Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everybody. Dr. Ben Edwards here, another episode of youf're the Cure. We are coming to the conclusion of this month's focus on regenerative agriculture. And I'm going to end it with an All Star, Mr. Will Harris.
And he comes all the way from Georgia. And we're going to bring Mr. Harris on here in a minute. I'm going to have the pleasure of sharing the stage with Mr. Harris at the Sovereignty Ranch Conference in Bandera, Texas. The 20, I believe it's 26, 27, 28th. Sovereigntyranch.com is the website. You can also find that on Eat your Healings with an S if you want to learn more about that conference. I interviewed Molly and her brother on a few episodes back, so you can go check that out. But guys, the reason I and I've said it before, the reason I love regenerative ag is, is because it parallels medical regenerative medicine so much the body's design. There is an absolute design to this thing and if we'll steward that design, it'll function. And when there's malfunctioning, there's usually mal stewardship.
And that poor stewardship usually is from lack of knowledge.
And unfortunately, we're so deep in this system, both on the patient side, but definitely on the doctor side too.
Doctors are trained very narrowly, just like farmers and ranchers can be trained very narrowly in the conventional education system. And so we got to look at outcomes and outcomes in the medical field, as our listeners well know, because I talk about it, every single show I think is we're dead last place in all outcomes and getting worse. Our kids are getting sicker and sicker. That's what this whole Maha Bobby Kennedy and all these guys are trying to do, draw attention to it and bring solutions to it. And both in the agriculture space and in the medical space.
But there's such a correlation between our soil, the microbes in the soil, the nutrition that ends up in the produce and in the animals eating the produce, the fruit of that soil, the grass and the plants and the fruit and the veggies. But that directly feeds our microbiome in our gut and obviously feeds our cells. Our cells are dying all the time.
Rods and cones in the back of your eye die every 48 hours.
Red blood cells die every 90 days. The lining of your gut about every four days. The skin on your surface of your skin every four weeks, your liver every eight weeks. We're constantly regenerating a whole new you.
And we need good raw materials to do that. Even probably more Importantly than that, because we can recycle a lot of these raw materials in our body. We need enzymes. Those are the workers in the body. When sunshine hits your skin and changes your cholesterol into vitamin D, it's an enzyme that's do the doing the physical work there, the cleaving and the adding of molecules, and those enzymes run off minerals. And if your food is missing the minerals, then you're going to have enzyme deficiency. And a lot of this chronic fatigue, brain fog, all this inflammatory disease is lack of minerals in many cases. So it's, there's an intricate relationship. But even on a bigger level of just how are we supposed to operate in the earth, how are we supposed to steward not only our body, but the land? God told Adam and Eve, take dominion and rule. Steward this thing, take care of it. It'll function. It'll function optimally if the one in charge of it's making the right decision. So that's what we've been talking about all month. And Will Harris has a great story and, and I'm gonna, I've asked him to come on the show today to share that story to encourage all the listeners that there is hope, there are folks doing it different and getting results and making it work financially and otherwise building a community.
And so I want this to be encouraging and educational. And if you are in the ranching business yourself or farming in the agriculture space, I'd want this to come to you too, to encourage you. And like I said, doctors are in a tough spot. They're mortgaged up to their eyeballs with school debt, vehicle debt, house debt. Then they have their kids and the kids get into debt, their own college debt and retirement accounts and all the things.
And we're stuck in this system. It's hard to just shake loose of that and especially when your peers are looking at you and wondering what in the world are you doing? So I have sympathy for farmers and doctors, both that are trying to do something different. So I certainly have a lot of sympathy for our guest here, Will Harris, because I know he's gone against the grain and have been outside the box and I'm sure got looked at a little funny over the years. But Mr. Will Harris, welcome to the show all the way, like I said, from Georgia, White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me on, Doc. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you all today.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Well, you bet. And I've listened to you on, you've been on all kinds of shows including the big one, Joe Rogan, I saw a couple years ago.
So I know that you love to get out there and educate and share the truth and share your story. So really for my listeners that don't know you, don't know your story, kind of just share some of your journey. I know you're, I think fourth generation and I've heard sixth generation now is on the farm, boots on the ground working the the fields with you now. But share that family history and that lineage and just where this farm has come from to where it is today, both the how and the why behind that.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: All right, so. So my great grandfather came to this land in Bluffton, Georgia in 1866.
He was from Georgia, but he moved about 60 miles, started the farm here, farm the farm all his life, followed by his son, my grandfather, who farmed the farm all his life.
And they, and my father did, and I did, and my children, grandchildren. But, but the way my great grandfather and grandfather ran the farm, it was a vertically integrated cyclical food business. A tiny, tiny little cycle, but a vertically integrated business. They raised livestock on the farm.
They got up before a day, six days a week with the employees and slaughtered something. It might have been a cow, it might have been two or three hogs, it might have been 200 chickens. They slaughtered something and employee loaded on a mule drawn wagon and brought it two miles up the road to Bluffton. I'm in the middle of Bluffton right now.
And peddled the meat and poultry and then they'd come up on side and collect the money and go again.
My dad took up, born in 1920, took over the farm post World War II and he really changed things dramatically. Under his watch it went from a vertically integrated multi species operation to just a cattle operation.
And they just raised calves, calves were born here, weaned them, shipped them out west to feed them.
And he was successful with that and I'm glad he did it. He probably saved the farm by adapting to the way modern agricultural production went after World War II.
I never wanted to do anything except run the farm as a, as a multi, as a monocultural cow operation, just like my dad. I would that that's what I wanted to do. And I went to the University of Georgia, I majored in animal science and I came home and ran the farm as a monocultural cattle operation for 20 years.
And then I changed my opinion on those things and started doing things differently.
And today we raise cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, poultry, a vegetable garden.
And we were vertically integrated. We slaughter animals we have a red meat slaughter plant and a poultry slaughter plant.
We market products all over the, all over the country.
The change of opinion came, started about 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
One morning we loaded out a load of feeder calves to ship to Nebraska. And I've done that many, many times in my life.
But that particular day it struck me as being very wrong. You could put nearly 100, 500 pound calves on that double decker truck. They'd be on that truck for over 24 hours without food or water or rest.
Ones on top, urinating and defecating on the ones on the bottom.
And it had never bothered me before, but it bothered me that day. And I decided I was going to do it different, not do that anymore.
And it was all about animal welfare. But very quickly the animal welfare morphed into concerns about the land.
I was more thoughtful after that day.
And I went in the woods, in the edge of the woods, I picked up a handful of soil and it was just teeming with all kind of life.
Some of it I could see, some of it I couldn't. But it was just a living medium.
40ft out there in the field. It was a dead mineral medium.
I knew now that that field was a half percent organic matter.
That soil in the forest was five and a half or six percent organic matter.
And the difference is the field had been cultivated and fertilized and sprayed with pesticides and it was taking the life out of the land.
And then, then from that point forward, it was animal welfare and land stewardship that were important to me.
And I changed the way I farmed dramatically.
Went from a monoculture of cattle to multi species that I described became more vertically integrated and along the way and it changed the way we operate. I went from having four minimum wage employees to having today 170 employees that payrolls over $100,000 a week.
And I did that just to continue my efforts on the animals and the land.
But when I did that, the little town of Bluffton started to resurrect.
It had become horribly impoverished. Clay County, Georgia is where I'm sitting right now, was the poorest county in America in 2020.
We were up to about 36 now, but it's still very poor.
But the reason the county was so poor is because it was a purely agricultural economy.
And when we industrialized, my dad and I industrialized, commoditized, centralized the food business, the farming business, it impoverished the town.
And I'm just very proud. Today it's the animals and the land. And this Community and the three things are important to me.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Wow, what an amazing journey.
Maybe explain a little bit of how that.
The commercial or not commercialization, but what you just said, industrialization of the agriculture. What exactly does that mean? And how does it lead to that economic downturn in a community?
[00:11:53] Speaker B: When my dad took over the farm after World War II and it became a purely commercial cattle operation, the money didn't stay here.
Money left very quickly.
There was no local tradesmen, very few local tradesmen that were able to profit from our farm.
The, The.
The way we operate today, you know, like this. So I think. I think if you Google it, it'll. It'll tell the. The Google will tell you that something like 14 cents of the food dollar goes to the farmer.
That's not much here. If I sell the food locally in my store, in my restaurant, 100 cents goes to the farm.
Now that. That would make you think our business is very profitable. But. But it's. It's not. It's profitable, but it's marginally profitable. But the reason is because those dollars turn over in Bluffton, Georgia.
And I'm just very proud of the reversal of the impoverished impoverishment that this town has since World War II. You can just track it, the way it went down. It's more obvious here than it is in many towns, because Bluffton has been a purely agrarian economy. We didn't have plants and factories and mills and office complexes. It was purely agrarian.
So the effect of that centralization of agriculture is more obvious here than is in so many places.
There's a lot I've been struck by these similarities in what we do on our farm and what folks like you do in the medical profession.
It had become all about streamlining it to be more and more and more efficient, but less and less efficacious.
And I've just been struck with that. And I've talked to doctors like you who are.
Or more holistic in the approach.
And there's just so many similarities.
We humans tend to want to make things so linear and so efficient and so many things like my farm and people's bodies is cyclical.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: And.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: It has a downside when you.
When you force things to be more efficient than they're meant to be.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Well, what was the trigger with your dad? Because you said your granddad was still vertically integrated. What happened with your dad? What caused him to get monocultured?
[00:14:52] Speaker B: That was the Post World War II boom. You know, those guys left.
My dad was born in 1920.
He let all those guys, those farmers Those young farmers left Bluffton, Georgia, where they were plowing with mules.
They went to the European theater when they were operating tanks and they didn't want to farm with mules anymore.
And so many of the war technologies were converted over to industrial farming.
Ammoniated fertilizer was, was invented or found or discovered in the late 1800s, but nobody used it much. They were using guano, bat manure because the ammoniated fertilizer was so expensive.
World War II, huge munitions plants were built all over the world.
And somebody was smart enough to discover that you could take a munitions plant and make ammoniated fertilizer. And it was really cheap because the munitions plant was already there and it wasn't producing munitions anymore.
So my dad used to tell the story about the first time he saw ammoniated fertilizer. A salesman came by and he thought it was the most amazing thing in the world because he could see the short term benefits in two or three days, but he couldn't see the unintended consequence of oxidizing the carbon in the soil and destroying the microbial population. All those things are negative. It took decades for that to show up.
We talked about people drove tanks, didn't want, didn't want to plow mules.
The first, I think the first pesticides came from the nerve gas technology of World War II.
So all the, all that, all that technology that developed was brought home by those GIs back to the, when they came back to the farm and they changed things.
And in the short term, it was very beneficial.
In the long term, it has not been beneficial. It's impoverished rural America. It's killed our soil.
So many endangered species of plant and animals and microbes extinct or endangered.
Just many, many, many horrible unintended consequences. But the benefits showed up very quickly.
And the unintended consequence too, decades to, to be apparent.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: That quick fix that everybody's after and quick results. That microwave type of mentality, because that ammonium nitrate, if I'm not mistaken, you put that kind of synthetic fertilizer out and you'll get tremendous growth.
So production and green looks good, big, you know, lots of volume. So that's good. You know, your cows have more to eat. Put more cows on there, I'm assuming. Or if you're growing a crop, you know, you get more tonnage of whatever you're making. But what you just said is what, what's going on underneath all that in the soil is you're oxidizing that soil, having a negative impact on the microbes and therefore ultimately a Negative impact on that plant, getting a weaker plant more susceptible to the pests moving in. And now we need the pesticides. And it just snowballs on you real fast.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: You know, I graduated from University of Georgia, I told you, in 1976, and steroids were just surfacing among athletes in that era.
And I spent my share of time in the gym and I had acquaintances, maybe friends, certainly acquaintances that I saw go from much smaller and weaker than me to much bigger and stronger than me quickly.
And I know now it was steroids. But I also know that there are unintended consequences that operate very similarly.
When you rush nature, it has a cost.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Those cows on that semi and said, I'm not doing that again.
And so you started keeping these cows at home or butchering them or selling them locally.
Did you just, was that just a simple step that way? Or when did you start seeing more of the regenerative type practices or bringing that vertical back in?
[00:19:48] Speaker B: It's been gradual.
Mean we're, and we're still changing. We're still figuring it out. We don't, we've been doing it 25 years. We still don't know it all. We, we, we learn stuff every day.
You know, I, I, when I was an industrial cattleman, the 20 years I was an industrial cattleman, we made money every year. I went back and I never made a lot of money. I don't mean that, but we made a profit every year. I went back and looked.
I was blessed to inherit a paid for farm and a good herd of cattle.
And we were good cattle people and we made a little money every year.
When I decided to change my direction, I had some years, a number of years I lost money and it would have ended poorly. I was very, very fortunate.
In the very early 2000s, I'd gotten my head around how to operate the farm without using chemical fertilizer and pesticides and hormone implants, therapeutic antibiotics and all those tools.
And. But I was still struggling to sell my beef for enough money to make up for the increased costs. You know, when you give up, when you give up the tools that cut, take cost out of production, you add cost back production.
And I would, that was causing me to not do well financially. I never went, I never went broke, but I was going broken.
Fortunately for me, that's when grass fed beef started gaining popularity.
The food writers were writing about it and people, the food critics were bragging on it.
And I was able to sell Whole Foods Market and Publix and Kroger and some others, the first pound of grass fed beef that they ever marketed as grass fed beef. And it, you know, I was so fortunate on that timing, I'd love to tell you I was brilliant and I saw it coming. That's not what happened. I luckily was there when it happened and we, the business became profitable for a number of years. We built USDA inspected red meat slaughter plant and later USDA inspected poultry slaughter plant and bought more land and did a lot of things and profitability was, I mean it was not a get rich quick deal. But for Bluffton Georgia it was a good business.
Wall street and Silicon Valley not such a good deal probably. But for Bluffton Georgia it was a good deal.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: Animals and for the land it was a good deal.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Well, yeah, my, my, my land went from a half percent organic matter to five and a half percent organic matter over that 25 years.
And, and you know that organic matter is not all that matters by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a, a good measuring tool.
You know, land that's 1% organic matter can absorb a 1 inch rainfall. That's about 27,000 gallons of water per acre.
If it's got a half inch, which is what mine was, more than a half inch of rain runs off.
If you go to five and a half percent organic matter, it'll absorb a five and a half inch rainfall. And we get five and a half inch rainfall.
We get 50 something, 52, 3, 4 inches of rain a year.
But the land is desertified.
The industrially farmed lands are desertifying even with that kind of rainfall.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: Let me pause right there for the listeners guys, what he's saying, that ground loses its sponginess, its ability to hold water.
With the industrial practices of agriculture, of course we see that out here too with the runoff and then the aquifer dropping.
How did, what would you say were the primary components that led to that organic matter increasing? What are your particular ways that you operate that will help that to happen more quickly?
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Restarting the cycles of nature?
The cycles of nature are, to name a few, the water cycle through rainfall, the energy cycle from the sun, the microbial cycle, the mineral cycle, on and on, many, many, many different cycles. Cycles that I don't even know about happening out there right now on my farm.
And when we use chemical fertilizers and pesticides and so therapeutic antibiotics and hormone implants, we break those cycles of nature.
We don't destroy them, but we break them. We cause them to not operate optimally anymore.
And that's when things start breaking down.
You know, I Think a lot about the, the, all this coal and oil and gas, we pumping out the ground for the last hundred years.
That's wealth that was put into the earth, on the Earth. We, when the Eric from the era of the dinosaur, when the cycles of nature were operating, apparently optimally, when we, when I started, my dad and I started using all these tools I keep referring to, we were breaking those cycles of nature. We were attempting to produce a monoculture out there, whether it's a corn field, a cotton field, a peanut field, cow pasture.
We were endeavoring to break the cycles of nature and have only one species of productivity out there. And that's not the way nature works. Nature works with many, many, many different species of plants and animals and microbes operating in symbiotic relationships with each other.
And that's how this wealth, like oil and gas or beef or vegetables is generated. And we broke that. We intentionally broke that. We didn't understand that, the unintended negative consequences, but we intentionally broke those cycles and continue to continue to. That's still the way people farm.
Mostly.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: The neighbors or your peers in the area.
What have they said? Or have these practices influenced others?
[00:26:44] Speaker B: No, no. And I, you know, and I, I take some responsibility for that. I, I, I, I should have handled it better. You know, I was, I was probably, in retrospect, I was overly critical of what they were doing. They were doing exactly what I used to do.
But when I changed, I thought they all changed too.
And I was critical, overly critical.
And my father in this, where I'm, where I live, where I farm, we raise three crops, peanuts, cotton and corn.
And a cotton picker costs $1.3 million. And it won't do anything but pick cotton.
And the farmer, my cousins and relatives and friends and neighbors own a cotton picker and they own an interest in the cotton gin, and they won't do things that gin cotton and they own an interest in the cotton warehouse, and they won't do anything but store cotton.
So they are financially invested to the point that they, they can't get, like, they can't not do that anymore financially, economically.
And I should tell you that, that, you know, what I do, the way I farm here does not make a lot more profit. I mean, if I could, if I could get on the pedestal and say it's just so you can increase your financial prospects so much more by doing this, but I can't do that because it, it's not, you know, the, and the reason it's not more profitable is we absorb so many of the costs that industrial farming casts off into the system.
You know, there's a, I'm about 80 or 80 or so miles from the Gulf of Mexico. There's a huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that used to be a thriving oystering area.
But the oyster, they don't let them oyster there anymore because they've decimated the population with all this chemical fertilizer and pesticides that washing down the river into the gulf.
So that Austrian ground not being there has a tremendous cost to society.
But the fertilizer manufacturers and the pesticide manufacturers aren't going to pay that or the farmers are not going to pay for that. That is a cost that spun off.
We drive countless species of plants and animals and microbes into extinction or near extinction.
And that has a cost. I believe that every plant, animal and microbe in an ecosystem has a role there and to generate the abundance.
And when we drive them into extinction or near extinction, that has a cost.
But we all share that cost. So I go on and on about all of the costs that this food production system that feeds us brings to society that the food production system doesn't cover. It's just spun off out there.
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[00:31:38] Speaker A: When did. Can you talk a little bit more specifically?
Like if there's some ranchers out here wondering how exactly you operate, like on your cows, you know that mob grazing or that high intensity, you rotate and move them every day. Do you all employ those kind of techniques?
[00:31:59] Speaker B: Absolutely.
The kind of farming that I do, and not just me, but those of us in this regenerative management system involves studying nature, how nature would operate in your ecosystem, ecosystem, your farms in, and doing your best job to emulate that. And it'll be an imperfect emulation. You know, I've been working on our emulation of nature here for 25 more years and it's very, still very imperfect. We're still figuring things out, but it's a heck of a lot closer than it used to be.
And it spins off on abundance and that's what we sell and make our living on so we can do it again.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: How do you incorporate the multi species chickens and or whatever other animals you have? How are they integrated into that cow operation or if they are.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Well, I, there's some unfortunate videos of me a long time ago.
I wish we were out loud with me telling people that you need to follow cows followed by sheep, followed by goats, followed by poultry, followed by hogs.
And I tried to do, that's, that's how I started doing it. And it was, it was beneficial.
But I ran off some of the best farm employees I ever had by trying to do that. You know that, you know how, you're from Texas, you know how, how they had those big cattle drives from Mexico to Canada.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: Yes sir.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: You never heard about a big chicken drive, you never heard about a big hog drive.
So, but, but, so the, it is, but multi species is important and, but we move them, we move them constantly. You know, that's that you let the land, the forage recover.
You have a hard impact a long time for it to recover before you graze it again.
This farm has got 3200 acres and it's divided up into 150 something parks.
And we move cattle every day to a different paddock and the three herds, about 50 days recovery time.
And I wish it was more than that. That's what it is.
Hogs are more prescriptive. We put hogs where we think we need them in a forest or we call it a bottom of marsh, whatever.
And we leave them there till we think that they have done a little bit of hog impact that's beneficial. Too much hog impact is devastating.
So it's a management judgment, call of when to move them.
Every species just manage a little different, but they all live together. Symbiotically on this farm.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: How much has the direct to consumer selling versus wholesale whole foods or other outlets versus your own store kind of speak to that? Where do these products end up and what's been the most beneficial on the business I start?
[00:35:22] Speaker B: You know, the success we have enjoyed came initially from wholesale grocery. I told you that we sold those people things and it was very, it was really good for a good number of years.
In 2015, they changed the rule on country of origin labeling.
Prior to 2015, product of the USA in beef meant born, raised and processed, slaughtered in one of the 50 states.
They changed that so that if value was added in one of the 50 states, it was a product of the USA.
I'm pretty sure that was done by meat lobbyists, international meat company lobbyists.
And that really hurt us badly in wholesale grocery. And we had some, we had some years that we didn't do so well. We survived.
When the pandemic hit, we had started our online store. My daughter had come home from college, graduated from college, started the online store and it would do a million dollars, a little more and was not profitable. It just wasn't enough to make it work.
And when the pandemic hit, it just caught fire. And we were able to put a lot of stuff through there.
And today more than half what we sell is through the online store UPS and FedEx delivers.
And then it's brought profitability back to us.
[00:37:05] Speaker A: And then how much are you doing as far as educating? I saw you had a book for sale, but getting out there, speaking or interviewing or policy changing, any of that kind of stuff?
[00:37:19] Speaker B: Well, I did write a book and, and I. And I don't want to travel and I.
Traveling and educating people is not something I want to do. I want to educate them, but I want them to come here.
And I started several years ago a nonprofit, a 501C3 called CFAR center for Agricultural Resilience. And we put on schools here on the farm. We've got an intern program. We bring in six interns four times a year.
And we try to do. I mean, I feel that it's incumbent upon us to try to teach what we know, but I'm not, I'm not going to start a traveling show. I got friends and I got friends that have done that. They travel all over the country and put on seminars and schools and God bless them, you know, I don't want to do that.
And I got 170 employees I sort of need to be around.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: So if someone was wanting to move this direction, what are Some of the first steps you would advise him to do.
And I know every, every ecosystem is a little different, the climate and different parts of the country. But are there some foundational key principles?
[00:38:39] Speaker B: Think that if, if somebody is truly first. First of all, I think that people that, that go into this business probably will be new farmers. And for the reason I mentioned earlier, economically, financially, it's hard for existing farmers to change over.
So for new farmers, I suggest they go somewhere to take some training.
And I don't think you should necessarily come to Bluffton, Georgia. I think it'd be better if you found training in the ecosystem you plan to operate in. And when we tell people, we have people come here from the Pacific Northwest and New England and all over the country, we've had them from Spain, France, Germany.
And I always lead out by saying it would be best if you took your training in an ecosystem that was near, as near as possible where you planned to farm.
But most of them don't have necessarily a plan. They don't have a plan. They're trying to learn.
So we bring them here and we train them.
If you work here for three months, you're not ready to go farm.
I've had a few small number that have done that and been successful. But it's a small number, but it is a good introduction.
And we keep a lot of our interns, we probably about half of them, we make job offers.
We can't necessarily assimilate them all, but we accumulate a couple number of my managers.
So I told you we got 170 employees.
There's six of us that I call the board of directors. I own the farm. The six of us that manage it, the highest level, we manage about 21 managers that manage the other 140, whatever's left people.
And a lot of our interns find their way into that system.
And then they've been, they make wonderful employees. Great. I love them.
[00:40:59] Speaker A: Well, if any of the universities out there asked you to come be a guest speaker.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: I'm sorry, say it again.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Have any of the universities out there asked you to be a guest speaker?
[00:41:12] Speaker B: No, no, I was, I graduated University of Georgia and I was very close to the university for. When I was farming industrially.
But land grant universities get so much of their funding from big ag, big tech, big food.
And they have not, they have not, they have not embraced this kind of farming for the most part.
I think because of that funding. I mean, it would be. If you're a professor at land grant university and you've got Research projects you want to do and you've got to seek funding from big Ag.
You don't want to be tied to people like me.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I can understand that.
Can you talk a little bit more about on back to the practices that y' all employ with the animal's health from the standpoint of. You mentioned that sub therapeutic antibiotic, but that I'm assuming was more to induce some weight gain.
But use of antibiotics, anti parasiticals, vaccines, that type of thing.
What's that look like? Or if you don't do that, how does that translate, you know, how do you just handle that piece of it?
[00:42:39] Speaker B: And where we, we don't use any prophylactic type medicines anymore. I didn't use any vaccines for a number of years.
And I've gone back to using.
I went from using every new vaccine they had, whatever the pharmaceutical company come out with that year, I wanted some of it. I wanted, I wanted to inject it into my cattle. I thought more was better.
And then I went from that to nothing. I just wouldn't give any vaccines.
And I did that for a few years and thought that was the right way to go. And then I got hit with a disease called black leg. Black leg is indigenous to this land.
When the conditions get right, it's going to manifest itself.
I lost six, eight head of calves to black leg. And I decided I probably need to start back giving them black leg. That's all I give them.
And I, you know, you know, my herd health is fantastic.
Another thing we've done is I don't bring animals onto the farm. We had always saved female cattle in Caliban and we had.
My great grandfather and grandfather saved their bulls as well. Save the heifers and save the bull.
My dad started buying purebred bulls to improve the herd.
And then I did the same thing.
And between my dad and I bet you we've had at least one of every breed of bull that's ever been to Georgia.
I could use it to Hereford, to Angus, to shorthorn, whatever.
But I, I just, I quit. I quit bringing bulls on the farm. Started saving my own bulls. And my cattle. We just don't bring anything in here.
And they have a natural, I hope and I believe a natural resistance to whatever pathogens on this farm.
And I'm not saying I will never have a problem, but I'm saying today I don't have a problem. And I feel very good about that.
I used to use a lot of wormers. I don't anymore because we move the cattle every Day and we. That breaks.
My cattle aren't 100% parasite free.
There's some worms in there, but it's not enough to affect performance.
And worms are indigenous.
Those parasites are indigenous. Those parasites are probably doing some good. I don't know what it is, but the fact I don't know what it is don't mean it's not happening.
Flies. I used to use all sorts of insecticides for face flies and horn flies but now because I move them every day, it breaks that fly cycle. Now there's some flies out there on the cows but it's not enough to treat them.
And when I quit using Wormer, my dung beetle population exploded. And dung beetles, because the dung beetles were killed by the wormer and dung beetles are super effective in aerating manure piles which keep them from raising so many flies. So it's, you know, all these cycles of nature work together and generate that symbiotic benefit. This is, this, it's, it's, it's the, the wealth that nature provides. But we, you know, we're so darn smart that we cut all those lines and when we do, we pay the price for it.
Yeah.
[00:46:31] Speaker A: Yeah. I was just out at a local friend of mine, local farmer here and we've had him on the podcast actually just last week and I saw that very thing. We went out there to pick black eyed peas but he had a little herd of cows that he's got them on one acre paddocks and he's moving them every day. He's practicing this way.
But he specifically pointed out, he said do you see any flies out here on the cows or just around.
And I didn't. It was amazing and I'm used to seeing lots of flies around these cattle out here. And then he went over and showed me those dung beetles and I mean they were everywhere and where he had just, just moved them off that paddock from yesterday. They had decimated those cow patties. It was incredible.
[00:47:17] Speaker B: I learned about cattle production from my father and from the University of Georgia and from the county agent and from salesmen is that, you know, I was, my job was go out there and kill stuff. You know, I went to my pasture every day and took a lot of pride in the fact that I knew how to look for problems and, and use technology to kill it. Whether it was a weed or a fly or worms or disease in the grass or grasshoppers, whatever it was. I was proud of the fact that I was an expert in knowing how to kill it.
That's what I did for a living. I killed stuff.
And what I didn't understand is that the technological tools that I was using to kill that perceived pest was highly efficacious in killing that pest.
But it killed a bunch of other stuff too.
And when it did, it threw those cycles of nature out of kilter. And that meant there's another problem, that I had to kill something.
And that created another problem. I had to kill something.
You know, I believe that when my dad first started using pesticides that were World War II relics, I don't think anybody intentionally said, well let's sell them this product and it'll create the need of another product.
But that's what it did. And I think now it's been figured out.
And I think that big multinational pesticide companies understand and medicine companies will be the same way. Pharmacy is a lot of similarities between these pharmaceuticals and pesticides and this big, big ag, big tech.
But when you use those, those remedies, it's highly efficacious on what you're targeting.
But it causes another problem that will require the purchase of another remedy and so on and so on and so on. And it's never ending.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: Reminds me a lot of my profession.
Even the origins of some of these medications like chemotherapy. The original chemotherapy was derived from the nerve gas, mustard gas products from the war, just like that. A lot of the agricultural products came from the same, from World War II. And pre World War II Americans were the healthiest people group in the world of the industrialized world. And Post World War II we started going down in health outcomes. And of course now we're in last place and have been for a long time and getting worse.
And it's that exact thing, these profit driven which I'm, I'm all for profit, but not at the expense of someone's health.
And I guarantee same thing. They figured this out.
This will create this, will create this. And it's a perpetual state of chasing these symptoms and unintended consequences and then we'll chase that symptom. And I mean it's an exact parallel. And it to me it just describes a system problem, a system where you put profit, a love of money versus the benefit of the people. Slash creatures, slash soil because there's creatures in the soil, the microbes. But it's all about a self centeredness. I'm gonna, for me, me, me and my profit versus the benefit of, of others, you know, not a self centeredness. So it's really a, to me a spiritual deal culturally that we've got to just shift our thinking and our heart posture, to put others, be others focused instead of self focused. But that's just my little kind of spin on that. But I think obviously looking at the fruit, I mean the physical fruit of your organic matter in your soil, and then the production of a variety of species and products for your customers.
And I would imagine, I don't know if you've done any testing, but I would imagine your chicken meat and organ meat and beef and eggs or whatever is a nutrient density of those are much, much better nutrient profile than the conventionally raised stuff, I imagine. Have y' all done any of that kind of testing?
[00:51:59] Speaker B: Reason to believe that it is and probably could show you, but I learned early on that I need to talk about what I'm an expert in.
And I am an expert in animals, land and rural economy economics.
And I'll tell you a story.
I was asked to speak somewhere one time, I can't remember where it was, and another farmer spoke ahead of me and he talked about conjugated linolenic acid and omega 3s and omega sixes.
And I thought he sounded stupid because he was just parroting what he had heard.
And I realized I do that too.
And when I came home, I didn't do it that day. And when I came home, I had my people go through our website and strike out any claim of attribution that wasn't animal land and rural community.
So I depend on people like you to do those things for me.
But the point you were making about the similarity between what you do, medicine and what I do, agriculture, farming, is incredible to me how similar they've evolved and how it used to be, how it is.
The similarities between medicine and agriculture are just endless with regard to the problems. And it comes from the fact that in both cases, we took something that was very cyclical and forced it into a linear model it didn't want to go. We forced it, and as a result, we share the same successes and failures.
[00:54:03] Speaker A: Well, we're nearing the end of this, Will.
Maybe we can end it on just the future. What do you see as the future of regenerative ag in general, but also of your particular farm at White Oak Pastures? What's the future hold?
[00:54:24] Speaker B: Don't know.
You know, over the last 25 years, this, this is, this, this stuff, it's not very. Doesn't sound very good. Won't tell it like it is. Over the past 25 years, there have been some times I thought, huh, I am what they call an early innovator.
And I Like that. I like that.
And then there have been times I said, no, no, I'm not an early innovator. I am a niche marketer.
And that's okay. I like, I like early innovator better because that means I help other people.
Niche marketer means I can keep white oak pastures going.
So I thought I was an early innovator a lot more a long time ago. Increasingly I thought of myself more and more as just a niche marketer.
But all this talk just recently about health and maybe something will come of that.
There's certainly more momentum than I've ever seen before.
But also I have a lot of understanding of the power of big food, big Ag, big tech. They're incredibly powerful.
And if they go down, they won't go down easy and they won't go down quick.
As a young man, you know, I would be invited to go to Washington to lobby for something or whatever and I would do it.
And I quit.
I made the decision, I'm not going to do that anymore.
And the reason is, you know, I was always treated well. You go in the senator's office or the representative's office and they'd have three or four or five staffers in their sharp looking people, well dressed people, asking good questions, writing down everything you said.
And I believe, thinking, I believe I put some points on the board.
But I, I know now that when I left, a lobbyist showed up with a briefcase full of money and he put the points on the board.
So I made the conscious decision, decision, I'm not going to do that anymore. But I did do it here earlier this year one time because I thought maybe things are getting a little bit better. And now, I don't know, I hope, I hope so.
[00:57:03] Speaker A: They've shared the same sentiments. I mean, not as much as you, but the little bit I've been involved with some of it this year with the political stuff, I saw the exact same thing.
There can be some listening and polite and all that, but at the end of the day, money talks and that's, I mean that's just becoming apparent across the board.
The people are waking up to the corruption, trying to do something about it. And I'm with you. We'll wait and see what, what shakes out. But hopefully. So I know a lot of effort is being put forth and that kind of leads us to the talks.
You and I'll be. Food is Medicine is the name of the conference.
I mentioned it at the top of the show.
Ryland and Molly Englehart. I interviewed them a few weeks ago. Y' all can go listen to it. But food is medicine and it's four day wellness summit in the heart of the Texas Hill country, Sovereignty Ranch, September 25th through 28th. You can go to eatyourhealings.com get your tickets and you can go back listen that interview to get all the details. But Will, I'm anxious to meet you in person there and shake your hand and visit some more face to face. But I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day. I know you, you've got a lot to manage out there. But I'll give you the last word. Any parting words of wisdom you want to leave the audience.
[00:58:32] Speaker B: I just appreciate you having me on. I appreciate you doing what you do. Yeah, we come from, we're going the same march in the same direction. We come from very different places and we're, I think both of us are needed to help give perspective for what we're trying to accomplish.
[00:58:51] Speaker A: Appreciate all your efforts. And everybody, WhiteOakpastures.com is a website. You can go there and learn more about Will and the crew and all that they're doing and even get some products there, too.
Will, thank you again for joining us and see you down in Bandera and everybody, thank you for listening today. This will be archived on the website veritas wellnessmember.com and all the podcast places and YouTube and all that. And love to see you in Bandera. Get your tickets. I think the Coupon code is BEN10. If you go to eatyourhealings.com BEN10 will get you 10% off. Okay, we'll see y' all next week. Y' all have a good week.
[00:59:29] Speaker B: Bye.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: Bye.
