Agritourism, Our Trip to White Oak Pastures

We're driving home today from a bird banding on Dauphin Island, so I've posted a story of our trip from last fall to an amazing regenerative farm, White Oak Pastures. This essay largely appeared in our little local paper. I hope you find it of interest, some did.

Maggie is an avid fan of the paper. She particularly enjoyed last months regenerative agriculture article

Last fall, we packed up and headed south on Highway 27 for about five hours to the small town of Bluffton, Georgia. We were introduced to Will Harris and his farm, White Oak Pastures, a few years ago from his appearance in the 15 minute video “100,000 Beating Hearts” on the YouTube series Soil Carbon Cowboys. It is a large (3200+ acre), diverse and vertically integrated regenerative farm. They additionally contract graze sheep on another 2000 acres under solar panels. The animals live on the farm from birth to processing and are directly sold to customers, restaurants, and stores nationwide.

Can Eating Meat Save our Planet? - The story of Will Harris | The Rebel Cowboy

(29 min) The documentary covers the history of White Oak Pastures and how it evolved with the modern US agricultural system into a concentrated animal feeding operation and then rebelled against traditional commodity farming to create a sustainable, regenerative, polyculture farm. Studies have shown the regenerative farm's model to be a carbon negative operation due to the sustainable farm's goal of rebuilding deep, nutrient dense, top soil that has been degraded and eroded (due to modern farming practices), into a carbon sequestration machine, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and into the ground thereby creating healthier land and therefore healthier and sustainable meat.
00:00 Intro
01:58 Rotational Grazing Explained
04:17 Regenerative Farming Explained
05:08 How soil can sequester carbon
06:53 Monoculture Explained
07:45 Gardening Regeneratively
08:59 Rebuilding Top Soil
10:27 Agricultural Toxic Run Off
14:10 History of Modern Agriculture
16:59 Rebel against Big Food
20:50 How a Zero Waste Farm Works
23:14 Greenwashing Explained
25:53 Consumers have the Power

Will is the fourth generation of his family to operate this farm. He began as a conventional farmer, but after he loaded a group of stocker calves in a three layered semitrailer to send to the Midwest, he started to think about what kind of life those calves would have after he had been so careful to insure they had a good start to life. He began to alter his farm at that point. The farm has three goals. First, to provide a humane and healthy life for his animals. Second, to use animals to improve his soils and the ecosystem, and lastly, to have a positive effect on his community. White Oak Pastures is the largest employer in the county and has brought the small town of Bluffton back from the ashes that so many other small southern towns suffer.

Agritourism wasn’t a goal, but so many people from around the country and world wanted to visit the farm that they began building cabins around the farm, buying homes in Bluffton as they became available, as well as building an RV campground for visitors. They offer a variety of tours, horseback rides, and workshops. They allow you to visit any part of the farm and it’s many operations on your own with the request you shut any gate you open. We live in the woods near Menlo, so for a change, we opted to stay in one of the town houses, a short stroll from the farm store and restaurant which is in the heart of Bluffton.

In the store you can buy a variety of grass raised and finished beef, pastured pork, rabbit, lamb and mutton cuts, as well as vegetables, fruits, honey, leather goods, tallow and lard products from hand creams to soap, all produced on the farm. There is also a restaurant providing three meals daily serving food from the farm. The farm has two meat processing plants (abattoirs). Any waste in the process is composted and returned to the soil after decomposition.

The farm is subdivided into over a hundred paddocks, and most of the animals are moved daily. Herd size is large with a couple of thousand head of cattle and hundreds of pigs being managed from paddock to paddock. When new land is acquired they begin rolling out hay and densely stocking cattle to concentrate organic matter and spread manure and urine to start improving fertility and healing the soil.

Rolled out hay and the resulting manure load

Rabbits were grazed behind the house where we were staying. The hutches have wire bottoms to prevent digging but allow grazing. They were moved daily. The electric netting around the hutches protects from predators (mainly neighborhood dogs). Rabbit is one of the more popular products, and the store was out during our stay.

Notice the grazed areas as the hutches are moved from day to day

A few miles south of the farm, sheep are contract grazed under 2000 acres of solar panels. They are also moved daily with the help of herding dogs. They not only provide meat to sell, but also earn a fee from the solar company for weed and grass maintenance.

Sheep graze under solar panels

It was interesting to see a regenerative operation of this scale. The multiple species are used synergistically to enhance soil fertility, water retention, and pasture/ecosystem restoration. Most of the surrounding area is row cropped primarily with peanuts, and the soils are open to erosion. During rain events, the runoff from White Oak Pastures isn’t muddy, but it is from the neighboring row cropped farms.

There are two other interesting tourist stops in the area. The first, the Kolomoki Mounds are only five miles or so away from Bluffton. They are a reminder that this land has been farmed for well over a thousand of years. It is the oldest Woodland Indian site in the SE and contains Georgia’s oldest temple mound standing 57 feet tall. The other site is closer to Columbus, Georgia, Providence Canyon State Park, also known as Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon”. It is easily accessible on arrival or departure from White Oak Pastures. It formed as a result of poor farming practices in the 1800’s allowing erosion so massive that gullies a 150 feet deep were formed, so deep it seems to be a canyon.

We can farm in a sustainable regenerative manner enhancing soil fertility and ecological health, or in a way which degrades and even destroys soils. White Oak Pastures makes a small profit, supports multiple families, enhances the local community. It serves as an example of how we can grow high quality food as we improve the environment.