Will Harris, regenerative farmer at White Oak Pastures—a 3,200-acre operation since 1866—contrasts his carbon-sequestering, multi-species pastured model with industrial farming’s reliance on WWII-derived chemicals (e.g., 44% nitrogen fertilizers) and growth hormones, exposing hidden costs like antibiotic resistance and dead zones. Despite bureaucratic hurdles (USDA’s Livestock Indemnity Program exploiting predator losses), he partners with Silicon Ranch to graze livestock on solar farms, proving resilience over scalability. His upcoming book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, sold to Penguin/Viking/Random House, urges consumers to demand transparency and cyclical farming over greenwashed efficiency. Harris’s work reveals how land health depends not on tech fixes but on rewilding wisdom—and individual choices can drive systemic change. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I first saw you on television doing one of those very quick interviews where they were talking about all these issues that you like to discuss, but they only gave you a couple of minutes.
And it was really hard, because you have a relaxed way of talking, but you were very interesting.
And I was watching, and I was like, this is a stupid format.
I'm the fourth generation of my family to own and manage white oak pastures.
I have two daughters and two in-laws who are there with me today helping run the farm.
And I have seven grandchildren, so the sixth generation is on the farm that's been in my family since 1866. So my great-grandfather, James Edward Harris, came there in 1866 and established the farm and ran it all his life,
followed by his son, Will Carter Harris, my granddad, followed by his son, Will Bell Harris, my dad, followed by me, and now, again, I've got two more generations in the offing.
You know, I think the thing I enjoy most, and to tell you about the farm, so the farm is, that farm is 3,200 acres.
We do some other grazing, but that farm is 3,200 acres.
We pasture raise five different poultry species.
Chickens, turkeys, geese, guineas, and ducks.
And we hand butcher them on the farm in a USDA-inspected processing plant I built.
We pasture-raised five red meat species, cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and hand-butchered them at a separate USDA-inspected facility that I built.
We raised pastured eggs, organic vegetables, honey, and a bunch of other little ancillary businesses that go from the organism that is white oak pastures.
They're very different from what I did prior to 25 years ago.
It's a very imperfect emulation, but it's better and better, and it serves to restart the cycles of nature, which we broke through industrial farming, and make our living off the abundance that comes from properly operating cycles of nature.
Well, it's also, we have to look at the reality of why that animal is so chewy, or it's so easy to chew.
It's because it's got no, like, the body is unhealthy.
Right.
There's so much fat in the system that the body's marbled with fat.
If that was a human being and you saw it, that person would be sick.
If you look at one of those cows that's completely infused with fat, if that was your body, you'd be like, wow, I might need to get myself together because this is not good.
So a bull or heifer that I slaughter would be two years old.
It would weigh 1,100 pounds.
It would have two or three-tenths inch of back fat.
And if I gave that animal a presidential pardon and said, we're not going to slaughter you at two years' age, they would live to be 20-something years old, probably.
That's the normal life expectancy of a cow.
Contrast that to a feedlot animal that would yield prime or choice.
They would be probably 16 to 18 months of age, not two years.
They would probably weigh 1,300, 1,400 pounds, not 1,100.
They would have three-quarters of an inch of back fat.
And while I have not done this, I would be willing to bet you that if you left that animal in the feedlot, gave it that same presidential pardon, it wouldn't live much over another year or so.
You're eating a naturally obese creature that would never occur in nature and is slowly dying of the same diseases of sedentary lifestyle and obesity that kill most of us.
During the pandemic panic, when the packing plants were closed down, they were euthanizing chickens and hogs particularly because they couldn't slaughter them, so they euthanized them.
Now, I own my own packing plant, and we never shut down.
That's a sign of resilience.
But if I had, I wouldn't have euthanized anything.
They'd been fine.
They would have kept eating, but they'd been fine.
So, this is not to my credit, but I... In my 40s, I became increasingly aware of the unintended consequences of the production model that I was using, the industrial commodity centralized model.
And I didn't like it much.
The more I looked at it, the less I liked it.
Animal welfare was the canary in the coal mine.
What I had previously believed to be good animal welfare is what most people still think of as good animal welfare.
And that is, you keep the animal well-fed, watered, In a comfortable temperature range, you don't intentionally inflict pain and suffering on the animal, and you're good to go.
All the boxes are checked.
That's good animal welfare.
But to me, and I subscribe to that, but to me in my 40s, I didn't like that much anymore.
I felt like it was, in addition to those things, incumbent upon me as the stockman Yeah.
Yeah.
and wallah.
Cows are meant to roam and graze.
But in the CAFO confinement model, those instinctive behaviors are not an option for them.
And I believe that puts the animal I think it's like if you're raising your kid...
Let's talk about good parenting.
Good parenting doesn't mean you take your child, your daughter, and put her in the closet.
It's 72 degrees.
You got the light on.
You got a mattress in there.
You give them all the Cheetos and Oreos and Fritos they want.
And that's good parenting because they'll never be abducted.
They'll never fall down and break their leg.
But it's not.
You've got to give those children the opportunity to express instinctive behavior.
I think that's also incumbent upon the stockman with his livestock.
So I changed the way I raised, at that time, only cattle.
I was a monocultural cattleman at that time.
I quit feeding.
We used to literally feed chicken shit to cows, chicken litter.
You put enough corn and enough molasses in it, and you give them enough sub-therapeutic antibiotics to keep them healthy.
So one of the horrors of animal agriculture was the great, the moment in England and in Europe where there's mad cow disease spread through the land, where I had a friend who, I think it was a decade plus later, after he had been to England, There was something about his medical report.
He had a list that he lived there during the time that he ate ground beef.
Because so many people had gotten mad cow disease from people feeding cows cows.
Encephalus, whatever that stands for, PSE, Bobine Spongiform Ecephalitis, I think it is, comes from prions, which when they grind the central nervous system of an infected animal, you convey it to healthy animals.
And that was done in England fairly extensively, apparently.
Anyway, to finish the question, most of my transition from what I did 25 years ago to what I do today involved just giving up stuff, giving up procedures, giving up products, giving up techniques.
The The problems that we have in agriculture today that make it so destructive is the misapplication of technology.
I've been accused of being anti-technology, and I am not.
My farm is a $25, $6 million business with 180-something employees.
We employ a lot of technology.
But reductive science technology does not lend itself to living systems, whether it's your body or my farm.
Living biological systems...
Have so often unintended consequences to misuse technology, and the unintended consequences are usually unnoticed consequences, and they're undesirable consequences.
And so, like, what did you see as far as what technological applications on farms did you see that were particularly destructive that you felt like you had to eliminate from your farm?
So let's talk about the land side because it's a little easier.
So I would say the three of the most damaging things we do to our soil, our land, is cultivation, the use of chemical fertilizers, and the the use of chemical fertilizers, and the use of pesticides.
You know, and most of this misused technology came from the war effort, from the Second World War.
I don't think agriculture changed much from the time the first person domesticated the first animal or put the first seed in the ground until post-World War II. And I'll give you some examples.
Ammoniated fertilizer, chemical fertilizer, was invented, I think, in Germany in the 1880s or something.
But farmers didn't use it because it was very expensive.
After the war, so much money had been spent on the munitions factories, the technology to build those factories and make munitions, that somebody figured out that, wow, we can make ammonia fertilizers cheap enough to sell it.
And they literally, companies, multinational companies, literally put salesmen out in the field to Bluffton, Georgia.
I heard my dad tell stories about that.
And to sell ammoniated fertilizer to the farmers.
Well, ammoniated fertilizer is like steroids in your body.
You put it on the land and immediately you've got this very visual growth and productivity boost.
It was the most efficient way to import nutrients into cropland was Guano, but until World War II. Ammoniated fertilizer is chemically produced fertilizer.
In fact, since we're into this, I'll tell you a brief story.
So my dad told me that he was born in 1920. So 1946, he'd been 26 years old and taking over the farm.
He told me that in 1946, after the war, a salesman came to Bluffton, our little town, and had a fish fry or barbecue or whatever it took to bring the farmers in.
He had two 200-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that had been made in munitions factories.
And they gave every farmer like a five or ten pound bag to take home.
And the ask was, go home, put this out on your grass, your pasture, wet it, put water on it, and don't look at it for about three days, then come back.
And my dad did that.
And when he came back where they put the ammonium nitrate, you know, it was a foot taller and five shades greener than the rest of it.
And he said, damn, I want the whole farm to look like that.
And from 1946 to probably...
In 1996, 50 years, that'd be 50 years, either my dad or I put ammoniated fertilizer on every acre of land we had every single year.
Now, the benefit was so obvious.
You could see it.
You could see it at 30 miles an hour just looking out the window.
What you couldn't see is that that ammoniated fertilizer It oxidized the carbon in the ground, the organic matter in the soil.
Oxidized it, right, chemically.
It killed the microbes in the soil.
Not sterilized them, but it was bad for the microbes.
It had some other negative chemical impacts, but you couldn't see them.
If you dug around the dirt with your fingers, you wouldn't have seen it.
You know, you've got some fault leaders somewhere that have probably been around for a long time, but as far as actual acceptance by the practitioners, I think it's just now happening, and it's really struggling to happen.
We've talked about Roundup many times on the podcast about how many people, when you test their blood, you find Roundup in it.
It's some crazy number.
What is it, like 80%, right?
Very high.
Very high number of people test positive for glyphosate, which is very disturbing because people want to pretend that it's not having any effects on people.
Well, you don't even know.
And then they were talking about the numbers, the minuscule amounts of glyphosate.
It's no big deal.
And my thought was like, why are you making apologies for that?
First of all, you're saying it's no big deal.
You don't know if it's not a big deal.
And second of all, You're only talking about some people have low amounts.
Like, what's the overall average that people have, and what's the high end?
At the high end, should you be warning the people that have a high level of glyphosate because they ingest it every day?
At what levels is it toxic, and is this really well understood?
It seems like it's understood that it's not good for you.
That's exactly what I'm told, and I believe, and it's my observation.
If I didn't just dump them out and go home, I've been looking at them every single day since I put them out, and I see them eating the tropical soda apple.
If I own that piece of property you're showing right now, and I put a good fence around it, and turn my cows, sheep, goats, I'd probably put hogs in there too, let them work on the roots.
In time, they would eat it to death.
It's actually quite a nourishing plant for livestock.
The big question about regenerative farming for most people is, is this scalable to what our current reality is as far as urban life?
You know, we've talked about this a bunch of times, but living in cities, you've got in Los Angeles is a good example.
I think there's something like 18 million people living in the Los Angeles area.
But no one's growing food.
So everything has to be shipped into there.
Everything.
And it's a very unnatural state for people.
When we want to be able to just pull into a Jack in the Box and get a cheeseburger, How much meat is required to feed 18 million people that don't farm?
That's so many people that aren't farming, so many people that aren't growing any food.
So it's got to be grown in these other places, but could you have a farm that's a regenerative farm that's so large And supplies so much food that you could feed people the way they're living right now, but do it completely naturally?
Or do we need a certain amount of factory farming in order for people to live like that today?
So the question is, what farming method will carry the earth furthest in its carrying capacity?
Will get the earth the furthest?
That's really the argument.
And the industrial farming with all this misused technology that we're using today, If acres of land is the first thing we run out of, it is a much better system than mine.
You can feed more people with the industrial centralized commodity system than you can with my regenerative system.
I lose.
But what if land's not the first thing we run out of?
What if it's oil?
I don't use as much oil, petroleum.
What if it's water?
I don't use as much water.
What if it's the reductive plant foods like potassium and phosphate that we mine?
Mine's better.
I can feed more people.
What if it's other things?
What if it's the antibiotics that the pathogens are not resistant to?
My system's better.
I can feed more people.
What if it's the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico down there, right?
My system's better.
So from many, many, many perspectives, I can give you a list of as many as you want.
My system is less destructive and will carry more people on this planet than the current destructive linear factory model.
So when you do this, how much If you decided you wanted to go back to the factory farming system, how much more money would it cost and how much more money would you get out of it?
Is it more financially beneficial to do it the way you're doing it or more financially beneficial in a scale like the size of the scale that you're using right now?
Because it seems like it would cost a lot of money to get all that stuff.
To feed these cows, to make them fat real quick, and all the money for the hormones, and all the money for all these other things, where you just let them roam around and eat grass, but you don't get as much weight out of them.
It's a great question, but I can't give you a short answer for it.
I would tell you that in the case of my grass-fed beef, My cost of production is probably 30% higher than the industrial model.
And you could argue, we could argue, if you told me 20 or 35, because I don't know, it's situational, but that's not going to be too far off.
Let's step over to poultry.
My cost for raising a chicken, a four-pound dressed chicken in Bluffton, Georgia, and putting them in a bag is like $4.50 or $0.60 a pound.
I see chicken on sale for $1.10 a pound.
So my cost of production for poultry is hundreds of percent higher.
And that's because the chicken lent itself to industrialization more handily than the cow did.
We took more cost out of production.
So when you say, how much higher is it?
That's how long it's a string.
But it's higher.
My cost of production is higher.
When you as a consumer ask me as a farmer to give up all the tools that reductionist science gave to take cost out of production, you add cost back to production.
So when you are around all these other people that are doing it in the industrialized way, and you're doing it in your sort of regenerative way, it doesn't have any influence on those people?
They see that you have a more...
Natural approach to farming.
It seems more prosperous.
You're getting all this attention.
People want to talk to you.
It's a fascinating subject and people gravitate towards it as a potential option.
Nobody's looking at the factory farming system going, oh wow, you stuff all those pigs together.
You take all the chickens and you make them live in these abnormal cages and no one's excited about that.
But when people talk to you, they're excited about it.
Like, oh, that's interesting.
So you can just let the chickens roam around.
And you let the hogs roam around.
And you let the grass grow for the cows to just graze around on.
And this is how you sustain a farm.
That sounds intriguing to people because one of the big dilemmas about being a person who eats meat is contributing to this horrendous factory farming system.
You know, if you were raised with your, as most of us generation farmers are, with your role model being dad and granddad, and what they did, you're not going to say, this is bad.
On top of that, they're told every day by land-grant universities and big food and big ag, this is how you do it.
And we glamorize it, and it's fine.
So those are the motivational reasons things don't change much.
Let's talk about the business reasons.
So let's compare my business to a commodity farmer, a larger commodity farmer.
Both businesses are very capital intensive.
I've got $28 million worth of capital invested in my business.
Some of it's debt, some of it's equity, but that's what we've got.
They do, too.
Both businesses are also low return.
My margins are not high and their margins are not high.
Both high capital investment, both low return.
My business is high risk.
Their business is not so high risk.
People have forever talked about how risky farming is.
You know, when you've got an arsenal of sides, pesticides, To throw at any problem you got.
When you got irrigation and the water is free where I live, other than the energy cost of getting it out of the ground.
When you've got crop insurance to mitigate risk, then compared to what I do, which is own the product all the way from when the calf hits the ground to the hamburger goes in your stomach, When he comes, I recall, and it's over for me.
And all those things that you're citing in terms of the investments that are involved, the cotton gins and the cotton pickers and all the different things that they need.
They'd have to restructure everything so it would take a significant investment to do that and then a big risk.
You know, what I'm good at is regenerative land management and animal welfare and community building.
So those questions are valid and they're out there, but I think that So I think that the way we farm today is wastefully—it causes food or fiber to be wastefully abundant and obscenely cheap and— Just very damaging in the way it's produced.
But in the industrial model that we operate in, a farmer in this country can produce a 48,000 pound semi-truck load of anything And call Big Ag and they'll come get it and send you a check or an EFT. Whether it's oranges, hogs, soybeans, corn, cows, cotton, it don't matter.
Big Ag, who I think of as being multinational corporations and being evil, but they'll come get it for you.
And it sends you some money.
Not much, 14.3 cents, but it sends you some money.
But then from that point forward, they take all the risk and provide all the service.
The farmer doesn't have to have $20-something million worth of assets like we do to further process.
We forget in this country that in the commodity market, consumers don't buy.
So you had a significant investment in order to be able to do that and you have the FDA facilities and all that in place.
This is a subject that is Being brought up more and more lately, because I think as time's going on and people are aware of all these things that they're finding in food, it becomes much more attractive to get food from a person like yourself.
How many people do you feed per year off of your farm?
So if you're looking at that amount of people, how much of farmland would we need to feed 300 million people?
How many farms like your own would we need?
This is the question of scalability, right?
And this doesn't include corn growth.
If you're assuming that animals would go back to being grass-fed, which would most certainly be healthier for everybody, healthier for the consumer and healthier for the animals, If you're assuming that, then you would have less monocrop agriculture that you would need for corn.
It's outside of my expertise, but I'm sure the answer is no, because corn has become the dominant crop it is because it lends itself so well to these outside inputs.
It's a fantastic assimilator of chemical nitrogen.
If it was another crop...
You wouldn't put as much nitrogen and you wouldn't make as much calories of production.
So corn didn't...
It's like corn, it's a good example.
Everything that's been done in agriculture for the last 80 years has been done for efficiency only.
There's nothing wrong with efficiency.
Nothing wrong with that.
In fact, it's incumbent upon me as a businessman to operate efficiently.
But when efficiency is all you're worried about, you pay the price in resilience.
Efficiency and resilience, and it's only what you're talking about when you're talking about people examining the soil and realizing the oxidation, realizing the damage to the carbon in the soil.
What are the steps that we can take to mitigate that other than having farms run regeneratively like yours?
If someone wants to continue with that industrialized model, But they're using all these herbicides and pesticides and it's destroying the soil in some way.
What can be done to correct that?
Or are we on a path that we can't get off of where we're not going to have good topsoil anymore?
So, and we can talk more about that, but the main point I want to make is, in the savory thought process, we talk about the difference in a complex system And a complicated system.
So this microphone thing we're working on here is a very complicated system.
And this computer this young man is working on over here is a very complicated system.
And to me what that means is there's a lot of shit going on to make it work.
And when one component quits working, it don't work no more.
And reductionist science works great on those very linear, complicated systems.
A factory is kind of the ultimate complicated system.
Very linear and very, lends itself to scale, which lends itself to efficiency.
And that is the model that my dad's generation and later my generation applied to agriculture.
Let's talk about agriculture.
My farm, like your body, is a very complex living system.
There's a lot going on in both of them to make it work.
But if one component quits, everything kind of morphs and it keeps working, right?
So in that scenario, it doesn't lend itself to reductive science as well because of the unintended consequences, that morphing we're talking about.
Living systems are complex systems.
Reductive science easily becomes misapplied to those systems because they have those unintended consequences that are not easily recognizable.
We talked about some of them.
Somebody taking steroids or me using fertilizer and pesticides on my land.
Reductive science applied to a living system.
Living systems are very cyclical.
They're not super scalable.
They are super replicable.
You can have more of them.
So this is finally getting back to your question about feeding LA. Yeah.
So we have, for the last 80 years, been feeding bigger and bigger and bigger cities using the factory model, applying that reductive science to a living system, and it had unintended consequences.
Well, some of us think we probably ought not do that so much anymore.
And if we do, then we need to move towards treating that cyclical biome, your body or form, in a manner that is favorable to the cycles of nature.
Because those cycles of nature are essential and they must all work together to have your body working good or my farm working good.
So let's talk about the cycles of nature just a minute.
First, let me tell you that industrial farming breaks the cycles of nature.
No species has ever done that before.
But it breaks us off.
You and I are the ape that learned to eat meat.
And when we learned to eat meat, we became less apish and ultimately we became the first species to really get good at technology.
We applied the technology to this system, this cyclical system, and broke the cycles of nature.
The cycles of nature, to me, are the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the mineral cycle, the microbial cycle, energy cycle.
There's probably a lot more that we don't recognize.
And when we broke the cycles of nature using those industrial tools, we ceased to produce that abundance.
That one plus one is three.
That symbiosis, you mentioned symbiosis earlier.
So that's...
What's important to us in my space is that we restart these cycles of nature.
You don't use reductive science, you use experiential wisdom.
It's like the other side of reductionist science.
And we're able to restart the cycles of nature.
That's what I've done on my farm.
And Could you please show that water video for me, please?
This is one cycle of nature, but I want to talk a little bit about how they all tie together.
Do you think it's possible that Especially when you're talking about like your neighbor who's only got 200 acres and you know they're probably very productive with those 200 acres doing it that way as opposed to doing it the way you're doing it.
How many of these without that sort of long-term 20-year investment Is there a way that the government can incentivize turning farms over that would be ultimately beneficial to everybody?
Is there a way?
Because there is some sort of government incentivizing, they're subsidizing, right, for certain crops that they started doing during the war, right?
Because they wanted to make sure that they had a surplus of certain grains and food and things like that.
And then they hire lobbyists, and those guys go to Washington and write the program, or get the program written through aides, congressional aides, or Senate aides.
And then it's past that.
So if Big Ag and Big Food don't want to change, it's not going to happen through the government.
To exacerbate that, Now, I don't want to get sued by anybody, so I'm just going to tell you what I believe.
In the case of USDA, those bureaucrats, for the most part, I'm sure it's not all, but many of those bureaucrats that become very senior in USDA, And I'm sure it's the Defense Department, too.
Post-retirement, they get really great jobs with big ag and big food.
And I think that there's a...
I can give you some examples, actually.
But I think there's a culture of catering to big ag and big food because of the rewards that become post-retirement.
You know, we...
I'll give you an example.
So we had an issue when I first started raising poultry outside in the pasture.
We had a predation problem by bald eagles.
It was kind of a good sign in a pervert way because we didn't have bald eagles.
They were outside my ecosystem.
We put poultry on the ground.
We had bald eagles.
And when the bald eagles first came back to my ecosystem, they were predating on my birds and just hammering me economically.
Now, we finally figured out how to prevent it operationally.
But for a couple of years there, 2015, 2016, we had huge economic losses because of eagle predation of my pastured poultry.
So, I learned that there is a program, federal USDA program, called LIP, Livestock Indemnity Program.
And the purpose of that program is to indemnify stockmen If a protected species is hammering your livestock, like not a coyote, not a bobcat, but a bald eagle, a timber wolf, or a grizzly bear, it's to identify the farmer.
So I went to my local USDA office and they told me what to do to prove my losses.
And I did it.
Painstaking, record-keeping, but I did it.
And the local county office, the guys that had seen the predation, approved it.
When I got to the state office, they denied my claim.
And they said that I had to prove every single one that got killed.
Well, you know, if an eagle swoops in and grabs a chicken, I can't prove it.
So they did not pay me my money.
And I went through the National Appeals Division.
This is 2015, 2016. I'm still at war with USDA to get the $190,000 they owe me for those two years' losses.
And I keep winning, and they keep appealing, and they won't pay me.
Now, I'm pretty sure there's somebody pretty highly placed in USDA. That might have told big poultry, hey, look what a good boy I'm being.
I'm not letting this farmer get his money.
Because big poultry, for the most part, doesn't like pastured production, independent production like ours.
You know where all that, and an acre slice of soil weighs about 2 million pounds.
You can Google it.
If I went from a half percent to over 5%, that's 5% of 2 million pounds.
I think that's 100,000 pounds of carbon.
Get it?
Per acre.
I didn't put any carbon out of there.
Every bit of that carbon, that 100,000 pounds per acre on 3,200 acres, used to be greenhouse gas.
That plant, through the magic of photosynthesis, Breathed in that carbon and other gases, the carbon dioxide and other gases, and turned it into fat and protein and carbohydrate that is the plant.
Some of it above the ground, some of it below the ground in roots.
My cows or sheep or goats ate that plant and some of that carbon went to make beef or pork or beef or lamb or goat Some of it went out as manure.
Some of it was put up as flatulence or burping or whatever.
And a lot of it went into the root in the ground and was sequestered there for a time.
When that plant grows, a growing plant is like a pump.
It's pulling carbon from the air, putting some of it under the ground.
The animal bites it off.
Those roots start to slough off until it regrows.
So it's literally just like a pumping carbon.
So not only is ruminant livestock not destroying the earth, it is a serious mitigator of climate change.
As a practitioner of regenerative agriculture, a guy who's regenerated thousands of acres of land, you cannot cost-effectively do it without ruminant impact.
You have to say, I'm going to take this degraded land and put it back pristine the way it was before Europeans got here.
But I'm not going to put the animal impact in it.
That's like you saying, I'm going to use my mama's recipe to cook brownies, but I'm not going to put the sugar in there.
It's not the same brownie.
And that evolution of that land without animal impact is not the same.
So that LCA I mentioned to you showed that we We are sequestering 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, whatever that is, for every pound of grass-fed beef we sell.
Ironically, the same Environmental engineers, Qantas, did an LCA on, I think it was Impossible Burger, Impossible Meats.
And they're emitting 3.5 pounds for every pound of Impossible Burger.
So if you want to have a zero footprint for every pound of Impossible Burger you eat, you've got to eat a pound of mine.
Because if you ask the average person, they think that that stuff's good for you and it's good for the environment and that if we don't get away from beef.
It's just like people have these narrow perspectives, these narratives that get fed to them.
And so they just repeat it over and over again.
But obviously when talking to someone like you who's an actual farmer, you realize how complex The organization is and how much time is involved and how much effort is involved.
Very few people have put a lot of thought into what it takes to be a farmer.
And what you were talking about, how it's high investment, low yield, and a lot of work.
And most people, I don't think, are aware of it.
They just want to get a cheeseburger.
They just want to be able to pull into In-N-Out, get yourself a cheeseburger, and don't think at all about where that cow came from and how much work is involved in bringing that cow to you and how fragile that whole system is.
Okay, so, I'm not an urban planner, but I can tell you what I know about the centralization of the food supply.
So, the difference in the way I farm today, and the way my dad and I farmed, and the way my great-granddad and granddad farmed us, Those guys then, and me now, are focused on, hyper-focused on the land, because that's our savings account.
That's our wealth.
The animals, that's our checking account.
They're coming and going.
We're raising them.
and the local economy.
That's our market.
When we industrialized, commoditized, and centralized agriculture, the industrialization was hell on the land and the water and the environment.
It caused it to be financially irrelevant, and it just wasn't needed anymore.
And when something is not needed anymore and is irrelevant, it atrophies away.
And that's what happened.
And then the last one is commoditization.
I don't want to talk about it, too.
But let me tell you about centralization and how the industrialization impoverished it and farming the way we farm re-enriches it.
So 25 years ago when I started changing, I had typically about three employees, minimum wage, payroll would be $1,000 a week, Today, fast forward the way I farm, I got 180 employees, 180-something.
My payroll is $100,000 every Friday in one of the poorest counties in America.
And the town has gone from, during that period, being a ghost town, literally, to a little destination.
And the reason is, White Oak Passage is the largest private employer in the county.
And it's an economic driver.
And of the 180-something employees I got, some of them are local.
A lot of them moved in.
And we moved those people in.
And they needed a place to eat and sleep and drink and shop and play.
And we provided it.
And Bluffton, Georgia is a nice little town.
You would enjoy bringing your wife and kids to Bluffton, Georgia and spending a few days.
Prior to our change, we got a store, we got cabins for lodging, we got an RV park, we got a restaurant, we got a leather shop, we got a bunch of stuff, stuff that is commerce.
Prior to us making those economic changes, the only thing you could buy in Bluffton, Georgia was a postage stamp.
There was not a single new housing start in Bluffton, Georgia.
From 1972 to 2016. Incorporated City, eastern Mississippi, zero new housing starts for nearly 50 years.
She also talks about the fact we brought high-speed internet to Bluffton, White Oak Pastures, working with a local provider.
We ran...
Fiber-optic cable about four miles to Bluffton.
Since Bluffton is considered a severe distressed community by the New Market Tax Credit map, it's reported that around 17.2% of adults do not go to the doctor due to concerns about cost, why do a pastor provide health insurance, and da-da-da-da.
So obviously you have a lot of employees and you have a positive impact on the community.
You know, the real question, again, it was always about whether or not this is scalable.
And what we were talking about is, is it natural to live with 18 million people in one place?
I think we both agree it's not.
But it exists.
So if it exists and you want to feed those people, do we need a certain percentage of just factory farming no matter what?
Or is it possible that over time, that if everybody got on the same page, which I'm not saying they would ever do that, but if everybody got on the same page, would it be possible to feed the country the way you grow food?
But obviously, if you look at that film, you could see a clear definition of the difference between what's happening with your water, how it's going into that river, and his water.
Where his topsoil's fucked and he's just using industrial fertilizer.
It's not good.
Can't do it that way.
But can we...
So is it a question of we shouldn't be saying...
There shouldn't be a Jack in the Box and a McDonald's on every corner because you shouldn't be getting your food like that.
Which we all agree.
Look, I don't eat that stuff very often.
But every now and then, I want one.
I like the fact that I could just pull into somewhere and get a burger.
It's a very guilty pleasure that a lot of people enjoy, right?
But if it didn't happen, if it didn't exist, I wouldn't be sad.
I'd be okay.
If I knew that we were creating more regenerative farms and more people were doing things more naturally, but...
In economically deprived places, a lot of people rely on fast food to get their calories, unfortunately.
You have to do it correctly, and the way you're doing it is correctly, where all the animals are working symbiotically.
It all is working together.
And that's the more attractive thing about it to someone like me who doesn't know anything about farming.
I go, well, that guy, the way he's doing it, that's how I want to buy my food.
I want to buy my food from a guy like Joel Salton.
I had him on the podcast back in the day and we had these similar conversations about this natural blend of these animals existing together and that's what keeps the land healthy.
And what he's done in Africa and India and some other places caused me to really – nothing I can do about it – caused me to really disdain technocrats controlling land, people who – And what are these things?
I don't want to get into the intricacies of those train wrecks, but they've been train wrecks by bringing technology in as the solution in these biosystems.
You know, Stuart Varney wanted me to say, Bill Gates is an evil man.
And you think that that's going to be, if this is the largest farm owner in the world, or in the country, rather, and he owns that much land, he's going to use it that way.
We could do a lot more good if we have not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative, where you're actually extracting greenhouse gases from the environment and using them in a natural way to grow food for everybody.
That could be done.
Maybe he's the answer.
Maybe someone like him who makes the decision, who owns that much land, he says, you know what?
This Will Harris guy's got a really good point.
This could be done.
It's not impossible to imagine someone like him making that decision.
All right, so we discussed previously how the narrative that Cattle are destroying the earth, just caught traction, and everybody has heard it, and so many people believe it.
But there's going to be an incredible amount of money made on those machines if we make people believe that the only problem is we just got too much carbon up.
Right, but without the ability to grow regenerative agriculture in these urban areas, unless we decided to level buildings and start putting farms up everywhere.
So one thing that we have to think about when it comes to pollution in urban cities is that the air is not as good.
It's not as good for you, and this is not a knock on cities.
Cities are great.
You want to live in a city though, you have to acknowledge that you're paying a price for living in those urban environments in terms of your health.
Like, that's a reality that's been documented in terms of, like, the length of life that people that live in heavily polluted areas or areas with high particulate matter, they live less.
They don't live as healthy.
It's not good for you.
Where you're living, the way you're establishing, it's actually better for everybody.
Well, I guess my point is that we have this problem with this linear thing we've been doing of pulling carbon out of the sea, the land, fossil fuels, and putting them up.
And we've got a natural solution for it, which is the way we manage our land.
And I hope we don't succumb to what we've succumbed in the past, which is just grabbing technology to do it in a way that's completely unnatural.
I mean that I believe that this narrative about cattle destroying the earth was done very intentionally.
I think that you take the militant vegan community.
I didn't finish that part.
So I told you I respect the vegetarian vegan decision.
They get to decide what they eat.
I do not respect the militant vegan decision.
Militant vegans want to decide what everybody eats, what I eat and you eat and they eat.
So the plant-based protein industry that sprang up so quickly and attracted so much money, I know it's not doing well now, but it sprang up quickly.
I think that this overwhelmingly accepted narrative that cattle are bad came from the partnership, loose, probably unintended partnership of the militant vegan community and people that stood to make a lot of money on vegetable-based protein.
So you got a message.
And as you pointed out, the feedlot example makes the message easy.
And you've got a very loud voice and a high platform to speak from, which is the people who make a lot of money on vegetable-based protein.
And the narrative just caught fire.
And I think that the carbon may be exactly the same thing.
And there's money to be made in the business of technology to take carbon out of air.
There's a lot of money to be made in that business.
When we villainize carbon badly enough that we're ready to have the carbon emitters, Delta Airlines and whoever else, pay a lot of money to mitigate their carbon footprint.
Then who's going to, if technology is saw as the answer, there's a lot of money to be made.
To be sure, when I say $25 million worth of stuff a year, there's people out there that will pay 30% more for beef and 100-something percent more for chicken.
They're out there.
I don't know how many there are.
I don't know if there's enough to have a white oak pasture in every county in the United States, ag county in the United States.
That's what I hope.
Right now, let me tell you this.
We can talk about distribution if you want to, but right now, I built my business on wholesale grass-fed beef sales.
And now it has evolved to more direct-to-consumer through our website.
And I did that for some reasons.
And one of them was, I want to be more local.
Right now, we ship our product to 48 states, FedEx, UPS, and I don't want to do that.
I really want to sell our product.
I can't do it in Clay County, Georgia, because it's poor and sparsely populated.
I don't want people in California ordering my beef, my pork, my lamb.
I want somebody in California to do it.
I don't want to send it to New England.
Right now, I have to, because I've got to sell $25 million worth of stuff, and I've got to reach as far as I have to reach to get it.
But it's my hope that as time goes on, I'll be more and more local.
Greenwashing is big food advertising using words to make consumers believe that the food they're selling is the same as what I'm producing, even though it's not.
Hey, is that...
Have you got that...
A Global Animal Partnership Whole Foods video where you can show what to show.
Step four, pasture-centered, based on an outdoor system.
Step five, animal-centered, no physical alterations.
That means castration and all that.
And then Step 5 +, which is you, animal-centered, entire life on the same farm.
As shoppers can know exactly what the animal was raised for, the meat they are buying just by looking for the color-coded step.
Rating on the product label as of October 1st, 2014, the Step 5 program includes 2,451 farms and ranches that range from Step 1 to Step 5 plus and raise more than 147 million animals annually.
But they added everything together there.
Step 5 and program, look how they did that.
Step 5 and program includes 2,451 farms and ranches that range From step one to step five plus.
So by saying that and includes these 2,451 farms, they're not saying how many of them are actually step five.
They're like kind of fucking with you with the numbers there.
Is it because it's corporate now and it's because it's owned by big companies and it's all about when you're involved in a gigantic corporation like that, it's about maximizing profits.
The way I would state it is that industrialized farming and big food distribution co-evolved together.
You know, prior to the end of World War II, there was no industrial farming.
And there were really no great big food companies or retail companies, you know, local Piggly Wiggly or whatnot, but they weren't.
And those all co-evolved, big ag, big food, and industrial farming co-evolved together to what it is now.
And, you know, the guys that are managing the meat departments for Whole Foods really need to pick up the phone and say, Send me 48,000 pounds, a truckload of 48,000 pounds of six-ounce fillets to the following five distribution centers every week for the next month.
Thank you.
Well, the Will Harris's of the world won't ever see 48,000 pounds of six-ounce fillets.
The only people that can do that are Tyson, Cargill, JBS, Smithfield.
I also sell to a grocery chain called Market District, one called Mom's, one called Publix, one called Kroger, and I don't feel as used as window dressing.
Well, it seems like that was the perception that I got from it, too, based on the way they used that giant number and said it's anywhere from Step 1 to Step 5+.
When I first built my packing plant in 2007, Sadly, we literally threw away, composted, essentially threw away, a lot of the liver, the heart, the bone, a lot of the bones, the fat.
We made biodiesel out of the lard and tallow.
Fast forward today, because of the work that these nutritionists, carnivore, I think you had Diana Rogers on, Paul Saladino, those kind of people...
We sell everything now.
All of the pork fat goes into lard.
We've got a product called Praise the Lord.
The beef fat goes into Tyler.
We've got a product called Tyler Be Thy Name.
We make broth out of the bones.
Organs that we used to throw away like tracheas and penises and esophaguses go into, we dehydrate them for pet treats.
And it's just, it's been a real blessing how, and thank God it did because we need the income stream.
So, the most exciting thing we've got right now is very new.
Well, it's two years old to us.
I'm sure you know there's been this explosion of renewable energy, windmills and solar.
And we are in a hot spot.
For utility-sized solar voltaic production.
Big, big thousand acre.
There's a company called Silicon Ranch, which is a shale company, that is putting in like three or four thousand acres of solar voltaic in our area.
And when I heard that they were doing that, I was a little dismayed by it, because I've seen those, you know, beside the road, and it's just, to me it was horrible.
The land usage part is so unnatural.
I used a little political capital and got the CEO to come down, a really sharp guy, Reagan Farr, the CEO. And Reagan is a lawyer, MBA, corporate And I thought it was a Hail Mary.
I wanted to convince him to let me use the land to graze for the vegetation control.
And I didn't think he would let me do it.
And when he came down, I was explaining to him and he started listening to me.
I really thought I was just throwing it out there.
And as it works out, he is that ultimate corporate But his daddy was the poultry production manager at LSU, and he was raised showing chickens, and he just got it.
And you might find, I hope you find this interesting.
I do.
But when we first started, he said, I just don't see why it's better for the land.
And I said, you know, natural systems, ruminant.
He said, well, yeah, I mean, I just don't see it.
So we were at a place on my farm where we had done some mowing of excess vegetation.
We don't do that too much.
Right beside where I was grazing.
And I stopped, got him out, and I said, all right.
This is where we mowed excess vegetation, like you do under your solar panels.
And this is where I grazed it.
Now you see this grass material laying on top, probably 70% of it will oxidize and go up into the air and never find, the microbes will never know it was there.
It's all about feeding microbes, microbial cycle, right?
On the other hand, If that grass had been bit by a ruminant, a sheep, a goat, a cow, and spent 48 hours in that fermentation tank that they call a rumen, and then is defecated out on the ground, it is like liquid, not solid liquid gas, like liquid-like currency.
It's immediately available to those insects and microbes.
And can you not see how that is life-giving, life-forming, and this is not?
Well, listen, Will, this has been a very enlightening talk.
I really appreciate you keeping up with my stupid questions and filling us in on all this information and giving us an understanding of what the real problem is and what your solution is and the way you're doing it.
And it's just nice to know that there is options like that available.
And there are people like you that are committed to doing it that way, that is so attractive to people like me.
I really appreciate being able to be here with you and reach so many people, and I hope that it does help move the P a little bit towards moving from industrial commodity agriculture to something that's kinder and chiller.
And I think, you know, there's always going to be these problems of scalability and these things that we're talking about in terms of fast food and just feeding large numbers of people.
But personally, people can make their own choices that are regenerative and beneficial and are ultimately a much more natural solution.
We actually sold the book rights to White Oak Pastures about a year ago to Penguin, Viking, Random House, and they hired a lady to write the book, and it'll be out.
They Galley copy or gallery copy or something is out, and it'll be published this time next year, and it's called A Bold Return to Giving a Damn.