Will Harris: A Bold Return to Giving a Damn

The beginnings of an agricultural revolution

Will Harris owns White Oak Pastures and is a transformative thinker in the world of agriculture. In the 1990s, Will took his father's farming practices and began evolving them toward a input, closed-loop system (often referred to as Regenerative Agriculture today). At the time, Will didn't think much about the changes he was making on the farm. That is not to say no thought was put into the changes he was making, but Will felt that the changes he was making were intuitive as opposed to innovative. His suspicions and struggles on the farm led him to experiment with raising his animals as nature intended: in line with nature. The changes he has seen on his farm since then have been nothing short of amazing. Will has returned nutrients back to the soil and enriched the life on his land by eliminating harmful chemicals, and relying on multi-speciation and systems that support natural dependencies.

In 2019, White Oak Pastures partnered with General Mills to create a Life Cycle Analysis of the amount of carbon his farm put back into the soil compared to conventional practices. This is a profound piece of research that contradicts what many people believe about agriculture and its potential impact on climate.

In our conversation with Will, we discussed:

- How did White Oak Pastures come to be?
- Building a legacy on the land
- Welfare farming & its effect on our health
- A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: Changing Our Culture
- Carbon sequestration, the water cycle, and returning life back to the land