You'll Find Pigs in the Forest at J&L Green Farms
Inside Virginia’s J&L Green Farm, pigs, poultry, and cattle regenerate soil, forests, and food systems. Rebels, here’s the blueprint for resilience.
Rebels,
In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a farm is rewriting the playbook for regenerative livestock systems. J&L Green Farm began with little more than a dirt-floor shed and grit. Today, it’s a multi-farm operation where forest-raised pigs, rotational grazing cattle, and pastured poultry aren’t just producing food—they’re regenerating ecosystems.
This isn’t the story of scaling industrial agriculture. It’s a rebellion against it. What the Greens have built is a living blueprint for how animals can be managed as ecological engineers—balancing efficiency, resilience, and food sovereignty.
And yes, you’ll want to see it yourself: Watch the full farm tour on YouTube →
The Farm Hub: Efficiency by Necessity
When Joran and Laura Green launched J&L Green Farm in 2009, their “hub” was an old shed full of junk. Today, it’s the nerve center: a farm store, poultry processing bay, freezer unit, and shipping center that feeds local families and ships boxes nationwide.
300–400 chickens processed per day
Up to 150 turkeys on a single day
10,000 broilers + 1,000 turkeys annually
50+ boxes shipped nationwide every two weeks
By focusing on multi-use infrastructure—farm store, freezer space, even brooders built from repurposed shipping containers—J&L has lowered costs while increasing resilience. Store hours are just Saturdays 10–2, concentrating labor so farmers can farm instead of babysitting retail counters.
This model isn’t quaint. It’s efficient rebellion against the burnout cycle that kills so many farm startups.
Poultry Innovation: From Tractors to Multi-Species Shelters
For a decade, J&L used the standard Salatin-style chicken tractors—10x12 pens dragged across pasture by hand. But after years of crouching, sweating, and losing birds to Virginia’s brutal summers, they designed something better: the Multi-Species Shelter System (MSS).
Picture a heavy-duty carport on skids:
Tall roofs (7–11 feet) for airflow and heat relief
Reflective tarps that drop temps by 10°F in summer
Reinforced bird netting that even hawks can’t penetrate
Modular design to house poultry in summer and pigs in winter
The result? 75% less labor time per move, thousands saved in seasonal labor, and dramatically fewer animal deaths from heat stress.
Instead of “cheap and light,” J&L built heavy and multi-use. The shelters don’t blow away in storms, and they lower capital costs because one building serves multiple species year-round.
That’s regenerative thinking applied to infrastructure: efficiency, resilience, and farmer sanity.
Stacking Species: Animals as Ecological Engineers
Regeneration isn’t about one enterprise. It’s about stacking species so each amplifies the others:
Broilers: Nitrogen machines. Their manure jumpstarts grass growth.
Cattle: Graze and trample weeds, cycling nutrients across paddocks.
Pigs: Disturb soil naturally, replacing tillage with noses and hooves.
In one field rotation:
Pigs disturb soil in winter, planting sorghum and millet with their hooves.
Cows graze forage 4–7 times through the season, moving nutrients.
Poultry sweep through once, fertilizing but avoiding nitrogen overload.
The outcome? Soil resilience in drought and storms. While neighbors hayed just 37 days during a drought year, J&L maintained normal stocking density. When storms dumped inches of rain, J&L’s fields absorbed it—while neighbors’ pastures ponded water.
This isn’t theory. It’s applied biology, creating forage systems more productive than conventional cow-calf grazing without chemical fertilizers.
Silvopasture and Black Walnut Syrup
Among J&L’s most innovative practices is silvopasture—grazing animals in managed forest canopy. Pigs clear invasive multiflora rose, cattle graze shaded forage, and black walnut trees provide syrup tapped each winter.
30–50% canopy shade = lower heat stress in humid summers
Pigs disturb understory, creating seedbeds for high-value forage
Cattle graze regrown sorghum and millet
Walnut syrup sells for $40/pint, adding a high-value enterprise
This isn’t just diversified farming—it’s landscape-level regeneration. Forests that once stood overgrown and unproductive now generate pork, beef, syrup, and wildlife habitat.
Forest-Raised Pork at Scale
Fifteen minutes up the mountain, J&L Green’s Woods Chapel farm is a far cry from industrial pork barns. Here, sows rotate through forest paddocks with gravity-fed water and solar-powered fencing, a model that is both low-cost and ecological.
The economics are striking:
Conventional hog barns: $3,000–$3,500 per sow spot (concrete, pits, fans, electricity)
J&L’s forest paddocks: $50–$60 per sow spot (temporary fencing, barrels, posts, chargers)
Sows are managed in sets of 12–18 animals, rotated weekly through wooded paddocks. This keeps soils from being overloaded with phosphorus, reduces animal stress, and leaves behind disturbed ground ready for reseeding.
For Joran Green, stress is a feedback loop. When pigs fight, bark trees, or scream excessively, it’s not “bad pigs”—it’s bad management. Moldy feed, poor genetics, or overstocking are almost always the cause.
The payoff is real: piglets bred for resilience in the woods are in high demand, from homesteaders buying two to four animals to national pasture-based brands sourcing hardy genetics.
Philosophy: Stewardship Over Extraction
At the core is a worldview: agriculture can strip-mine land for five years of profit, or it can manage ecosystems for generations.
Green rejects both extremes—the industrial model of total dominion, and the utopian model of hands-off purity. Instead, he sees himself as a participant in an ecosystem, stewarding animals, trees, soil, and water together.
“We’re just as much an animal in nature as pigs or cattle. If I want long-term success, I can’t mine nutrients and walk away—I have to manage for generations.”
This is regenerative agriculture not as a slogan, but as a lived ethic.
Wildlife, Water, and Resilience
Ecological feedback tells the story better than words. Since J&L began:
Whitetail deer populations have surged.
Wild turkeys roam pastures daily.
Box turtles and amphibians thrive in ponds pigs helped shape.
Fields no longer pond water after storms—soils absorb it.
When neighbors’ pastures drown in runoff, J&L’s ground drinks deeply. Regeneration isn’t charity—it’s resilience.
The Energy Question
One of the farm’s most sobering reflections? Petroleum is the cheat code of modern agriculture.
Where once human and animal labor limited food production, now diesel fuel and synthetic fertilizers pump external energy into the system. But petroleum is finite.
Green asks: Are we using this golden window of cheap energy to build systems that will last without it?
His model—stacked species, silvopasture, on-farm feed, low-cost shelters—is an attempt to answer “yes.”
Key Takeaways from J&L Farm
Infrastructure matters. Multi-use, heavy shelters beat cheap, single-use systems.
Animals are tools. Each species contributes uniquely to soil regeneration.
Diversity drives resilience. From walnut syrup to poultry, income streams are stacked like species.
Efficiency prevents burnout. Concentrated store hours and labor-saving shelters sustain farmer health.
Philosophy guides practice. Stewardship, not extraction, builds generational farms.