Book Review: A Bold Return to Giving a Damn
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
In 2020 the pandemic revealed cracks in our food system and I became interested in learning more about it. In 2021 I leaned in a little more and worked part-time on a farm near Los Angeles. Through my reading and experience I became a believer that fixing the food system was a path to fixing most (if not all) the ailments we face as a nation. November 2022 I listened to Will Harris on the Joe Rogan Experience and the episode provided even more fuel and I started manifesting a trip to visit his farm, White Oak Pastures, to learn more.
In February 2023, Jen and I found ourselves within a 6 hour drive of Bluffton, Georgia where White Oak Pastures is located. By good fortune they were having a Valentines Day dinner at their farm-to-table restaurant connected to their general store. So we made reservations, booked accommodations, and made the 6 hour drive.
Walking into the general store, originally built in the mid-1800s and recently restored, was like going back in time. The whole ambience of being in Bluffton, which resides within one of the poorest counties in the country, just 3 hours south of Atlanta, was a surreal experience. It gave me a glimpse into what rural communities must’ve looked like when local farms and the infrastructure they built could sustain the towns and counties around them.
The food, prepared out of a trailer converted into a kitchen, was beyond expectations. All of the meat and produce served was harvested directly from their organic regenerative farm. There was a stark contrast between their food, and the food we’ve become used to that is grown by industrial methods and fills grocery stores.
But the highlight of the evening was meeting Will Harris. Not only because my girlfriend, who herself is an experienced farmer, and myself view people like Will Harris who are fighting to change the food system as rock stars, but because he was as friendly and down to earth as one could hope for when meeting their heroes. He spent 30 - 40 minutes chatting it up with us around the fire surrounded by his family and friends.
Reading A Bold Return to Giving a Damn on the heels of reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America provided even more insight into the struggles farmers face who are trying to break away from the “conventional” way of farming, i.e. using tons (literally) of pesticides, herbicides and all kinds of “cides” to kill unwanted life off their farms. Wendell Berry published his book in 1977 when Will Harris was just coming of age as a farmer (he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1976).
For farmers the 1970’s were marked by the mantra “Get Big or Get Out,” a phrase coined by President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz. It was part of the administration’s campaign to grow agribusiness and commodity foods. Nearly 50 years later Get Big or Get Out has triumphed at the expense of small family farms and their communities. White Oak Pastures and Bluffton, Georgia were among the casualties. But in the last 25 years, Will Harris has turned that all around.
To give you a little background on what agribusiness and industrial food is, consider the following.
In the industrial food model cattle are separated from their mothers and their milk at 6 month old, and forced into tightly packed feedlots where they’re unable to move or walk. They’re fed commodity grains and corn, crops grown using herbicides, pesticides and other toxic chemicals, which is nothing like the grass these ruminants are used to eating out in the pastures.
The carbohydrate rich food packs weight on quick, and by the time they are ready for slaughter, around 30 - 40 months old, they’re akin to “a twenty year old human weighing four hundred pounds… likely dying of the diseases of obesity and sedentary lifestyle that kill countless humans today.” But their misery doesn’t end there.
A 30 hour ride to the slaughterhouse in a double-decker tractor trailer without food, water, or rest awaits them. Eventually these cattle make their way into your McDonalds hamburger, or grocery store steak.
Would you want to eat a sick animal suffering from many of the diseases that plague humans? Is it a coincidence that humans suffer from the same diseases that the animals we eat face?
The land and climate has also not been spared. It’s estimated that the applications of chemicals and extraction of resources has eroded our soil so drastically that we only have sixty harvests left. As Will Harris puts it, “What I was doing and what my daddy had been doing before me was kind of a one way street: take, take, take from nature, without giving much back.” A trend that hasn’t slowed for the majority of conventional farmers.
Meanwhile large corporations have continued to grow and profit off of this inhumane system. Big Food, the likes of Tyson, Cargill and others, now control over 90 percent of the food we eat. Industrial feedlots supply 97 percent of beef consumed in America (just four corporations control 88 percent of beef processing), and industrial chicken houses supply 99 percent of the eggs and chicken we buy.
And while they’ve been getting rich, rural farmers have been disappearing and getting squeezed for profits. Farmers today make up only 1 percent of the American workforce compared to 41 percent a century ago. And farmers keep only 15 cents on ever dollar of food produced, the remaining 85 cents goes to Big Food and Big Ag.
Before the food system became centralized rural communities enjoyed meaningful livelihoods from raising food and being part of getting food to market. But that small town infrastructure has mostly eroded. All of this degradation and inhumanity is what prompted Will Harris to make a change.
He had been farming according to all of the conventional methods mentioned above. Spraying his land with toxic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Feeding his cattle grains, and giving them antibiotics when the grains inevitably made them sick. And shipping them out to slaughterhouses far away for processing. The farm that was in his family for over a century and the town around him was suffering, and he knew there had to a better way. Twenty five years later and White Oak Pastures is the antithesis of industrial agriculture.
Today White Oak Pastures is a leader in the regenerative agriculture movement, although Will Harris likes to refer to it as “resilient” agriculture. His farm, which raises cattle, chickens, turkeys, hogs, goats, sheep, duck, and guinea hens, as well as organic produce, operates as a “closed loop” ecosystem. The animals are free to roam, graze, root, and most importantly express their instinctive behaviors.
By re-engineering his farm White Oak Pastures runs at almost zero waste. Anything that can be turned into compost and used to support future life is put back into the earth. They’ve also been able to achieve what almost no other farm has, they’re carbon negative. For every pound of beef produced they sequester 3.5 pounds of carbon (compare that to Impossible Burger’s “plant based meat” which emits 3.5 pounds of carbon for every pound produced).
They’ve also been leading the charge by developing internship programs that allow young farmers to come stay on the farm and learn their processes. They’re an open book. In 2021 they launched The Center for Agricultural Resilience with the goal “to educate thought leaders on the environmental, economic and social benefits of building resilient animal, plant and human ecosystems that can nourish our communities.”
But the most amazing part of might just be the impact it has had on the local economy and spirit of Bluffton.
As someone who’s been there, I can tell you that outside of the White Oak Pastures’ general store, there ain’t much else. There’s one “grocery store” although neither you nor I would ever choose to shop there. The closest gas station is 10 miles away. But in returning his farm to the natural ways of growing and producing food, and turning his back on industrial farming, Will Harris and team have been able to revitalize a whole town.
White Oak Pastures now employs close to 200 people, attracting people from all over the country and all backgrounds. Their employees make twice the average pay for the county, and receive benefits such as health insurance.
Local business creates local jobs, which stirs local economy and breaths life into dying towns and cities that were once thriving. Health can never be fully defined, because it encompasses so much. Food, happiness, fulfillment are all ways we try to achieve it. But I’ve recently been learning that none of that matters unless you have community. Community to lean on and support each other is the foundation of a healthy population. It’s whats distinguishes most blue zones from the rest of the world, and it’s what has distinguished White Oak Pastures’ success from so many others.
I loved this book. It’s a story that everyone should know in detail because it tells more than just Will Harris’ story, it tells the story of why our country finds ourselves in the state of decline that we do.
The podcast episode is a great alternative to the book, as they touch on many of the same topics, just in a lot less detail.
A quick tip from Will Harris about getting to know your food
Ask yourself these three questions about the animals you’re eating:
Are the animals free to express instinctive behaviors?
Do they live in their natural habitat?
How and where do the animals die?
