I recently finished the awe-inspiring memoir and manifesto by Will Harris, the owner of White Oak Pastures, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food. Will serves on HMI’s Advisory Council, has spoken at the REGENERATE Conference that we co-host with the Quivira Coalition and the American Grassfed Association, and I’ve even interviewed him for an article for our publication, IN PRACTICE, and have visited his farm in Bluffton, Georgia. I have seen him as a bold visionary for years and have been amazed by the risks he has taken over the years to develop a model of regenerative agriculture that shows the world that this work and product can be done at scale.
But reading this book brought my appreciation to a whole new level and deepened my understanding of what it takes to create this level of scale. Will’s approach and the book itself is not for the faint of heart. While Will was ably assisted in writing this book by the talented writer and editor Amely Greeven, it is truly his story and his voice that keeps the reader engaged to the very end—rooting for this ornery underdog who has described himself as the cartoon character of Foghorn Leghorn from Looney Tunes. As Will notes, “It took the patience of a saint to listen to many hours of my rambling recollections, opinions, and observations. It took incredible organization skills to transform my never-ending, cyclical, random thoughts into a linear story that was tellable. And I don’t know what it took for an English-raised, California-residing, forty-something-year-old woman to learn and interpret the language of a sixty-something-year-old profoundly southern cowboy.”
I heard his voice and his passion throughout A Bold Return as he recounts his family’s development of the farm and his upbringing as the fourth generation on the farm, embracing and pushing the edge of all conventional agriculture had to offer at the time, like fertilizer, chemicals, antibiotics, growth hormones, etc. He notes it’s easy to get hooked into thinking these things would give him a competitive edge, which it did for a time. But, then the reckoning day came in 1995, when one day as Will watched weaned calves getting loaded on to a truck to go to Nebraska feedlot, he realized that this system in which he was participating now felt wrong to him. He notes he had worked hard to raise these cattle and seeing them sent off down the road felt like “raising your daughter to be a princess and then sending her to the whorehouse.”
Will doesn’t apologize for what he did as he notes there was a certain amount of destiny involved with family that bred swagger into him and being part of a generation that moved “from worshiping nature to worshiping science.” In that moment he decided to get off the bus and that began the journey of creating a new system where he could rebuild the ecosystem function of White Oak Pastures, and create a farming system that would ultimately revitalize his community, bring his daughters back to the farm to involve the fifth and sixth generation of the farm, and create a model of how to develop the production and processing capability of a farm with $30 million of assets that can serve as a model for other regions of the country.
As Will goes down this road and deals with the layers and layers of policies that keep the large agri-business style of farming in power in this country and creates an unlevel playing field for small and medium regenerative farmers, I found myself marveling at the sheer willpower and tenacity it required to create this thriving regional food system and all the incredible benefits that have germinated as a result of this work—and how tenuous this success still seems.
While Will notes that he did not hear God speak to him or have any incredible epiphany, his story actually speaks of an organic and natural awakening, nature’s tendrils pulling him from some nightmarish reality and reminding him of his childhood spent playing in the woods on the farm, communing with the diversity of life that was there and then disappeared by 1995. One of the wonderful inspirations of this book is how he was able to restore that broken ecosystem and live again on land that now has a functioning water cycle and mineral cycle, that has an abundant biological community that is engaged in the miracle of photosynthesis and carbon sequestration. He also writes about how he was able to engage in raising livestock in a more humane way that addresses his ethos: “I love all these creatures and put an incredible amount of energy and effort to ensure their well-being—it’s the core of everything I do.”
Will notes that any reasonably intelligent person can restart the broken natural systems, but the work to create the local food system that would allow him to scale was truly the great challenge he now faced. He paints a very clear picture of just how much influence the large meat packers have over the meat industry and what lengths he had to go to get out from under their control and be able to keep more control over the highly valuable product he is raising and earn more money by being able to sell direct to the consumer, use more of the animal, and engage in high-value wholesale relationships with chains like Whole Foods, Kroger, and Publix.
Ultimately, this work meant he now employs over 200 people (with a payroll of over $100,000 per week) and has to deal with managing people. The result is they are “a wonderful shiny rhinestone on the Bible Belt” and where Will might be the “only southern-born, straight person” at the lunch table. It also meant he took the risk of signing a $2.2 million bank loan to expand the business and build a custom-built meat processing plant.
Will acknowledges he started with the great advantage of inheriting 1,000 acres of already paid for land. He also got some lucky breaks like his relationship with the president of Whole Foods’ mid-Atlantic region increasing their order for meat at the same time as the interest in consumer interest in grassfed meat started to take off. Luck may favor the bold, but it also favors the prepared and Will and his team were working hard to continue to risk the farm to get to the scale they wanted.
Those risks in building a full-scale meat fulfillment center meant they were mostly ready to meet the demand that occurred when COVID hit and the big players were leaving the grocery store shelves empty and consumers turned to other distribution channels for their meat.
Will ends his book with a call to consumers and to farmers to “give a damn.” Those of us who care about healthy land, communities, and food must continue to vote with our dollars and get the education we need to change agricultural practices and not just give up.
To purchase a signed copy of A Bold Return and support this valuable work, go to White Oak Pastures website at: https://whiteoakpastures.com/products/signed-copy-of-a-bold-return-to-giving-a-damn.