At Georgia’s White Oak Pastures, an organic approach is keeping the land in good health, with help from fourth-generation farmer Will Harris, who went against the grain, stepping away from the industrial methods that were all he’d ever known.
I’m driving through a sea of farmland, but it’s not hard to see where White Oak Pastures begins.
Stretching out on each side of the highway into Bluffton, Georgia are fields that have grown cotton and peanuts and soybeans year after year for decades. Then at some point the colors shift to deeper green, and the order gives way to choreographed chaos.
On a sunny February afternoon, Will Harris, with his tan Stetson cowboy hat and measured South Georgia drawl, is in the newly renovated general store, greeting neighbors, family members, and new White Oak Pastures interns – some of whom have come all the way from Europe to this town with a population of under 150, in one of the state’s poorest counties.
Harris is the fourth generation of his family to work this land. Thanks to some bold moves – plus a lot of trial and error – he has transformed White Oak Pastures from a 1,000-acre industrial cattle farm to an agricultural operation that’s unique in the Southeast.
The farm doesn’t use chemical fertilizers or pest controls, doesn’t give the animals antibiotics or hormones, and doesn’t grow any genetically modified crops. Two decades ago Harris began making changes to prioritize natural cycles and make sure nothing goes to waste, adhering to sustainability practices that go above and beyond standards like “certified organic”. White Oak Pastures embraces a regenerative model of land stewardship aimed at improving the quality of the soil, the air, and the water as well as the quality of life for the animals.
Today, the farm raises cows, hogs, goats, sheep, chickens, guinea fowl, turkeys, and rabbits across 3,200 acres. Workers process the animals on-site, producing meat cuts that can be found in Whole Foods and other grocery stores in various parts of the US. They also make lotions, soaps, leather goods and pet chews from other parts of the animal. The general store sells jams, jellies, and pickles made from the produce grown at the farm, and honey from the bees that pollinated those plants. The farm restaurant is kept busy serving three meals a day to the employees, and the numerous people who come to visit.
Linear vs cyclical
This type of agriculture is in many ways a return to how family farms functioned when White Oak Pastures was established in 1866. However, it’s a long way from how things were done when Harris first took over. His father adopted industrial farming methods in the post-WWII era and at first, Harris carried them on with gusto
“I was really an excessively industrial producer. If the label on the pesticides said put a pint, I might put a quart,” Harris says. “My dad was like that too. I think we somehow just had the belief that if a little would do a little good, more would do more good.”
“Farmers can grow more when they grow it as a monoculture. That doesn’t mean it’s better”
Harris learned about soils while studying animal sciences at the University of Georgia, but when it came to the rich and varied life in that soil, the focus was on killing it – with nematicides, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. Harris took pride in knowing the right chemical for every job.
“It wasn’t until I started rethinking things that I came to understand that all those -cides, which are highly efficacious on killing the target, they kill some other stuff too. When you kill an indigenous species, you change the cycle. Something else becomes a problem, so you gotta kill it. Another -cide. It’s never-ending.”
The shift away from spraying the land with chemicals and raising cattle on grain and antibiotics began for Harris with a deep concern for animal welfare. Preventing livestock from expressing instinctive behaviors didn’t sit right with him – he wanted his cows grazing, his pigs wallowing, and chickens pecking and scratching. In the early 2000s he started to work out a grazing system that mimicked the way buffalo used to move across plains in North America, in order to enable his herd to be in the pastures their entire lives instead of contained in commercial-style feedlots.
Industrial farming technologies had supercharged production by interrupting nature’s cycles. Gradually, Harris began to get glimpses of how those cycles would be spinning if he got out of their way. “From a production perspective, farmers can grow so much more crop when they grow it as a monoculture, relying on these tools,” says Harris. “That doesn’t mean it’s better. If I was cold, I could pee in my pants right now and it would warm me up. It has unintended consequences.”
Bringing the water cycle, carbon cycle, energy cycle, mineral cycle, and many of nature’s other cycles back online at White Oak Pastures created a ripple effect of benefits for the animals, the land, and the community.
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He sees the last 100 years or so as a period of humans breaking those cycles with technology – living off the “previous bounty of nature,” by burning fossil fuels like coal and oil and gas, while compromising the future. “We have killed our soil, the water, air,” he says. “We’re going to have to pay for it sometime, and I really worry about that.”
Betting the farm
This return to “radically traditional farming” was not a change his father would have supported, Harris says.
In the beginning, he had actual nightmares about his dad becoming aware of what he was doing. Borrowing money against land that was paid off would have been considered a grievous sin by his father, who watched his family manage to keep their farm through the Great Depression as a child when many other families didn’t.
Old photograph of Will’s father, Will Bell Harris.
Harris’s resolve to take big risks seems to come from a clear-eyed view of the long-term vulnerabilities underlying our current food systems. “We’re on a path that we cannot stay on. I don’t want to be that gloom and doom, but I don’t see how any rational, fair-minded person can say this is fine,” Harris says of modern agriculture, noting major issues like the depletion of top soils and the dead zone that fertilizer runoff has created in the Gulf of Mexico.
The weekly farm management meetings held in the historic courthouse that Harris uses for his office don’t focus on the next month, next quarter, or the next year, he says. “We talk about it generationally and I think that’s pretty unusual in any business these days… but I think that probably agriculture needs to be that way, because so much of the investment is in the land and in the herd, which are perpetual.”
Will Harris owner of White Oak Pastures Farm in Bluffton, Georgia. Pictured at his office, a converted old courthouse.
Harris sees conventional farmers looking at his operation with interest, if not necessarily envy. Sales hit a high of $30 million this year, and the farm makes a profit, but the return on investment “isn’t great,” he says. Besides, industrial farms tend to be heavily invested in machinery and processes for monoculture, so change is tough, even if they want it.
The science in the soil
At White Oak Pastures, the improvement in soil health is visible compared with neighboring farmland, in its color and texture, the hardiness and diversity of the plants growing, and in the water runoff during a hard rain.
The impact of cows grazing and leaving behind their droppings enriches the soil, allowing plants and grasses to grow bigger and with deeper roots, increasing the amount of water the earth can retain as well as the amount of carbon dioxide being pulled out of the air and stored in the plants and the soil.
The herd is moved every day to avoid depleting any one pasture. The cows typically grow less fatty and Harris believes they are less susceptible to illness than feedlot cattle. When they’re killed and processed on-site, the parts of the carcass that can’t be eaten or used get composted. In a field not far from the red meat plant, there’s about 6,000 tons of compost in piles taller than a dump truck that will eventually allow those animal parts to feed back into the soil.
When we hear cows and climate in the same sentence, it’s not usually a positive story. The UN says the world needs to eat less meat to hold back climate change, and overall, beef is the most climate-unfriendly meat of all – with an impact between 10 and 100 times that of most plant-based foods. This is because of two main factors: planet-warming methane burped out by cows on the farm, and the impact of farming cattle on the land, which often means chopping down trees that would otherwise have absorbed carbon from the air, and depleting carbon in the soil.
There’s not much Harris can do about the methane – feed supplements exist that can reduce it, but they’re not organic. However when it comes to the soil, there’s a big difference between industrial cattle farming and the approach to grazing and land management that Harris takes.
Research into the long-term climate benefits of this way of doing things, is still relatively nascent. Dr. Paige Stanley, an agroecologist and soil biogeochemist at Colorado State University, is one of those working on it. She says regenerative grazing practices generally have big potential to mitigate emissions by getting carbon into the soil, but the question of whether that’s enough to negate a cow’s methane footprint remains “a little up in the air”.
What’s clear is that the land at White Oak Pastures has a particularly good opportunity to accrue carbon, Stanley says, because it started out depleted – having been plowed and used to grow single crops for decades.
Harris’ long-held belief in the positive potential of grazing cattle was supported by a 2019 life cycle assessment of White Oak Pastures’ beef products, which the farm and its customer, the food giant General Mills, commissioned from sustainability consultancy Quantis.
The study acknowledged uncertainties around the impact of methane over time, how long carbon stays in the soil, and how much carbon the farm’s soil can continue to absorb. But it concluded that for each kilogram of beef produced at White Oak Pastures, the net result is the equivalent of 3.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere. That’s because the estimated amount of carbon stored in soil and vegetation outstrips the estimated amount of methane emitted.
Harris enjoys pointing out that this estimate means a burger made from his grass-fed beef has an even smaller climate footprint than plant-based alternatives from companies like Impossible Burger or Beyond Burger – according to those manufacturers’ own life cycle assessments. These studies, it should be said, were conducted independently from each other and are not designed to be directly comparable.
This is not necessarily the case for cows farmed elsewhere, Stanley points out, because the amount of carbon the soil can hold is highly dependent on the location and on how grazing is managed – and the gains in soil carbon will diminish over time. However, that shouldn’t be a deterrent to pursuing this type of regenerative approach, she says.
“I hear a lot of people on the other side of this argument say ‘Oh, well it’s not worth pursuing because there are thresholds to [carbon] accumulation,’” she says. “Even if maybe in 50 years, soil carbon accrual isn’t happening every year, there are still other major co-benefits. And when we think of climate change mitigation, the near-term really does matter… The immediate soil carbon accrual potential is really large and there are other major benefits that are felt – both to farmers and ranchers like Will and to the public, like soil water holding potential, biodiversity, and all these other things.”
Harris often says that the regenerative model at White Oak Pastures is “highly replicable, but not highly scalable.” He and Stanley agree that regenerative practices like managed grazing can bring benefits to pretty much any farmland, but it’s not just a case of copying and pasting the White Oak Pastures strategy. The most appropriate measures, and the effect they have, will look different from place to place.
Harris still has ambitions to fulfil. Driving around the farm, he points out patches of land he’d still like to acquire and rehabilitate and projects that will soon be underway, including installing $2.5 million worth of solar panels – tall enough for cows to graze under – near the processing plant to provide clean power for the facility.
White Oak Pastures offers an example for other farmers to follow, but encouraging them to actually do it will take more, Harris says. It will take for consumers to demand food that’s produced differently. That’s why Harris believes anyone who cares about the soil, the climate and the resilience of food systems, should make connections with real farmers who are caring for their land, animals and communities.
“I’m convinced that’s the only way it’s going to happen,” he says.
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