From Factory Farm to Organic Icon: Inside White Oak Pasture

7/27/2019 From Factory Farm to Organic Icon: Inside White Oak Pasture

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/from-factory-farm-to-organic-icon-inside-white-oak-pasture 1/10

637 S. Victory Blvd.| Burbank, CA 91502 | Phone: (818) 567-4400 | Fax: (818) 567-4401www.fhofficesystems.com

From Factory Farm to Organic Icon: Inside White Oak PasturesWill Harris III grew up on conventional farming. But now his family's

legacy is anything but that.

By Maryn McKenna

Photographs by Ben Stechsculte

The second-best time to arrive at White Oak Pastures, in tiny Bluffton,

Georgia, is probably dawn. Sunlight shoots over the pine trees, highlighting a

Great Pyrenees sleeping at the door of a hen house. The first cows to emerge

from the woods cut trails through the dew. Goats prop their forefeet on fence

posts and bleat. It is idyllic.

But White Oak is a working idyll, and it is at its best a few hours later, when

the largest USDA certified-organic farm in Georgia is up and running. By

mid-morning, three cowboys are setting out in trucks to check on 2,000 head

of cattle. Half of the dozen field hands are taking water to the 60,000




pastured chickens; the others are headed for the new heritage pigs that just

spent their first night outdoors. Meat-cutters are suiting up for the two USDA-

inspected abbatoirs. People are tinkering with the solar panels, the biodiesel

brewer, the egg-washer, the anaerobic digester that turns discarded blood

into fertilizer.

And Will Harris III, 58, burly and goateed and the fourth generation of his

family to work the White Oak property, is keeping an eye on everything from

beneath the brim of his trademark white Stetson.

“The men in my family live to be pretty old,” he says. “So I figure I got 30

more years. And I figure at the end of that, I’ll still be saying, ‘Oh, shit. One

more thing still to do.’”

***

The men in Harris’s family are important to his story. To run this picture-

perfect, hard-working farm, he turned his back on almost everything they

stood for.

His great-grandfather, James Edward Harris, left college in Macon, Georgia

to fight in the Civil War, mortgaging family land and slaves to provision a

cavalry unit. When the South lost the war — and the bank took the property

and the slaves were emancipated — he fled to Bluffton in the state’s far

southwest corner and started a farm to survive. James’ son Will Carter




Harris converted the property from subsistence to small-scale commercial,

butchering a cow and some hogs and chickens for sale every day. Will Bell

Harris took charge after World War II and made White Oak over, vastly

expanding the acreage and narrowing the product to nothing but beef calves

for feedlots. His son, Will Harris III, started down the same path, with an

agriculture degree from the University of Georgia. His initial farm life was

filled with silos of feed grain and tanks of fertilizer, “and nothing except cows,

and horses and dogs to work the cows,” he recalls.

And then, for no single reason but a growing sense of responsibility and

heritage, he stopped.

“The first thing I gave up was confinement feed and hormone implants and

antibiotics,” Harris says. “I thought that that’s all I had to do. Then I realized that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were wrong, so I stopped using them.

And then I realized that we needed to be butchering animals on the farm and

not moving them, so we built an abattoir, and I thought we were done. But

then I realized we were still running a monoculture — a meat monoculture,

and a plant monoculture — and to my mind, when you’ve got a monoculture,

that’s a sign of a factory farm.”

***

Out of those realizations, Harris, his wife and daughters, and his 85

employees have built a business that sells its grass-fed beef and lamb and

pastured chicken to southeastern supermarkets and Whole Foods Markets, to

restaurants in Atlanta, three hours’ drive away, and online. The operation is

complex and quite large — Harris runs 1,200 owned acres and almost 2,000

leased ones — but from the passenger seat of his 20-year-old Jeep Wrangler,

it looks good.




The first thing I notice is the pastures beneath the tires. The grasses are deep

green and lush, dotted with broad blades and tiny flowers. “I used to strive to

only have T-85 Bermuda grass, and when other grasses would come up, I

sprayed pesticides to kill them,” he says in a drawl that turns “strive”

into strahve and “grass” into gress. “Now when I ride through here I see threedifferent Bermuda grasses, Dallisgrass, Johnson grass, a little bit of Buffalo

grass, rye grass and crabgrass and clover.”

After the grass, there are the animals it nourishes. To begin his farm’s

transformation, Harris turned all his cattle onto his pastures for the length of

their lives; then he added goats and Katahdin hair sheep, to eat the weeds the

cattle left behind. In 2010, he put meat chickens into the rotation, a

proprietary cross that he calls “T-Rex Reds.” There are 60,000 on the

pastures at any time, pecking and scratching, as well as turkeys, geese, ducks

and guinea hens, his favorite. This year, the farm brought in 3,500 laying

hens and 200 rabbit does, and then added a dozen Tamworth and Berkshire

hogs.

And after the animals, there is everything else. Which is a lot: A brooder

house, to raise their own chicks. An organic vegetable patch, for CSA boxes;




an heirloom orchard, for jams and jellies; shiitake and oyster mushrooms

growing on felled oak logs in the woods. There is a dining pavilion, which

Harris built to feed his employees lunch, but now is open to the public on

weekdays and rented for events on weekends.

Impressively, all the disparate parts of the operation circle back to each

other, because White Oak labors to be zero-waste. Bones are windrowed to

dry out — a soaring column of buzzards marks the location — and then

ground for bone meal. Organs and feathers are composted; hides are tanned

for rugs. Wash water from the humane, Temple Grandin-designed abattoirs

goes to irrigation and litter from beneath the chicken shelters is spread on the

pastures when the mobile houses are moved. Trays under the rabbit hutches

catch droppings to raise earthworms. In the greenhouse, a graduate-student

entomologist is using slaughterhouse discards to raise black soldier flylarvae for chicken feed.

Around the time I meet the larvae, which as they grow inch their way up a

spiral ramp sunk into a plastic tub of guts, I feel all the pieces of White Oak

fall into place. I realize the Harrises are doing, in a very modern way, what

farmers have always done: extracting every dime of value and trimming

every penny of expense. In White Oak’s case, the animals, the products, and

the relentless innovation on view in every corner have produced a model of

sustainability. But sustainability is a paradoxically costly pursuit. Harris,

acutely aware of his responsibility to preserve the farm for the next

generation, is paring every profit margin to ensure that his version of White

Oak — personal, responsible and organic — survives.




***

If he succeeds, responsibility for the farm someday will pass to his daughters.

Harris was the only son of an only son, so as his three girls grew, he fretted that he might have to divide the property and dilute its legacy. Fortunately,

he was spared that: Two of the three have elected to take White Oak into its

fifth generation. Jenni, 26 and the middle child, already runs the farm with

her father.

“To be the first women carrying on this heritage that was carved out by men

is an emotional thing,” she says, wedged into the back of the Wrangler next to

their broad-jawed pit bull, Ox. “To make it ours in time will be exciting.”

With their father, Jenni and her younger sister Jodi (who is about to marry

John Benoit, White Oak’s poultry and hogs manager) have mapped out the

next step in the farm’s survival. They already do everything they can to sell

products off the property; the next goal is to lure their customers onto it.

White Oak has always encouraged visitors: school groups, Boy Scouts, drop-

ins on their way to Florida. “But we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Jenni says.

“If people really want to come embrace what we do, we need a place for them

to sleep.”

“Nowhere” isn’t much of an exaggeration: the closest gas station is 10 milesaway and the closest McDonald’s is 12 miles. Bluffton, the town at the edge of

their property, has no lodging, no retail, not so much as a vending machine.

Its post office, the only place you can spend money, has reduced its hours by

half and may close. Out of Bluffton’s 39 houses, maybe a third are empty.

Harris has been buying them when he can, to rent to employees who want to

live nearby — he owns six so far — and he recently purchased the derelict

general store, which closed in the 1960s with racks of jeans and stacks of

paint cans still inside.

Building a motel would fit neither their budget nor their mission. What they

envision instead is an outpost of agritourism, a cluster of cabins and a lodge

tucked into a 32-acre parcel of longleaf pines and rustling, sighing wheat.

Harris sketches the someday-dwellings in the air, imagining them full of

customers who stay for days instead of hours. “We’ll put them up and sell

them a meal ticket, and then maybe they’d like to stay and experience what




we do,” he says. “Preserve vegetables, tan hides, cut up a chicken. Raise

rabbits. Raise hogs.” He grins. “Raise hell.”

“We’ll make it a festival on a farm,” Jenni adds. “Instead of Woodstock, we’ll

have Livestock.”

It’s another illustration of doing whatever is available — and consistent with

their values — to keep White Oak afloat.

“Everything takes so much capital,” Will says. “That chicken abattoir was

about one and a half million dollars. The beef plant, we’re up to about $3

million. The dining pavilion we just built was about $120,000, but we’re not

through with it yet. We made money every year when I was an industrial

commodity farmer. But when you choose to do things this way, it’s harder;you can’t extract value out of your products for a long time.”

***

Toward the end of a long day, Harris drives the Wrangler into a tree-ringed

pasture across the highway from White Oak’s sheds and slaughterhouses.

There are half-grown cattle scattered across the small field, glossy black like

Angus but possessing the mahogany glint of Japanese Akaushi and

sometimes the dove-grey burnish of Charolais. The sunset light slides under

the branches and turns the humid air pearly. Harris kills the engine. The

cows, noses deep in red-flowering clover, stop munching and look up.




“In five minutes, they’ll be hanging their heads in here,” he says, shifting his

arms inside the Jeep. “These are teenagers; they have no fear.”

Conventional cattle-raising relies on artificial insemination, which is quick,

controlled, and keeps breeds pure. Like so much he learned in his earlier life,

Harris disdains it, allowing the breeds in his herd to merge naturally into a

unique White Oak mix. Every December 15, he puts 30 bulls into the fields

with about 700 15-month-old calves. The cows that get pregnant will stay on

the farm, joining an unbroken line of female cattle that stretches back to

1866. The heifers that don’t conceive, and the male calves that White Oak

doesn’t need, are raised on grass until the autumn comes. Then they will be

driven across the road to the humane abattoir, 30 of them on every working

day.

Watching the cattle, Harris takes a moment to reflect. “I can’t regret the way

they taught me to farm in college,” he says, lifting and resettling his white

Stetson as though giving himself room to think. “If in 1972 they had filled me

up with ideas of animal welfare and land stewardship, I would have gone




broke. And I don’t grudge my father one bit for industrializing this farm,

because if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have it now.”

While he talks, the calves have circled us. A tail thumps a door panel; a wet

muzzle slides under the side mirror, teeth angling to nibble his sleeve. When I

look in the back seat, three of them are, in fact, hanging their heads into the

Jeep, as if they were listening. As if they realize there is nothing here to fear.

“I want to do a really good job raising my animals correctly and making a

living doing it,” Harris says. “This land, these animals, they’re not really

mine. I’ve got custody of them, and I need to do it right.”

He starts the engine. The calves startle, backing off a few yards, and then

settle down and drop their heads to graze.

“In industrial agriculture, we try to play God,” he says. “We fight nature; we

think we know everything. But I’d rather work with nature. I think there’s

things we’re not supposed to know.”

Photo at top: The chicken operation at White Oak Pastures is especially

unusual — Harris’ operation is the only one in the country to have both cattle

and poultry slaughterhouses on site. The team, from left to right, is: Giovani

Bueno, Lori Moshman, Jamal Ghram, Tripp Eldridge, Gil Giancaterino, Tori

Smith, Frankie Darsey.

From Factory Farm to Organic Icon: Inside White Oak Pasture

Documents

Transcript of From Factory Farm to Organic Icon: Inside White Oak Pasture