4G5wUM1XT7pa7jfvWMTw@2x.jpeg">
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 running on his farm mimicking 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. 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 grasses (cows are self-medicating so they’ll seek the right grass for their given condition). Joel’s cows get to dine on a replenishing field 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.
I find Joel’s use of farming holons 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 and at the end of the day — the output of his farm. I’ve been using this inspiring approach as a check to the quality of systems that I design at work or in my home practice. Is the “wellness” of all the components in the system accounted for and even better yet — are they being sustainably improved with every forward loop through? Could the operating “costs” of the system be converted into value by an existing or new component? Those are some questions I consider, when possible, inspired by Salatin’s operation. Thank you for your time.
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<a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/a-farmers-approach-to-systems-design-73c8302e32d2">A Farmer’s Approach to Systems Design</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Farmer’s Approach to Systems Design

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