Episode 21
Return to Nature Podcast
In this episode of Return to Nature, Melissa interviews Will Harris, the owner of White Oak Pastures, a holistically managed regenerative ranch and farm in Bluffton, Georgia.
Will is a fourth-generation cattleman, who tends the same land that his great-grandfather settled in 1866. Born and raised at White Oak Pastures, Will left home to attend the University of Georgia’s School of Agriculture, where he was trained in the industrial farming methods that had taken hold after World War II. Will graduated in 1976 and returned to Bluffton, where he and his father continued to raise cattle using pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics. They also fed their herd a high-carbohydrate diet of corn and soy.
These tools did a fantastic job of taking the cost out of the system, but in the mid-1990s, Will became disenchanted with the excesses of these industrialized methods. In 1995, Will made the audacious decision to return to the farming methods his great-grandfather had used 130 years before. Since Will has successfully implemented these changes, he has been recognized all over the world as a leader in humane animal husbandry and environmental sustainability.
Will is the immediate past President of the Board of Directors of Georgia Organics. He is the Beef Director of the American Grassfed Association and was selected 2011 Business Person of the year for Georgia by the Small Business Administration. He is also the author of A Bold Return to Giving A Damn, a memoir-meets-manifesto on betting the farm on a better future for our food, animals, land, local communities and our planet.
WILL SHARES
- How his great grandfather and grandfather ran the farm and how his father transitioned to industrial practices
- How he was raised and educated to believe that there was nothing wrong with industrial farming practices
- His observation of the quality of his farm’s dirt versus the untouched soil in the woods
- The reason his daughters have chosen to come back to the farm and work at White Oak Pastures
- The unintended consequences of industrial agriculture and taking cost out of production
- How transferring from industrial to regenerative is a long term process
- The importance of allowing animals to express their instinctive behaviors
- The resiliency of regenerative agriculture versus the efficiency of industrial agriculture
- How label regulations can affect farmer’s profitability
- The pandemic’s role in their creation of White Oak Pasture’s new distribution avenue: online orders
- The right amount of growth for a regenerative farming operation to make sure short term profitability is not the main focus, but rather generational profitability
- White Oak Pasture’s non-profit, which helps educate people on their regenerative practices
- Why regenerative agriculture will mostly happen outside the existing industrial model
- How the government could be instrumental in making a national shift to regenerative agriculture
YOU CAN CONNECT WITH WILL THROUGH WHITE OAK PASTURES
You know, when I talk to my friends and neighbors and relatives who are bankers and accountants and CEOs and MBAs and attorneys and I tell them what’s true about our farm the question that comes up is: ‘Why do you do that? Why would you want to do that?’ Our farm is profitable. It makes money. Our return on investment is not good. We’ve got a lot of equity in this farm and have some debt too. Got a lot of equity. If I have to take how much money we make, our profits, and divide it by how much we’ve got tied up in investments, it’s not a very good number for the month or quarter or the year. But I do believe that in the long term, in the generational measure, it’s probably a pretty good way of making a living.”
