I didn’t really understand what regenerative farming was all about until I visited Will Harris’s White Oak Pastures Farm in Georgia USA in 2018 with Allan Savory and others from the Savory Institute.
I first heard about sustainable farming when I was working in Cumbria in the early 2000s and had submitted a paper on how we could manage soil carbon to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to Jonathon Porritt’s Sustainable Development Commission’s Breakthroughs for the 21st Century conference in 2007, but I had not seen genuinely sustainable, let alone regenerative, land use in practice.
Will inherited his 3,000 acre farm about 30 years ago when it was typical for the area, growing a rotation of maize, peanuts and cotton and some cattle finished in a feedlot with 3 employees. He started to pasture feed beef in 1995 then stopped using fertilisers as he came to understand how soil works. The business had some tough years as he worked out how to manage his land holistically, introducing more species until he now has cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and Iberican pigs for pork and Iberican style ham, rabbits, laying hens and meat chickens, ducks, turkeys, all grazing the right place at the right time for the right reason, along with a market garden. To retain full value on the farm he built an abattoir to process and market everything produced; leather is now tanned, worked and sold in the shop in Bluffton and all waste is composted and returned to the land.
He now employs 150 people and is buying neighbouring land as it becomes available. The town of Bluffton has gone from a ghost town to a vibrant community with visitors from all over the world. The soil has gone from less than 0.5% to over 5% carbon with abundant wildlife all over the farm. Will is the consummate holistic manager, always observing, thinking and trying new ideas as he works out the interactions of complex natural systems. He is generous with his knowledge and enjoys challenging questions, often returning an equally challenging but humorous answer.
This is what regeneration is all about; a flourishing farm business benefiting all other life on the land, supporting its local community and influencing many others around the world into the future.
Those few days I spent on White Oak Pastures with Will Harris, Allan Savory, Woody Tasch of Slow Money, Tre’ Cates of nRhythm and many others completely changed how I see farming and business.
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