‘Betting the Farm’ on Regenerative Agriculture Pays Off for White Oak Pastures

(The Epoch Times)—On a calm late winter morning after a severe thunderstorm passed through hours before, Will Harris navigates the secluded and narrow red clay roads that wind around White Oak Pastures.

With his Deep South tone, the 71-year-old rancher laments at what he sees as he guides his dusty Jeep pickup truck around the maze of downed trees. Minutes later, standing in a vibrant green paddock, he marvels at another sight.

“Just about everything I see here makes me feel good,” he said. “Eagles flying across. Squirrels playing in the trees. Cattle grazing. It makes me feel good to see farm animals and wildlife expressing instinctive behaviors. It makes me feel good to know what we are doing here.”

Three generations of Harris’s family before him raised cattle on this land in the tiny village of Bluffton, which counted 113 residents in the 2020 census. It’s where his great-grandfather settled in 1866.

His adult daughters represent the fifth generation, and at least a few grandchildren will likely continue the tradition, he said.

Today, White Oak Pastures is a pilgrimage destination for conventional farmers who want to transition to regenerative methods. The family, along with 180 employees, operates what Harris calls a thriving 5,000-acre ecosystem.

It wasn’t always like that.

Heavy Industrial Farming

White Oak Pastures was a conventional farm until the mid-1990s. Harris relied heavily on chemicals, pesticides, and antibiotics. He gradually started the transition to regenerative methods, which prioritize building and preserving healthy soils, avoiding synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and implementing minimal or no tilling.

“You know, I’m different from most of the people that I know in this sustainable, humane food movement. I’m one of the good ole boys that produced food industrially for years, took a risk, and embraced a shift in mindset,” said Harris, the author of “A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food.”

Harris has an office in a small old courthouse in the center of Bluffton. One wall is adorned with portraits of previous generations who tended the land here.

Capt. James Edward Harris founded the family farm soon after the Civil War.

Will Carter Harris, James’s son, took over in the early 20th century.

Will Bell Harris, the current owner’s father, took over after World War II. That is when chemical fertilizers and pesticides were introduced and the slaughtering process became more centralized, Will Harris said.

For example, every year from 1946 until 2003, the Harris family applied ammonium nitrate on every acre.

Harris graduated from the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture in 1976. His father said he had to work elsewhere before returning full time to the farm, so he ascended to regional manager for one of the world’s largest meat producers.

Along the way, he continued to work at White Oak. Some days, after eight hours at the meat production company, he completed another eight on the family farm.

In 1995, as his health declined, Will Bell Harris handed the farm’s leadership role to his son.

The Switch to Regenerative Methods

The younger Harris continued to manage White Oak with “heavy industrial” practices, but in the mid-1990s, he started to feel a need for change. He was unsure what the adjustments would look like, and the path to full regenerative farming was gradual.

“The first thing we did was give up hormonal implants, subtherapeutic antibiotics, and confinement feeding of corn. I liked it better,” Harris said.

In 2003, White Oak stopped using chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the pastures.

Harris acknowledges that the farm’s pastures looked awful, but two years later, the soil started to flourish, as did the farm’s bottom line.

White Oak introduced sheep in 2005, incorporating the long-standing idea that raising multiple species on a single farm benefits the animals and the land.

At this point, White Oak’s herds were roaming freely and foraging instinctively, but Harris was no longer comfortable with how they were being slaughtered.

He wanted a method other than loading calves he had raised onto double-decker trucks, where they would travel hundreds of miles in cramped conditions to slaughterhouses operated by one of the four agribusiness giants—Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—which process more than four-fifths of the nation’s beef.

This led Harris to take a mammoth leap of faith. He hired animal welfare expert Temple Grandin to design a slaughterhouse to be constructed at White Oak. To fund the project, he borrowed $7.5 million, using the land as collateral. It debuted in 2008.

Betting the Farm

Harris acknowledges he figuratively and literally “bet the farm.”

“When you’re a privately owned business, every time you look at a big investment, you bet the farm,” he said. “You bet your house and your daughter’s house. You take a chance and hope it pays off.”

White Oak lost money for “four or five years,” but he was never late paying his bills, he noted. The farm started making a profit again and kept growing.

Harris added chickens to the farm in 2010 and built a second slaughterhouse solely for poultry. That is currently being remodeled and will re-open on June 1.

White Oak now has cattle, sheep, chickens, hogs, goats, rabbits, ducks, guineas, geese, and turkeys. Except for the breeding rabbits, all of the animals freely roam the pastures.

White Oak’s four-acre organic garden grows more than 40 varieties of heritage vegetables, fruits, and nuts.

A few decades ago, Harris bought, restored, and re-opened a formerly shuttered general store in Bluffton. That mercantile sells provisions, along with White Oak Pastures meats and eggs, among other products and items from other farms.

Across the street, a zero-waste facility produces candles, cowhides, leather goods, pet treats, and soaps.

No part of the animal goes to waste, Harris said. Hides and tallow are turned into handmade goods, and any other remains are converted to compost for the pastures.

Today, the farm is Clay County’s largest private employer, with 180 employees, Harris proudly proclaimed.

“We use only sun, soil, and rain to grow sweet grasses for our animals to eat,” he said. “We rotate complimentary animal species side-by-side through our pastures. The cows graze the grass, the sheep and goats eat the weeds and shrubs, and the chickens peck at the grubs and insects. All species naturally fertilize the land, and our soil is a living organic medium that teems with life.”

Harris said he is thankful he made the changes. He has three daughters. Two of them, and their spouses, returned home to help operate the farm.

Revitalizing the Land

Regenerative farming practices revitalized the land, too, increasing the organic matter from 1 percent to 5.5 percent, which Harris said is a way of quantifying improvements made to the soil.

As he stood outside his truck in a green field brimming with activity from farm animals and wildlife, Harris described how he views his change in thinking.

“When I was purely a cattleman, I went to my pastures every day looking for something to kill,” he said. “I was looking for a plant or microbe or animal that I felt was disruptive to my monoculture of cattle and Bermuda grass, and I used a pesticide to kill it.

“Now when I go to my pasture, it’s all about keeping things alive, and keeping all the cycles of nature operating optimally.”

Reviving Bluffton

Harris is also proud of the vitality brought back to a village.

He said he remembers that when he was a boy, several businesses in the village provided everything the residents needed. Bluffton has always been a community centered around farming, Harris said. The village has never housed a factory or a mill.

Over the years, as the agriculture industry was centralized and commoditized, Bluffton was hit hard, Harris said. Businesses shuttered. Jobs were scarce.

Harris started buying homes in the village and renovating them to provide housing for his growing farm.

In 2016, the Harris family bought and restored a general store that dated back to the 1800s. The store closed in the 1960s, leaving residents without a place to buy provisions.

As word spread about White Oak Pastures’ bustling regenerative farming practices, visitors started arriving and requesting tours. To accommodate them, the Harris family transformed some of the village’s properties into cottages for lodging.

The farm added a farm-to-table restaurant that is attached to the general store and situated on the edge of the organic garden. The eatery serves meals to farm employees, residents, and visitors.

What was a thriving village a century ago that had fallen into disrepair became a postcard-worthy community of restored century-old homes and buildings, such as the former courthouse that serves as Harris’s office and the longtime Methodist church that is now White Oak Pastures’ events center.

Focus on Education

In 2021, White Oak Pastures created a nonprofit educational program called The Center for Agriculture Resilience, which offers multi-day learning sessions about regenerative farming.

Harris spoke to The Epoch Times at a farm event called “Immersive Introduction to Regenerative Agriculture.” Some of the farmers in attendance currently use conventional practices and want to transition to regenerative methods. Others are aspiring farmers or current regenerative farmers who want to learn from Harris.

Dale Caldwell is the executive director of the Center for Agricultural Resilience.

“With what it does on the farm, and with what we are doing with the educational side, we hope to pass this knowledge on to future generations and help people now who are trying to make changes on their farm or start a farm using regenerative practices,” Caldwell said.

“You can’t make changes to a broken system without an educational component.”

Janet Sampson operates Sampson Family Farms with her husband, daughter, and daughter-in-law. It is a certified grass-fed beef and lamb farm in Live Oak, Florida.

Sampson said she first visited White Oak Pastures when the processing plant opened about 15 years ago. The farm has significantly grown since then, so they wanted to see White Oak’s practices firsthand, attracting them to the regenerative agriculture event in early March.

Sampson Family Farms covers about 400 acres. They once used conventional methods but transitioned to regenerative agriculture.

“Getting an in-depth look at an operation of White Oak’s scale, and seeing their success, reinforces that we are doing what we should be doing, and it gives us inspiration to do more,” Sampson said.

Harris is not hesitant to give visitors an in-depth look at White Oaks Pastures’ operations. He said he wants to encourage aspiring farmers to embrace regenerative methods and help conventional farmers make the transition. Improving the nation’s chronic disease epidemic starts with producing healthy food at the local level, Harris said.

“There could be and should be two or three White Oak Pastures in every agricultural county in this nation,” Harris said.

“I’ve had conventional farmers who are my friends tell me, ‘What you do is fine, Will, but you can’t feed the world like that.’ And my response is: ‘I don’t know that I’m supposed to feed the world. I think I’m supposed to feed my community.’”