What does regenerative agriculture mean to you? Whither Big Regen?
To Will Harris, author of A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food,it means restarting the cycles of nature—making them healthy again. This week on Reversing Climate Change, Ross Kenyon and Jada Dormaier from Nori are joined by Will Harris to discuss his remarkable journey from industrial to regenerative farming.
The conversation is simultaneously a beginners introduction, and a deep dive into regenerative farming practices.
The conversation covers the shift from efficiency, the complexities of greenwashing in agriculture, the role of big food companies, the challenges in balancing local and national food production, and the intricacies of feeding the world while considering the environmental consequences of commercial farming. Oh, and don’t forget carbon credits.
Tune in to explore the nuanced goal of creating food systems that are good for the planet, animals, and eaters.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Bluffton, Georgia
A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food
University of Georgia Animal and Dairy Science
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the director of creative and marketing here. Nori is a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle, Washington. Today, co-hosting duties are shared with my colleague Nori supply account manager, Jada Dormeyer. Hi Jada.
Jada Dormaier: Hello. I’m really excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me back, even after I make a little blunders sometimes in our other podcasts.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t remember blunders. No, you grew up on a farm. You work with farmers. It makes sense that you’re here. You’re also just charming. I don’t want to make you blush too hard to start this off. You’re the right person to be co-hosting this, I think.
Jada Dormaier: Well, I appreciate it.
Ross Kenyon: Our guest today is Will Harris. Will is a fourth generation cattleman who tends the same land that his great grandfather settled in 1866. He has become a major figure in the regenerative agriculture movement and is the author of A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food. Thanks for being here, Will.
Will Harris: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you today. And if you like the way that Will speaks, it’s a very comforting experience listening to him narrate his book too. Jada, you would agree with that?
Jada Dormaier: I would. I already told Will, too, that it was just very soothing and something that you could actually listen to while you were falling asleep, too. Not that you want to fall asleep during the book, but it’s a very soothing voice.
Ross Kenyon: How does that make you feel, Will? I don’t want to make you blush, either.
Will Harris: It’s very nice. Thank you, Jada.
Ross Kenyon: Will, in the broadest strokes, what does regenerative agriculture mean to you?
Will Harris: It means restarting the cycles of nature, making the cycles of nature healthy again. Cycles of nature are, as for instance, the water cycle, mineral cycle, microbial cycle, energy cycle, probably a lot of other cycles we don’t even recognize, but it’s the way the earth evolved and technology has broken them down.
Ross Kenyon: Could you contrast that with how farming is typically conducted these days?
Will Harris: Farming has become very linear as opposed to being very cyclical. It’s become a complicated system versus a complex system. Is very cyclical, complicated in my mind. It’s very linear.
Ross Kenyon: Linear being something like you apply synthetic fertilizer at these dates and at these rates and you don’t need to keep track of fertility or the seasons as much. What is the aspect of the cyclical nature of this that you have to be more attuned to be regenerative?
Will Harris: I think to be truly regenerative, you need to understand the cycles of nature and how to promote them and make them work. In the linear system, it’s about breaking the cycles of nature, killing the pest, whether it be insect or fungus or weed, as opposed to a symbiotic relationship in which every life form in the Biome is making a contribution.
Ross Kenyon: There’s something about having a blank slate soil as a medium of growing that doesn’t have its own life or desire or diversity of life within it that was really appealing. I imagine people compare that to the assembly line and the factory that came out of post-World War II America. You don’t want a factory floor where people are doing lots of different things. You want them to do one job over and over a million times over. That’s when you get the greatest amount of efficiency. And that way of thinking probably carried over to agriculture in that same period of time.
But what do you think they missed in striving for efficiency? Your work does not seem efficient, and I think that’s a good thing. But why do you think that vision of efficiency is so powerful and people might be attracted to it?
Will Harris: Well, it has all been about efficiency ever since the end of World War II. That’s when things really started to change. We can talk about that a lot. And food production has become just incredibly efficient, unbelievably efficient. But we’ve given up the resiliency. Resiliency and efficiency are the yin and yang. And we have sacrificed all the resiliency That’s why we live in fear of bird flu and how the pandemic stopped the food production system. I can go on and on with how fragile the food production system has become in this ceaseless quest for efficiency.
Jada Dormaier: What was your farm like during the pandemic?
Will Harris: You know, if we hadn’t heard there was a pandemic, we wouldn’t have known there was a pandemic. I have a number of employees, a large 180 or so employees, and a bunch of them got the flu. Everybody in my family got the flu. I think I got it too. I didn’t go to the doctor, but I think I did. I felt bad for a few days. But we kept working. I mean, nobody, we had one hospitalization and it was a person that was not healthy anyway. I mean, they, you know, they were a weakened system.
But it was just a non-event here. You know, as far as the animals go, you know, I read about euthanizing big flocks of chickens and big herds, droves of hogs and Those kind of things. We never missed a day in our processing plants. We had some people out that were ill, but we never missed a day processing. We never had any animals that we didn’t process on time. It was just a non-event. And I’m not saying that nothing can disrupt our system. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying it is very resilient.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Do you... I liked in the book how you described how you had all the insects, you see all the birds and you can tell that you’re like very connected to your land. And something that I’ve been thinking about a lot too is like the idea of place being really important and where you find belonging. And I’m interested to hear like how you felt, how connected you felt before Like 35 years ago, how were you feeling about the land? Do you still feel that connection? You didn’t see as many animals.
What was that like?
Will Harris: I’ve always loved the land, but about 25 years ago, my feelings about how my role with the land changed dramatically. In fact, the first thing that Changed in me was my relationship with my animals. I thought animal welfare was something I was really good at. You know, I’d been the son of a cattleman, grandson of a cattleman, graduated from the University of Georgia College of Agriculture. I thought I was good. I’d been doing it for 20 years. I thought I was really good at that. And I realized that what I thought was good animal welfare was not good animal welfare.
I thought that keeping them well fed and watered and a comfortable temperature range and protecting them was great. I never considered allowing them to express their instinctive behavior, but it kind of hit me one day. And when that happened, very quickly, the ecological side occurred. I realized that all these things that I’ve been doing to my land that I thought was actually improving it, I thought I was improving it, was actually degrading it. And then much later, but those two ideas came about very quickly. Later, I figured out that what we had been doing, it was just horrible for the rural economy.
That took a while. It took a while for that to happen, but A few years into it, I realized that this impoverishment of rural communities was also a function of my very linear operation of this business.
Jada Dormaier: Do you think that, going back to the idea of resiliency of the land, do you think that your relationship with the animals made them more resilient also?
Will Harris: Understanding of what is good animal welfare did impact the health and well-being of my animals, to be sure. You know, I operated a feedlot, confinement feeding operation. It was a monoculture-only cattle. And I fed a feedlot that I actually fed chicken manure to the cattle in low doses. It’s so wrong in nature. Cattle who are ruminants and vegetarian herbivores would never eat feces, but I learned how to make them eat it. And it was very cheap feed. And I know all about the things we did that were wrong. A lot of drugs, a lot of ionosophores, hormone implants, subtherapeutic antibiotics.
Just a lot of things we did that were not good for the herd, but I knew how to keep them alive and keep them gaining weight and actually turn them into naturally obese creatures that weren’t healthy. So when I turn them out, allow them to emulate more, our system is not perfect. Be crystal clear here. I can’t let my animals... We migrate from Mexico to Canada. That’s not in the cards. But we emulate that as nearly as we can, and they are much healthier for us.
Ross Kenyon: Seems that a big part of what it means to be farming regeneratively is there’s a line from the title of one of Joel Salatin’s book about the marvelous pigness of pigs. You’re letting pigs be pigs. You’re not trying to make them do things they don’t want to do. And when you work along their nature, it results in animal welfare and nutrition. That’s much better than these more unnatural linear systems of conventional agriculture that we’re contrasting against. Is that a fair way to say this?
Will Harris: Absolutely. I agree with that fully. And the way we say it is expressing instinctive behavior. And those instinctive behaviors evolved over thousands or millions of years. How long? I don’t know that. Forever in evolution. And, you know, cows roam and graze a certain way. And instinctively, they want to do it. Now I can shut them up and make them eat corn and chicken manure out of a trough. I can do that. But that’s not instinctive behavior. Hogs are born to root and wallow. You can raise them on concrete slabs in high rise buildings and make them gain weight fast and turn into unnaturally obese creatures that would never occur in nature.
Chickens were born to scratch and pick. You can put 30,000 of them in a house With one cubic foot, a square foot of space. Not much scratching and pecking going on. I mean, we can, you know, we have, we humans have become brilliant enough in terms of technology to break these cycles of nature. And we do it, we have done it with impunity, but it has a great cost. And we have not recognized that cost until now. And we still are not fully, you know, I think we will one day.
I’m not sure how that will manifest itself.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen videos of farmers, and I believe it’s in Sweden, letting the cows out for the first time after they’ve been barned up for the winter and how excited the cows are to be back in the pasture. Are you able to see things like that? Do the animals seem like they’re living full and fulfilling lives as much as their species allows?
Will Harris: Every day, you know, and I’ve made the statement about, I’ve heard those make the statement about happy cows and confinement. I don’t know who’s there. A happy cow. What does a happy cow look like? You don’t know what a happy cow looks like. I can show you one right now. I can show you 3,000 of them today and they’re visibly happy.
Jada Dormaier: There’s an article about, I don’t know who wrote it, but cows have best friends. And my dad also has cows and he does pasture them. And you can tell, I agree with you, Will. You can definitely tell a happy cow from an unhappy cow.
Ross Kenyon: Can you tell who’s in the best friends club and who’s out of the click that week and you can keep track of that?
Jada Dormaier: Well, if you separate them, you can tell who was best friends because they don’t stop crying about it.
Will Harris: They’re not as petty as we humans. No clicks.
Ross Kenyon: How hard was it to switch, Will? I guess I’m feeding you this question because I know, but you have a number of stories in the book where you In order to do what you wanted to do in the right kinds of ways, you had to take out a number of big loans. You had to build infrastructure yourself. You were not able to depend upon the systems that are set up to allow farmers to farm conventionally and linearly. You had to build a lot of this stuff from scratch. And it was a big risk.
And also farmers going direct to consumer rather than feeding into the commodity ag system. That’s also a big risk. You’re taking the responsibility for moving product directly to consumers yourself. It seems like in this switch, there’s just enormous amounts of risk and it was not an easy transition. Maybe the ease of transition has been oversold sometimes by some of your peers. How hard was it actually to make this switch?
Will Harris: It’s an incredible amount of risk in it. How hard it is in terms of labor, it’s not an issue. But risk is very real. And sadly, I’ve had Friends or acquaintances that have not done well financially because of the risk involved. And I would not have, had the timing not been so, so fortunate for me. We started earlier than most and had some really good years early on. It’s not as good now, you know, with the greenwashed product. It’s really taken a lot of the margin out of it for all of us, and I worry about that.
But the difficulty of the transition is, it’s a steep learning curve, but that’s kind of fun. The financial risk, though, is real.
Ross Kenyon: You talk about this in the book some about various types of pasture-raised meat products that maybe they say the right words, but they follow the letter but not the spirit of the law, you might say. Is that what you’re referring to here?
Will Harris: Yes, that would be one thing. But really, probably the greatest impediment to profitability in this field is what we call greenwashing. And the big meat companies actually import grass-fed beef from 20-something countries, New Zealand, Australia, and Uruguay, the three biggest ones, I think. And they are able to legally label it product of the USA. And there’s a lot of beef in the grocery store or food service that It has very American sounding ranch names. It’s beautiful. They make a beautiful picture. And legally, boldly says, product of the USA, when the cow was born and raised and slaughtered in another hemisphere.
It’s horrible. And it’s really taken its toll. And I’m convinced that it was done by, I mean, I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that it was done by influence from big meat companies on bureaucrats. So country of origin labeling.
Ross Kenyon: And maybe they follow some of the same practices that you do, but isn’t nearly as thorough going. Is that your take on it?
Will Harris: You know, I don’t know. And I’m not saying it’s not good. I’m not saying that it’s not good meat produced properly. I don’t know. It may be great. It may be better than mine, but it’s not a product of the USA. Please don’t say that. If you’re proud of what you, I’m proud of what I’m doing. And I say what I’m doing. If you’re proud of what you’re doing, say what it is. Say product of South Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, whatever it is.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think about the push towards more regenerative language in ag products? You can go to the store now and more things seemingly every month get a regenerative stamp on it. And certainly not all of them are as thoroughgoing as what you’re trying to do with the diversity of operations and income streams and animals and different plants. And it’s a good thing. I think we can all agree that even agribusiness making marginal changes can be a big thing, but it isn’t breaking the linearity that you’re critical of. Do you think there’s a role for agribusiness in pushing regenerative agriculture forward or do you think it’s more of a threat to what you’re doing?
Will Harris: I find it hard to conceive a system in which Big food companies are properly sourcing food that’s raised correctly. It’s a commodity system. Those big food companies are putting together multi-rail car loads of grain and their feedlots with 100,000 head of cattle in them. When you’re dealing in those kinds of volumes, quality becomes meeting the minimum standard. It’s not about making it the best you can make it. It’s about meeting the minimum. And the financial goal for the producer would be to barely meet the minimum so that their cost of the commodity is as low as it can be.
So I’m... Now, this is not very popular, but I don’t envision how big food companies can be part of this local food movement, better food movement. I think that food has become so centralized in an effort to drive the cost down cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That we’ve lost the integrity of a system that strives for quality. I think that a local food production system is the answer, so that both from a perspective of the consumer getting what they think they’re getting, but also for resiliency. I mean, when they were killing Poultry houses during the pandemic, I was still raising chickens fine.
So having that diversity of producers for something as essential as food, I think is very, very important.
Ross Kenyon: I like supporting local agriculture and certainly shop as much as my wallet allows and the diversity of products for offer allows at the farmer’s market. We enjoyed a number of your products too, but we’re at the antipodes of the country for getting your products too. Was there something tainted about us enjoying your products from across the country? Should we maybe be talking to a farmer closer at home now? Should we know your name for this, Will? I don’t mean for that to sound antagonistic. What do you think about that?
Will Harris: It does not sound antagonistic. I think that it White Oak Pastures is way bigger today than I ever intended for it to be. You know, I don’t want to be a, I ship product to 48 states, but I don’t want to do that. I do it because I’ve got to sell a certain volume to make my business work. But I want to sell that volume in Georgia, Florida. I’m right here with Georgia, Florida, and Alabama come together. And that’s where I want to sell my product. We get orders every day from California and New York, and I appreciate it, I’m grateful for it, but I’d really rather those people find a producer in California and New York, and I’d rather other people in Georgia, Florida, Alabama find us.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think there is a role for a commodity system in agriculture at all? It’s very good at producing cheap calories, and that can be important in some cases. Maybe it’s overstressed or overemphasized in terms of importance now, but is there a role for it at all in your opinion?
Will Harris: I want everybody to eat. I don’t want anybody to ever be hungry. And if they can’t eat good food, I hope they’ll be able to eat not good food, but I want them to be able to eat. And I don’t know how, I don’t know how that works. And I’ll say this, what you’re getting to, or may get to, Dan, with this line of reasoning is, so I’m talking about food production that’s good for the planet. And that’s what I know a little bit about. You know, solving economic dysfunctionality is not something I know anything about.
You know, I won’t, The poorest people in the world will be able to eat and eat well, but I don’t have the answer for that. That’s not my specialty. When I have people here and I tell them what we do and how I feel about it, they say, but how can you feed the poor people? Well, I work this out, you work that out, and I want them to eat as badly as you do, but I don’t have that answer. Can we feed the population of the world farming the way I farm?
It’s a question I get a lot. I don’t have a quick answer for it. The answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know that we can feed the world the way we’re doing it commercially. I think we’re poisoning the oceans. We’re depleting the water. I don’t know how you feel about global warming, but if I think that things are happening with weather conditions, I think we’re doing a lot, a lot, a lot of harm. We’re You’re dependent upon resources like the potassium and magnesium and phosphate. We dig out of the ground.
There’s a finite amount found there. So if we’re killing off species, things are going extinct on a regular basis. What we’re doing is a damaging system. Now, how that weighs into the growing population feeding The earth has, nobody wants to hear me say this, but the earth has a limited carrying capacity. You can’t keep increasing the population of people on this planet exponentially in perpetuity and it’s going to be okay. I have learned how to farm in a way that benefits this land and this water and I think the climate.
And certainly the economy of the people in this rural impoverished area. And how that needs to be applied to the world, again, that’s outside my expertise. I graduated from the University of Georgia in Animal Science. You mentioned that earlier and I was going to get into it. The major I had at the University of Georgia back in the 70s, Animal Science, had previously been Animal Husband And it was intentionally changed to animal science. And that’s very interesting to me. You know, husbandry and science, you know, it’s like art and art and science.
You see, they’re different.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, husbandry has a relational element to it. Science is like a third party observer quality to it or something like that.
Will Harris: But, you know, science is popular and sexy, you know, and Not so much.
Ross Kenyon: Funny how that works. I want to bring up that we work in carbon markets and on climate change. That’s why we’re here. We work with farmers switching their practices to be more regenerative. We also work with agribusiness as well in trying to help their farmers along to change their practices. And while we recognize there’s quite a large difference between what you do and what they do, I think it’s possible that some of these changes that could be made are a pretty big leverage point. Even getting one agribusiness to have their suppliers use cover crops, that could be a really impactful change.
Will Harris: Oh, I will. Companies like Bayer are leading the charge on this kind of regenerative. I think about tobacco companies in the 60s convincing people that cigarettes are fine, just fine. I see no difference in the two scenarios. We, I was born in 1954, I wasn’t part of that, but the public Government figured out that, you know, cigarettes are, you know, they’re not healthy. And remember, there was a huge dissension when they made them put the little on the side the cigarette, this may harm your health. Boy, that didn’t go well.
And I think we’re in the same place now with pesticides and similar companies, GMOs maybe. But I don’t think there’s the integrity today to make the change that happened with cancer and cigarettes and big tobacco in the 60s. I don’t think we’ve got the integrity, especially in the political and the bureaucracy to say, hey, this is bad and we shouldn’t do it anymore. I see it being dodged every day.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like you might think we’re on a fool’s errand.
Will Harris: I think you got to run that rabbit. Do I think that, I mean, I think we can’t just say, well, let’s just go ahead and spray these chemicals everywhere and eat whatever we want to eat because we’re going to die anyway. I don’t think that’s a very good game plan. But I don’t think the solution will come from big industry. And I think that big industry influences, unduly influences the government, the legislatures. So I think that if we have meaningful change, it’ll come from the public, from consumers. And I don’t know, and that’s hard.
I mean, it’s hard for people to spend more for their food. I understand that and I respect it. And so it’s a very difficult situation we have here. And I don’t know what the answer is going to be. I know that in my, I’m pretty old and I’ve seen a lot of change. I’ve never seen much change come about without pain. And I’m very sorry about that. I think that a lot of, there’ll be a lot of pain involved on the path that we’re on in terms of agriculture and food production.
Jada Dormaier: Do you think that there is a regenerative farming movement happening right now, or is it, Sort of like pseudo with big companies pushing these. They’re still monocropping, but they’re maybe pushing cover crops or reducing tillage. Do you think that there is a regenerative movement actually happening? And can you speculate like what you think farming will look like in 10 to 20 years?
Will Harris: I don’t think we really have a regenerative movement right now. I think we have a regenerative discussion right now. The people who are actually doing it like us, we’re not the only ones, but it’s a small number of people. I probably got all their numbers in that cell phone right there from California to here. So I think that we’re a long way from really making anything happen. And that’s kind of what I said about the pain. I fear that nothing meaningful will happen until there’s a lot of pain. Until something really significant causes humanity to say, huh, we probably need to be eating differently.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah.
Will Harris: Oh, sorry.
Jada Dormaier: Well, go ahead.
Will Harris: Producing food differently.
Jada Dormaier: What about, like, do you see a change in farmer sentiment now that there’s a lot of carbon market talk? We are having regenerative discussions. And farmers haven’t typically had a voice in that space. You know, environmentalism has sort of been a political issue and sort of polarizing to farmers, I think. And have you seen with the new with with the regenerative discussions, have you seen any difference in the minds of farmers now that they kind of have a space in this industry and a voice and affecting change?
Will Harris: There’s a lot of discussion. I mean, every farm publication you pick up has got something in it about a carbon market somewhere. I got several opinions, strong opinions on that. One is, I feel like there’s going to be more money made in carbon measuring than carbon sequestering. We’ve had a lot of work done on this farm. Or the organic model in my soil on this farm that I’ve been managing holistically for over 20 years has gone from a half a percent carbon to 5% carbon, 10X increase. And it was done through natural systems.
I’ve not poured a bunch of carbon into it. It happened through microbial plant animal interaction. The amount of money I hear them talk about farmers actually receiving is not much. The amount of cost of measuring this carbon, and it’s just an estimate, but the best measurements in the world are just estimates. It’s a lot. So I think that there will be a lot of money made in the carbon market, so I’m not sure how much I will actually go to the guys who are doing it. All this talk about carbon sequestering really concerns me.
And please keep in mind that I have sequestered hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon in the last 20 years, right? The farm currently is about 5,000 acres. It’s not all 20 years in the process, but some of it is, 1,000 acres of it is. So we have sequestered a lot of carbon. And I think it needs to be done. The carbon cycle is only one of the cycles of nature. The energy cycle, the water cycle, the microbial cycle, on and on and on. But the carbon cycle is the one that somebody is probably going to make a lot of money on early on.
So you know which one we’re talking about? The carbon cycle. You can have a perfect carbon cycle. I don’t know what that looks like, but And it’s not worth a damn if the microbial cycle, the water cycle, the energy cycle, the other cycles aren’t operating. It’s not the best four out of five cycles operating to give you the abundance. It’s all of it working together. And I think the only reason we’re talking so much about the carbon cycle is that’s the one that people are going to be able to make money on first.
So I’m... I don’t want to sound like I’m not an advocate for sequestering carbon. I don’t think many people have sequestered much more than I have. But that’s not all there is to it. You’re watching the ball game through one slat in the fence, right?
Jada Dormaier: Instead Do you think, so thanks for giving your opinion, Will. So this is just what I do. I enroll farmers into Nori’s carbon marketplace. But do you think that incentivizing farmers to make these changes and to sequester carbon will promote them to start looking at some of those other cycles and changing those practices too?
Will Harris: I do. I do. And you’ve got to start somewhere. And that’s somewhere. My fear is that it’ll start and end there. It’s what big companies can make money on.
Jada Dormaier: What do you think farming will look like in 10 years? Do you think we’ll kind of keep going on this linear path or will farmers start seeing that they need to make changes sooner than later?
Will Harris: That’s an excellent question. And I think about it all the time and I have no freaking idea. I mean, I just don’t know. I mean, I think about it all the time. I used to believe, I would not have said this out loud, but at some level, I believe that I was one of the early innovators that was helping to figure this out, not solely, but helping a greater group figure it out. And it would spread and spread and spread and eventually become a tsunami of change. And I don’t think that anymore.
Now I think it’s just, I’m a little bitty bubble and there’s some other little bitty bubbles, but there aren’t getting to be more and more little bitty bubbles. The things that we talked about with the beef importation is making it hard for that. And what happened here with us making the changes we made, moving from industrial commodity cattle into what we do today It has been, was profitable for us for a while. And it’s okay now. You know, our return on investment, we are suddenly profitable. Now, our return on investment is horrible.
We got a lot of assets tied up, not making any money or much money. Now, that’s okay because it’s what we want to do. And because this is important, A farmer like me thinks generational. In business, when I was majoring in animal science, I had to take a little bit of business and accounting. And it’s all about the monthly report, the quarterly report, the annual report, return on investment. And in a farming situation, that is not the way it should be thought about it. And we have come to think about it that way.
But it is a much longer term. It’s a generational business. And to do it properly, if it would be properly done, people like me make investments that I’ll never get a return. It’ll cost me money the rest of my life. But I’ve got four children, two children and their spouses in their thirties. So, I’m looking at the 30-year window. They got 30 more years to operate this farm. And I can give you many, many examples of the difference in those two mindsets. We are used to buying the stock today and selling it tomorrow.
And that is not perpetuating. That’s what we do. It’s our business is doing. In this kind of business, it’s generational. And we make an investment today. And the fact that we’re getting a really crappy return on our investment. We got a lot of assets tied up here. We got some debt. We got a lot of assets. Would be, I mean, I got friends who are MBAs and CPAs and they, and I talk to them about money. They think I’m crazy as a run over chicken And I understand why they do, but it’s just a completely different context.
Not even mindset, different context. So sequestering carbon is right up my alley. My family’s owned this farm, the home place of this farm, since 1866, 150-something years. We’re very long-term players in it. What my dad and I did to oxidize the carbon in this land and degrade it was terrible. We thought it was a thing to do that day, but it wasn’t. I’m the one that wants to do that, but I also think I know enough about business to know that the actual practitioner I have that’s doing the work is probably not going to get too much.
Ross Kenyon: One of the aspects of the regenerative movement that I think is undersold potentially is how much it can impact rural and small town economies. You have stories of going from single digit employee numbers to hundreds of people who now have meaningful, healthy work that they’re able to connect with. And Bluffton, where you live, has seemingly had a renaissance, at least partially due to your work and the work of your family. What’s that been like and what should people keep in mind about that?
Will Harris: Yeah, that’s wonderful. And it’s demonstrable, it’s ongoing. So Bluffton, Georgia, founded in 1815, one of the oldest towns in the Creek Indian Treaty. Yeah, one of the oldest towns, it’s not on the river, they said, the Creek Treaty, the reasons for that. And it was a thriving little town when my great grandfather came in 1866. And gone into decay, like most rural southern towns. Well, not just southern, I guess, probably rural towns that were dependent upon agriculture. And until recently, we started building some houses here about 2015. But before that, the newest housing start in Bluffton was in 1972.
1972 to 2015, zero new housing starts in this incorporated city, eastern Mississippi. The population had plummeted. I think it peaked in 1900 with, I forgot the number, several hundred people, it wasn’t much, but It would have been the trade center for thousands of people because 40 acres and a mule, little farms all around it. This was the trade center. So it would have been a trade center for 15,000 or something people, a lot of people. I did the calculation. I don’t know what it was. Went into decline. And today it’s a really nice little place again.
When I started making changes in Bluffet, the only thing you could buy was a stamp. The only thing you could spend money on was a stamp, U. S. government stamp. And it was open about two hours a day. Today it’s a very pleasant place. I’m very proud of it.
Ross Kenyon: Is that what it means to go from a system that you deem complicated to one that’s complex? You substituted various types of external systems for labor. People just need to be on the farm using their eyeballs, using their hands to get this work done. Is it something like that? I see you nodding.
Will Harris: It’s exactly like that. When I was operating my farm industrially, I had probably three, maybe four employees, minimum wage employees. Today, our payroll is over $100,000 a week. We’re the largest private employer in the county. And those people, we hire good people. If they need a place to eat and sleep and play and shop and We built it and provided it, and it’s not big, but it’s just really nice. Come see us. We got cabins to rent out, a restaurant, a store, and come see us, and I’ll show you.
Ross Kenyon: We’d love to hang out with you. We just got to hang out with all of our local farmers before we get to you. You’re farther down our list now, Will. You demoted yourself.
Will Harris: I’m way down on a lot of people’s lists. I know how to do it. I’m used to that.
Ross Kenyon: Well, we did. I want to speak for you, but I really, I loved your book. I think it’s, I think it’s a great, inspiring story. I read a lot of the region ag books and definitely one of my favorites and something that I’ll be recommending. If people want to support your work besides buying your book. Yeah. You offer a number of products, both fresh things and shelf stable things that, that ship. Well, is that understanding? Correct.
Will Harris: We do. Uh, we, uh, We have a website, whiteoakpastures.com. We sell our products, ship them to 48 states. And even though that’s not exactly what I want to do, I realize in a lot of those states, there’s nowhere to get it except the little small handful, not just us, but the small handful of us that are in this business. We also have a nonprofit that we founded, a 501c3 called CIFAR, Center for Agricultural Resilience. And we teach people the basics of this kind of regenerative farming. I have a real problem with people and entities that want to teach you how you should farm your farm regeneratively.
I don’t think that’s how that works. I think there’s way too much diversity in the ecosystem, even 15, 20, 30 miles away. I don’t think that anybody can come to Bluffton, Georgia and learn how to regeneratively farm a farm in California or Maine or Colorado or even Kentucky, Missouri. I think that it’s too ecosystem specific. You need to understand, Wendell Berry says something about The farmer’s knowledge of his land and how important it is. And it is. But what we do teach is how to think about it, how to look at it.
We do that through our internship program, which I’m not really recruiting interns. We get more opportunities than we can service. But also through the CFAR, Center for Agricultural Resilience, which I think is It’s good. Any listeners that want to donate to that or come and participate in it, I invite them.
Ross Kenyon: It’s great to hear. And that work reminds me very strongly. And of course, there’s probably no coincidence that you are a savory hub too. And people are hard on Alan Savory for the fact that this is not a linear replicable thing. In some cases, it’s a way of seeing rather than a checklist of things that you do and you do it just so. And these are the inputs, these are the outputs, and you’re done. It is a new way of seeing, I think is maybe a better way to say it.
Will Harris: We are a slavery hub, and I am a friend of ours, but we don’t agree on everything.
Ross Kenyon: I’d love to see that. That sounds like a good conversation right there. Men of strong opinions here.
Will Harris: And strong drink. And strong drink, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Will, we really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for letting us ask you some hard questions and giving us some hard answers in return. I respect that, and thanks for being here.
Will Harris: Thank you all very much for having me. I enjoyed talking to you, and you’re both very knowledgeable, smart people.
Jada Dormaier: Thanks, Will. It was really great to meet you.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
