Knowing that they're coming back for the next 30 years empowers
us to make decisions based on the 30 year performance window.
You know, one of the things I think is wrong, horribly wrong in business is
we make, and I, and I've been in, in business, you know, in a different way.
We make decisions based on the monthly report or the quarterly
report, or the annual report, and we don't even think about those things.
When we, when we're considering a, an investment or a change or
a modification, we think of it in terms of generational, you know, what
that, what's that gonna do to us?
Not, not, what's that gonna do to our bottom line for June of 2024?
What's it going to do to the operation generationally?
That was Will Harris, and you are listening to the Regenerative Journey.
Good day.
I'm your host, Charlie Arnett, an eighth generational
Australian regenerative farmer.
And in this podcast series, I'll be diving deep and exploring my guests
unique perspectives on the world so you can apply their experience and
knowledge to cultivate your own transition to a more regenerative way of life.
Welcome to The Regenerative Journey with your host, Charlie Arnet.
Good day.
Welcome to The Regenerative Journey, and welcome to my office.
Check it out.
Um, you also might be, I might be welcoming you to a bit of
background noise of two Grahams on the whipper snipper in the garden.
Um, so hopefully that won't interfere with things too much.
Lovely for the garden, but not so good for you guys.
This episode of the Regenerative Journey is with Will Harris, as,
um, is mo as, as is most of the interviews, um, in this series.
Uh, we recorded it in the United States in July last year.
Can you hear those lovely birds?
Seeing there, it's just so beautiful.
On this spring day in October, um, we interviewed, um, a number of
people in the United States in July.
Last year Will was about halfway through.
We drove from, um, we were in LA for a few days.
We flew into Memphis.
We had a few days there.
Li had a birthday at Gracelands.
It was awesome for the few days we were there and we drove down, um,
to, to um, uh, to Wills at, uh, white oak pastures there in South Georgia.
And we stayed there for two or three nights in one of their cottages
in the town of, of Bluffton.
And I have to say it was one of the highlights of our trip.
We, um, very grateful to have, um, met Will, uh, gave me a couple of hours of his
time for the interview, um, in his office.
And as we, I might have mentioned this actually in the interview, his office
used to be the courthouse in Bluffton so many years ago, will decided to, as
he, as he and his family, decided to essentially revitalize the whole town.
'cause it was really struggling.
He's done that in a number of ways.
He does reveal a bit of that in the interview, but where his office
is now used to be the courthouse.
And the crazy thing is over the road there's this big old tree.
I dunno what sort of tree it is.
It's a massive tree.
It used to be the tree they used to hang people out of, essentially
if they'd been found guilty of.
Whatever in the courthouse over the road that was quite, quite haunting.
However, didn't take away from the quality of the interview and
the wonderful, wonderful surrounds and the people of Bluffton.
We had such a lovely couple of days there.
They've got amazing, um, cafe shop there.
We had, we pretty much had three meals a day there, as does will.
Um, he's quite the, he's quite the feature.
Uh, there wa it was, it was such a lovely thing to sit down with Will
in his courtroom, in his office.
Um, I gave him a bandana and a packet of gym tams.
Uh, he took me through some parts of his life.
Uh, it was a real honor and we had such a good time.
He took us for quite a few farm tours and I remember the, the morning we
went to say goodbye and he used to say I had the worst, um, um, uh, worst
Southern American accent he'd ever heard anyway, which is probably right.
And he said, um, he might, hopefully excuses me for taking him off.
But he said, um, when he said, oh, I've gotta go now
morning, you know, this morning.
Will.
He said, I'm not ready for you to leave.
It was really sweet.
Um, and he, and he's the only man I know who actually puts the
bee at the end of the word lamb.
Um, I think he might even say in the interview, go, we got beef, we got
pork, we got chicken, and we got lamb.
Anyway, um, really miss Will, he's such a lovely guy.
Um, great insight, great pioneer, great figurehead for the regenerative farming
industry, direct to consumer industry.
Um, I hope you really enjoyed this interview.
I, I loved, um, sitting with him for the, for the couple hours we had.
Uh, and it was actually when we finished the interview that we heard that, um,
Trump had been, um, uh, assassination attempt had been made on his life.
Get stuck in the interview.
It's coming up right now.
Don't forget to subscribe, rate, review, do all those wonderful things.
Make sure you do that on your favorite podcast, um, app so that you know
when each, if these episodes comes out, if you haven't given us a, a,
a review or a rating yet, really appreciate if you were to do that.
Preferably a five star one would be awesome.
Um, and there's show notes of course, as part of this interview.
Um, and lots of all, all the other good stuff.
Uh, I did do a q and a with Will.
I'm pretty sure we're just gonna work out how we're gonna roll those out.
Stay tuned for that and many more q and a's from all our other interviews
from not just this interview, but for ones from previous, previous
series, we've got heaps, heaps.
Um, of them lined up.
Enjoy this one.
Will Harris, he's an absolute legend.
Hope you enjoy this interview with Will Harris as much as I did interviewing him.
Welcome to the Regenerative Journey.
Good.
We here and welcome to Bluffton Courthouse.
Lofton Georgia Courthouse.
Yeah.
Which is this, which is your office.
Mm-hmm.
I'm just gonna do, I'm gonna, I'm gonna risk ruining the, oh, how's that
Judge's bitch in the middle up there.
That's your, and and then the bar.
Plaintiff defendant.
Yeah.
And the interesting thing here is that you and I mentioned, I just did a
little video, now it's outta focus here.
But was um, gotta get that focus back is, yeah, that's it.
We'll go back.
It'll work it out.
Is, um,
the very closed loop of law that was here, because this is the courthouse.
Mm-hmm.
The jail cells are out the back.
Yep.
And the gallows the tree's out front, the living gallows is out the front.
Yes.
That's lost its focus here.
That's a real shit, isn't it?
How do we get you back in focus here?
Will, that's it.
We'll,
it'll, uh, I'll, I'll work on that.
If I get distracted.
Don't you get distracted?
But if I'm trying to work that focus out.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but
we very seldom
hang
people anymore.
Uh, well, I'm glad.
Well, I was a bit worried today.
I might, I might have copped something.
I'm just gonna turn my phone off.
Well, um, thank you so much for dinner last night.
Oh yeah.
Let's, let's turn that thing off.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Um, the machine up there,
that's better.
Yeah, that's gonna make a huge difference.
Um, if it gets hot, we can, we'll be okay.
Have a break.
Turn that on.
Do the fan action.
Um, we've just spent a few hours with you and your Jeep with me.
Cradling your rifle in my groin, basically.
That's right.
Which my, which, which had me worried.
Um, but we just spent wonderful couple of hours.
You took us around pretty much all of white oak pastures.
Um, so thank you for that.
I'm so grateful that you've spent the time with our family to do that.
Um, this is, but this is all about you, not what we did.
Will, can you start by telling us, um, what it is, what it is about being here?
That, what, what is it about being a fourth generational farmer that
has his daughters working with him?
Well, let's start.
Now, now we've both got the croaks.
Yeah, yeah, we've got water, we've got lozenges.
So if we sort of have to stop and start and cough a bit.
This
lozenge is ticking my ass
is it is.
Spit it out.
It's no good.
I don't,
we'll least we'll, we'll eventually be okay.
Well, at least we, I, I'm, I guess I'm not a wilder guy.
Oh, no.
But knowing you, you just say yes.
You go.
Let's give it a shot.
Yeah, that's, that's your, I got, I've got a question.
Angelica has got a question for you about that.
So let's start with you.
Fourth generational farmer, fifth generations in the business.
Mm-hmm.
You made a lovely comment last night when Jody sort of, you had a chat about
something and she walked away and you had these, this beautiful look on your
face and you just see it outta nowhere.
You just said, you know, how lovely it is to have your daughters there.
Can you sort of step into that one a bit?
Yeah, I'd love to start there.
It really is.
So, uh, I had no idea that my daughters would come back to the farm.
Uh, I, I'm the fourth generation on the farm and, uh, my dad was a very
dedicated cattleman and I was too.
And I never wanted to do anything except run the farm,
came back, and the
married a.
And, uh, really good girls and they, uh, weren't raised the way I was raised.
They were raised to be fair, modern young girls in the, in the, uh, in
their, and uh, their activities were dancing lessons and piano lessons
and gymnastics and softball, and just never worked on the farm.
And I never imagined they would come back to the farm and they wouldn't
have, uh, while they were young, I started transitioning the farm
to a very industrial monocultural cattle operation to what we do today.
And I'm sure we'll be talking more about that.
And I didn't do, I did not do it to attract my children to come back.
I did it because I wanted to, but the, the best part of it, it did bring my
children back and two of the three, and their spouses came back here and
are actively involved in the management of the, and I'll be this year.
And it is very pleasing to me that I have a succession plan.
You know, had they not, I have friends who have large farms.
And they have children who chose not to come back and they have a, a problem, you
know, they have a, uh, uh, they need to terminate their operation or something.
And I don't have to do that.
So how, I mean, it might be a pretty open-ended question, but like,
what would you have done if they'd said, oh look Dad, this is lovely,
but we just don't wanna do it.
I mean, what, what, what sense would that have given you?
I mean, all all that hard work.
Not for nothing.
'cause you've obviously worked and it's, it's been what you
wanted to do as you said.
It wasn't something you wanted them to necessarily come back.
You didn't set it up for them.
But I mean, and I guess it's, it, as you said, it's a, it's, it's something that a
lot of farmers have to face in succession.
It's a really tricky thing.
Yeah.
And luckily I did not have to deal with that.
I think probably what I would pursue would be finding some motivated,
talented person that doesn't have the, uh, doesn't have a farm to come back
to and just see what we could work out.
I'm very fortunate I didn't have to do that.
Um, and they go, aren't they?
Jenny and Jenny.
Oh yeah.
They're great.
They're fantastic.
Yep.
You know, well, what?
No one there coming back.
They, they were, they were born in 80, my three daughters were born in
eighty three, eighty six, eighty nine.
So the 86 and 89 model are the ones that came back.
And so they're, uh, what that put them in their thirties.
Yep.
And, um, so they've got 30 years ahead of working career ahead of them.
And by the way, those two daughters have five babies who could potentially be the
sixth generation on the farm potentially.
We'll see.
But what, knowing that they're coming back for the next 30 years
empowers us to make decisions based on the 30 year performance window.
You know, one of the things I think is wrong, horribly wrong in business
is we make, and I, and I've been in, in business in a different way.
We make decisions based on the monthly report or the quarterly
report, or the annual report.
And we don't even think about those things when we, when we're considering a, an
investment or a change or modification, we think of it in terms of generational.
You know, what, what's that gonna do to us?
Not, not, what's that gonna do to our bottom line for June of 2024?
What's it gonna do to the operation generationally?
But that's what, but that's just a really smart way to do business, isn't it?
Well, I think, I think that's the way that a perpetual business
like a farm is supposed to be run.
You know, we, uh, we talked about this earlier, but there are not
very many non depreciating assets.
Precious, precious gs, precious metals, maybe art
depreciating assets invest.
They're,
and of the non depreciating assets that I know of, the only
one that yields a return is land.
And it yields a very, very small return, very small percentage, but it does.
And, uh, and, and planning an operation to, uh, keep a family together and
to grow a farm, much of which is the investment, is the land is a
different kind of rodeo than running a retail operation or manufacturing
operation or a construction operation.
I mean, that's, nature doesn't work month to month, is it?
That's exactly right.
Perpetual.
It's just
on, and you are a cycles man.
That's, that's how I think, is that how Jenny talk talks and you mentioned it
today, like you don't, you're not linear.
Oh, yeah.
You, you work, you know, the, the, yeah,
we, we, we, I, we, I think very you a very cyclical way.
It's very difficult for me to have a linear conversation.
I, I, I'm, I'm, I get off on other tangents and I, you know, there's been
several things I've started with you.
I didn't finish it because I got off on something else.
And that's, uh, you know, that that's what works well for a farmer and some
other, and some other professions.
You know, if you're gonna be a, uh, an engineer or an accountant or,
you know, a number that, that linear focused view is, is very, uh, desirable.
But if you're going be, uh, uh, working with the cycles of
nature, it's really a, a, a, a beneficial way to think about that.
Well, I guess it's a great analogy, a great example.
Accountants, there are not many variables are there in their business.
They've got clients, they've got dollars in dollars out, they've
got their procedures In farming, there's so many variables.
Many of which are out our control.
So if we're too rigid and we're too prescriptive,
yeah, I think that that's, that's true.
And I think there are other things.
I think that there's just, and I, and I, and I think that one of the great ills
that, that we, we, this happened post World War ii, is to try to bring that very
linear, uh, approach to, to agriculture.
You know, the, the, uh, the, the fact that we operate so, so
predominantly as monocultures.
You know, my great grandfather and grandfather owned this farm
from 1866 until 1945, operated it in a very different way.
It was a many different species
marketed direct to the consumer.
So the, my great Grand Farm grandpa raised as I do cows, hogs, sheep,
goats, poultry, big garden, whatnot.
They had employees.
And every day, uh, the folk, the family law is that every day that they and
the employees go up way before day.
And slaughter, some might might've been a cow, might've been three hogs, might've
been 50 chickens, might've been some ducks, but they slaughtered something.
Loaded in a mule drawn wagon, an employee drove it two miles up
the road to this little town of Bluffton and what they had to sell.
You understand, this is no refrigeration, no USDA inspection.
It was, uh, you know, sell it or smell it,
you know?
Is
that
right?
That's a
classic.
And my father, my father took over the farm post World War ii and he
made the industrial changes that all his neighbors made to industrialize
commoditized, centralized.
And on his watch, it became a monocultural cattle operation.
And that allowed him to become an expert cattleman.
And I think he probably, uh, he was cowboy and I was cowboys,
and we didn't talk about it, but I think he was proud of that.
The fact that he, he didn't slaughter animals.
He didn't raise vegetables.
He was a cattleman.
Very, very linear, very monocultural, and was successful.
Uh, he, uh, accumulated more land and, and we had no debt do good job.
Uh, growing up.
I.
You know, I wanna be a very monocultural industrial cattleman expert cattleman.
And that's, and I went to University of Georgia major in, came back, and,
and, and that's what I did for 20 years and loved it for most of that time.
But at a point in the mid nineties, I became increasingly disillusioned
with that production model, started moving away from it.
And for the last 25 years, I have moved
further and further away from
it.
Um,
getting back to your great-grandfather, grandfather, father, grandfather, your,
let's start with your great grandfather.
1866. Yeah.
1866. Mm-hmm.
What do you think some of the challenges were for him at that time?
Every generation's gonna have a new set of challenges.
Yeah.
What, what do you think his pioneering challenges were?
You know, we, we, harrises don't do a good job keeping written records, so I, you
know, most of what I know about, about my great-grandfather was his family law.
He was a, uh, senior at Emory University when the north invaded
the south in 1861 Civil War.
And, uh, he and his classmates quit school.
Joined the army and they thought they had a, a deal with the southern
army, like a band of brothers to be kept together as one unit.
And the southern army had about an 80% in literacy rate and one unit of
college boys that could read and write.
So they
broke the, uh, agreement and made all those guys offices.
So he fought the war as a 20-year-old, uh, captain.
And, uh,
I, he had a farm about, about, uh, 40 miles north of here.
And I dunno exactly what happened, but the farm was somehow lost in the wall
as, as a, on the losing side, so to speak.
And he,
well, you know, I don't, I, I don't know how that worked.
I don't think they land.
I just don't know.
I've heard, I've heard several renditions of how, but he lost the farm however that
was.
But he was very fortunate.
He had an uncle who was a medical doctor right here in Bluffton, in
this town who started him oval, uh, on the land we have now.
And, uh, uh.
Farm that, that our farm, all his life added to a little
bit, followed by his son.
My grandfather did the same thing, followed by my
father, me, now my daughter.
Matter of fact, that that little cam there, the red one?
Yeah, this one.
Yeah.
It's heavy.
It's, so that is, uh,
that's a pistol holster.
This is, uh, coins.
Wow.
That sound heavy.
That's, that's a lead io called Babbitt.
Babbit.
Babbitt.
And my great grandfather who came here, he had no money, so he made him some
money and, uh, paid his employees with it.
This was, uh, you see that's a dollar, some of them 50 cents.
And that's a, that's an official dollar.
That was, that was minted by the, by my great-grandfather.
Oh, this was his currency.
That's his currency, yeah.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
Is that right?
And he made about 150 something years old.
So is air worn just by worn out.
So, and
did he have to forge that?
Like did he make the babbit or you buy it in sheets or something
and then he pressed it, or,
you know what bait is?
No.
So, okay.
So in the days before, ball bearings and roller bearings, they had babbit bearings.
Like if you had a water wheel, the shaft of a steel shaft.
You would've a babbit bearing holding it up.
Uh, and it would be a wear item.
It's soft and it's allowed to wear out.
Yeah.
And then once a week you jacket it up, put a new, yeah, put a new babbit bearing on.
Ah, take the old one off, melt it, got a low melting point,
and then pour another one.
Yeah.
So we'd have one for next Saturday, so that I see.
He was, he and his, they were familiar with pouring babbit, so
he made his own money with Babbit.
That's fascinating.
And, uh, uh, and then, and my grandfather continued to use Babbit and, uh, so
post World War ii, after World War ii, the United States Treasury Department,
the Babb, it's called a Harris dollar.
And the Harris dollar became the currency for Bluffton people.
So, so people weren't paying taxes because they were operating off the system.
That's James.
So post World War II and the Treasury Department sent a man to
Bluffton, an agent to stop that.
And my dad, my, my dad was bigger than me, taught a louder than me.
And, uh, and he, he didn't wanna say that anybody made his dad do anything.
So when he'd tell the story, he'd say, after World War ii, the Treasury
Department sent a man down here to ask my daddy to quit making his own money.
I'd say, did he
ask him or tell?
He'd say, you go to hell.
So when was that?
In, in, in 1940.
When was that?
When did that happen?
I think post World War iii, 19 45, 6 7.
And it was working still then?
Yeah, they, uh, they operated off
that currency from 18 66, 19 46 or something.
Fascinating.
And why haven't you put recreated the Harris here?
I don't want that man.
He may, he, he may
still be living in,
he's got enough reasons to come down here.
Another reason to come down here.
I, I don't, I don't need the treasury department.
I got, I got everybody else on my case.
I don't need the Treasury Department.
That is a classic.
Do.
Is that, was that a common thing in, in, in the, in that time?
Was this a unique situation that was its own little regional?
You know, I'm old but I'm not old enough
to recall.
Yeah, I, I'm sure I'm, I'm sure it was not unique, but I dunno
how, how widespread it was.
That is a
classic.
Um, let's go back.
Because as I'm known to do, and clearly you are known to do too,
Mr. Will is just go off in tangents.
Then again, I have known you having listened to, um, your
interview with Joe Rogan.
I love your, because he likes to go on tangents too, and I love
that how you said I'll get to that.
I want to you, you're very, very on purpose, which is fantastic.
So you might to pull me in the line every now and again.
Let's start day one.
Mr. Will, will, will.
I don't.
Yeah.
So how about day one?
Will Harris hits the, somewhere around here we were born when
were, when were you born?
You'd
have to give us I was born December 22nd, 1954 in a little
hospital with 12 rooms in Blakely.
12 patient rooms in Blakely, Georgia.
And uh, uh, had a, a pretty normal farm childhood.
You know, honey
child,
I'm an child.
My dad was an child.
And, uh, pretty, uh,
pretty normal rural farm boy.
Childhood.
Uh, great childhood.
I'll say that.
Graduated my school.
Very average student.
You know, I, uh, I could, I could remember, uh, a few days after my
graduation, I was with my dad at a, a cattle auction and a, uh, the father of
one of my classmates, who was a girl who was the valedictorian, uh, was there.
And, uh, he said, oh, well, will, congratulations.
Graduated from high school.
Yes, sir.
You know, I was real.
He said, I was real proud.
You know, Miriam was a valedictorian.
She made it all the way through 12 years of school and never made a c My daddy
said, I don't believe you ever never made a b. My, my daughter made it all
the way through 12 years of school and never made a, my dad never missed me.
Said, I don't believe you ever made a b either, did you?
Classic.
But, but you know what?
That, you know, Lila, our daughter who you, you've met, she's homeschooling.
Mm-hmm.
And we have, one of the reasons why she is, is, you know,
we've got a bit of a problem
with conventional modern schooling.
You know, we don't think it's necessarily what they learn at school.
Is gonna, is the best thing for, you know, life, life lessons and setting them up.
You know, my and I, people are gonna listen to this and
say, oh, here he goes again.
But my, my favorite saying is, our job as parents is to
prepare our children to leave us.
And that's what we're trying to do.
You know, when she's le she's 18 and she leaves home whatever, finishes, school,
whatever that looks like, we want her to go out in the world and assist and
be resilient and survive and thrive.
And we just don't think that normal schooling kind of
sets kids up, um, to do that.
So, back to you and your average student may be average in terms
of their definition, you know?
Yeah.
I changed my mind a lot about that.
You know, I really graduated from school thinking that, um, you know,
I just wasn't very smart about this.
Smart kids made, you know, and I, and I didn't, and I, I, I'll say this, I
wasn't particularly bothered by it.
I knew much stuff.
I did good, but I just didn't,
that reservation that I'm not,
and I wasn't in, in kind of learning environment.
When I went to Georgia, I came to realize that I had really good, uh, uh,
the ability to retain the things I was interested in, but I didn't
wanna go very deep into anything.
I would know a little bit about everything, but I didn't wanna
know too much about any of it.
And, and that's what it takes to make a c and I, I could, I, I, I didn't
do it, but I bet you I could have taken a double or triple load of
classes and made a C in all of them.
But those I wa an A was not in me, you know?
I just, I just wasn't that interested.
And I, when I realized that, I didn't think it was, uh, it was
interesting, but I didn't think it was an attribute nor a, a deficiency.
It just, just is.
But now that I have lived for nearly 70 years, I have come to understand
that that is part of that being a generalist and thinking in a cyclical
mount as opposed to a linear mount.
And I think we do a pretty good job operating this form of white
oak pastures because that cyclical thought process works well.
And I've seen a lot of farmers who were certainly better students than me.
They didn't do so well operationally because they knew a lot about a little
instead of knowing a little about a lot, you know, and I, that, that's a problem
that I have with modern education.
I, I went to University of Georgia.
I sent my, all three of my daughters through four years of college.
They all graduated.
But I, I won't do that with my grandchildren.
Uh, if, if one, if one or more of my grandchildren has a, uh,
a career path they wanna follow, doctor, lawyer, school, teacher, accountant
that needs a college education, then we, we'll probably do that.
But if they wanna come back here or they don't know what they wanna do,
they just wanna figure it out, we're not gonna go to college and figure it
out or not happy is not gonna play for them to go to college and figure it out.
Um,
you know, the, uh,
the siloed, not linear, siloed knowledge.
Uh, the old expression was, you know, uh, let more and more about less
and less until, you know, almost all this, know about almost nothing.
And that's the way that my perception of, of, of my education in college was.
You know, I took, uh, I took, I had genetics courses from guys that knew all
there was to know about genetics, but didn't know anything about soil fertility.
And I took soil fertility from a guy that knew all that was so about soil fertility,
but didn't know anything about microbial and so on and so on, and nutrition.
And there's so much wrong with that.
And one of the things that's wrong with it is it assumes that all the
ecosystems operate the same way.
You know, the, I have great belief strengthened the belief that the cycles
of nature are what drives what we do, particularly here on this farm.
But then beyond that, you know, the soil cycle, the, the water cycle, mineral
cycle, the carbon cycle, the grazing cycle, and we just own mini, some of
'em we probably don't even recognize.
That's what makes life work.
And that's what general, and when they op, when those cycles are operating
optimally, it spins off on abundance.
And that abundance is what I produce.
It's what I live on, you know, all that coal and oil and
natural gas in the ground.
That's the abundance of nature.
When the sockers of nature were just operating optimally
in the era of the dinosaur.
And today on white oak pastures, the sockers of nature operate far more
optimally than they did 25 years ago.
Because we've worked on them, we, we've worked on fixing them.
My dad started in 1945 and I continued on until 1995, breaking the sock overtly,
intentionally breaking the sock of nature, forcing a monocultural production of
TIF 85 Bermuda grass graze by cattle.
If you lived on my farm and you worked Tifton 85 Bermuda
grass or a cow, I'd kill you.
And I was really good at killing things that weren't
TIF 85 Bermuda Grass Cow side.
Means kill homicide, kill people, insecticide, kill insect, um,
fungicide kill on and on the sides.
And you know, what I became was an expert is using the sides to kill things, to
promote the monoculture and the, and the, the monoculture of, of no monoculture, but
the monoculture that I had of, of grass and cows weren't producing abundance.
And I was producing a product I could sell, but I was throwing the
cost off for somebody else to bear.
You know, I'm, uh, so my farm is on Devil's Branch.
It flows into Spring Creek, it flows into the Flint River, it flows into Appalachia
Bay, which is Gulf of Mexico, and there's a, a dead zone in Appalachia Bay is
as big as the state of Massachusetts.
It used to be a thriving oyster ground, but all the pesticides that
me and my friends and relatives and neighbors have destroyed that
it's a, it's a dead zone amount.
So that's a cost.
And, and, and me and the other people that created that cost aren't gonna it.
Everybody's gonna bear that cost.
Nature's bearing that now
too.
Yeah.
Nature is bearing that cost.
I mean, the destruction of the, the industry that's not there anymore.
Well, don't, don't you worry about nature.
She, she'll, she'll bat last half her way.
But yeah.
You know, I, I worry about the fact that we're driving so many species, plants
and animals and microbes into extinction.
And I believe that every ecosystem has plants and animals and microbes that
work in symbiotic relationships with each other to create the abundance.
And when, when a plant, or I dunno, a microbe is driven into
extinction, it's gonna change things.
Now nature's powerful and something else is going to happen to, but it's, it's
gonna be, but it's gonna be different.
We've changed the direction.
So yeah, I worry about these things
and it's often the thing that jumps in is worse, right?
Like you take a hierarchy of predatory animals and you take one
out, whether it's a wheat or a plant, or it's an insect or something.
You remove that from that chain of.
Supply.
I don't think we're gonna, we're definitely gonna change it.
I doubt that we improve it.
No, no.
You know, you know, nature spent, what, billions or trillions of years evolving
this system that produces the abundance.
Again, all that coal and oil and natural gas in the ground.
And I, and I can see what we've done.
I can see what we've done.
Uh, so one of the things that, that changed me in the, in the mid nineties is,
uh, for the number of reasons I looked at the soil, that was my land owned by my dad
and my granddaddy and my great granddaddy.
And then I walked down in the woods, you know, 20 yards away.
You got a handful of, and this was soil and this is dirt.
This is, this is five plus percent organic model, just teaming with
plants and animals and microbes, stuff you can see, stuff you can't see.
And this is just, it's, it's, it's a dead mineral medium.
This, it's just, I, there's some life in it, but it's a tiny
fraction of the life this year.
And we did that, me and my dad primarily with, again, tillage,
chemical fertilizer, pesticides.
The desire to, to operate as a monoculture.
And tell me about that.
I mean,
because where, from where I sit now and, and definitely where you sit, you know,
that's how we used to operate in the conventional sense.
What was the attraction of your father?
So let's take it back to him.
Maybe you can't answer, you can't speak for him, but you
may have a bit of a sense of it.
What was, what made it attractive to head down that monoculture, conventional,
whatever, you know, all those words.
Yeah, no,
I, I knew that answer.
I mean, I, I know that story.
It was before I was born, but I know the story.
Yeah.
So right over there, that peanut company is right by that window.
Yeah.
There's, uh, uh, they had a, a fish fry and, uh, sponsored by a sales for
a fertilizer company, invited all the farmers to come and eat free fish.
And he gave all of them a, had a couple of 200 pound bags of
ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
He gave all the farmers a, a bag with five or 10 pounds or whatever in it,
and his request was go home, put it on your grass.
Wet it, put some water on it, and leave it for three days
and come back and look at it.
And my dad did that when he got back.
When he put the only nitrate fertilizer, you, the grass was that
much higher than the rest of it.
And you know, my day shit, I want it all to look like that.
In 1946 until the mid nineties, he or I one put nitrogen
fertilizer on every acre we had.
And we could see the benefit, but we couldn't see the cost.
We couldn't see the oxidation of the carbon in the soil.
We couldn't see the destruction of microbes in the soil.
We, you know, there's a lot we couldn't see, but you can see what's good.
You couldn't see what was bad.
So what, what do you do?
Well, the truth is, chemical nitrogen fertilizer wasn't invented in 1946.
It was invented in 18, the 18 hundreds.
But it was so expensive that nobody used it.
But then when the world invested a fortune in munitions uh, manufacturing for World
War ii and the war was over, all that infrastructure was standing now, and it
could be converted from munitions to.
Nitrogen fertilizer.
So it became very cheap and that's when people started using it.
And we're still using it and it's still doing damage.
And we can talk about, uh, the damage it does when it gets in the ground.
We can talk about the damage it does when it gets in lakes and the rivers.
But let's just talk about the d damage to still white pastures.
We can see that.
I can show it to you.
Mm-hmm.
And that started in Yeah, the second World War and what was the other one?
Pesticides.
That was, yeah.
I think that, uh, I, I think that pesticides came about from
the, from the war effort as well.
I think the nerve gas and other things.
I think that the, I know the use of tractors.
I don't think tractors are evil, but the, the fact is, uh, the, the, the, the
farm boy is left here in 1940 and they've been plowing mules and they went to the
European Theater and operated tanks.
When they came home, they didn't wanna plow a mul.
So tractors, well, again, I don't think tractors are evil, but we were
just talking about how the, how the whole, uh, food production thing
turned upside down post World War ii.
And then, so there's the inputs of chemical fertilizers, the urea
or Romanian based fertilizers, pesticides, all, you know, essentially
a result of the Second World War repurposing factories and materials.
What about the mindset of monoculture Bermuda grass or not, or year out?
Like what was the, what was the sense of, because that's like massive
simplification of nature, right?
Well, it, it made life so much easier.
I mean, you could, you know, again, my dad became an expert cattleman.
He didn't have to know anything about hogs.
And she, he took pride in the fact he was an expert cattleman.
And, you know, he and I would've fought because we fought anyway.
We fought anyway, but we, we would've fought on the fact that that whole
evolution dumbed farming down.
You know, he could become an expert in cattle production because
he did have know anything about anything but cattle production.
And, uh, it, it didn't make him a less smart person, but it caused him to have
less focus on all these other things so he could become better at that.
But it made him vulnerable to big players taking advantage, because
when he produced those cattle.
He didn't have a market for the beef, he didn't have the
capacity to slaughter the beef.
He didn't have a market for the beef.
So he was, uh, it didn't happen all at one time, but since that time
we've been increasing from a marketing perspective, have less and less
and less players to market to it.
Two who had more and more and more market power.
And that's why the percentage of the food dollar that the farmer gets is
so much lower than it used to be.
I think it's, don't hold me to these figures.
You can look it up, but I think it's less than 15 cents.
And it depends on what commodity you're talking about.
I look on the averages, less than 15 cents of the, of the food dollar goes
to the farmer and you know, white oak pastures, a hundred cents of the food
goes to white Oak pastors pastor.
Now I got a lot of costs,
but I don't mind that, you know, well, white Oak Pastors is the largest
employer in Clay County, Georgia.
You in Clay County, Georgia right now.
County, Georgia County in America.
We got so, so employees.
I get a hundred cents of that dollar.
Now I spend $5 million a year on payroll, but I spend $5 million a year
on payroll in Clay County, Georgia.
It stays here.
I don't get to keep it all, but it stays here.
It's just, it's a much healthier system.
It's, it's healthy for other reasons too.
You know, when, uh,
uh, when we had the, uh, the pandemic, uh,
the, the, the, the big beef, the big slaughter plants closed down, and
I'm very, it could have happened, but I'm very proud to tell you we never
missed a day slaughtering cattle.
Not one day.
So no one turned up here and said, shut down.
There's close contact, there's disaster.
There was that discussion, but nobody made me do it.
You know, some, somebody was gonna make me do that, and nobody,
nobody showed up to make me do it.
We, we served food, we got a restaurant, and they did, they did tell us we
couldn't serve food anymore, but we did.
And we just, we just never, now, of my 70 employees, probably all
of us got COVID at some point.
I did, like everybody did.
Not one day.
You know, we all, we kept working, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I don't
think I've ever videoed a TV screen before, but during that COVID panic,
uh, the, uh, c the CN one morning, putting on my boots and the CCEO of
Tyson Foods said the, the, uh, the food production chain is, I can't, with
it's dead or something to that effect.
And I, I, I snatched my phone up and videoed it.
And I, we didn't know, we didn't know what happened in Bluffton.
We heard about it, we kept operating property.
But isn't that a great lesson though, like that, that, that's like a shining
example of resilience, sovereignty, you know, fuck the pandemic and all that
other stuff that happened around that.
I mean, that's a whole nother conversation, but it's like, what a
shining example of resilience in a community, employment, food supply,
sustainable, you know, the, the economics, the whole thing, health, I mean, you
know, the, and the food that you continue to, to supply was the most nutritious
stuff that people could have anyway.
Well, I, athlete we are quite resilient, but the, the, the real
strength of it is if we did falter.
It wouldn't starve the whole country.
You know, I, I don't, I don't, you know, I think that that one of the
places we've gone, one of the many places we've gone wrong is this
centralization of food production.
So that we're making, we're producing so much of our food, not not just
meat, whether it's, whether it's oats or rice or grapes or whatever the,
whatever livestock, probably especially.
But it's so centralized and controlled by so few players
that, and let's talk about this.
Mm. Those big players have achieved incredible efficiency.
Everything that's been done for the last 80 years has been to make it
more and more and more efficient.
And I'm tell you now, efficiency and resiliency are ying and yang.
The more efficient, and I'm not anti efficiency, but I'm here to
tell you that the more efficient a system becomes, the less resilient.
It's the higher you build a building, the, the greater the,
uh, opportunity for it to, to fall.
So, you know, I think, I think that we've, uh, really taken great risks.
Uber efficient food production system that could, that could fail.
And, and do you put that under the banner of industrialization?
Is that kind of
centralization?
Centralization?
I, I What's the d What you tell us the difference.
Yeah.
I think three things that I'm in opposition to, industrialization,
commoditization, and centralization.
We can talk all day long about all three of them, but, uh, centralization is kind
of, and, and they're all part of this conversation, but centralization is, uh,
these, the small number of really high volume food production and processing
centers that we've got as opposed to a decentralized, so centralization, uh,
commoditization, you know, those, there was a time when my great grandfather
and grandfather ruined this farm.
They were very successful because they really put a lot of emphasis on making
their product the best it could be.
Not, not, not because of of pride, but because they wanted more thought.
It, it offered them the opportunity to charge a premium because they, they,
they produced a really good, it forced them to produce a really good product.
So a focus on quality.
Right.
And, and commoditization on the other hand is putting a, uh, a, a lowest possible,
uh, acceptance of what you're producing.
And if you're, if you're focused on quality selling into the
commodity market, you go broke.
Because what you need to be doing is producing as low quality sheep a product
as you can to get the commodity price
and high turnover.
Yeah.
And of course, industrialization is this, this what we were talking about
earlier, moving this whole production system from that very cyclical
appreciation to that very linear approach.
So commoditization, socialization, industrialization.
And that the, the, the triad is, is essentially, um, I mean that, that applies
to not just agriculture, that applies to big pharma too, or pharmaceutical health.
The health, you know, industry or the health kind of probably, I'm, I'm a guy.
I mean, I.
I'm, but I know those applications, but I know exactly what's
happened in agriculture, food production, and I just told you,
um, and also, and I listened to yourself and Jenny on, on Joe Rogan
there about, um, I can't remember how Jenny phrased it was like, you, uh,
you know, you create the, what was it?
Selling bandaids and bullets?
Is
that it?
Selling bandaids and bullets?
Yeah.
Well,
yeah.
Yeah.
That's my, that's my Is that yours?
Yeah, you go, that's great.
Explain that one.
That's we, I mean, God, what a, what a what a trick is sell bandaids and bullets.
If you sell drugs and pesticides, you, you, you creating your own
market, it's just a great deal.
You sell a product that has a perceived benefit because a, a health
problem, then you sell the health
pharmaceutical to fix that.
And I,
I, I, and this is opinion.
I can't prove this.
Well, when, when that fertilizer salesman came over here, I, I, I'm, I'm sure
he was very innocent in his belief that this ammonium nitrate fertilizer
that used to be part of the explosive program was really good for farmers.
And I, I bet he believed that.
And probably when the first pesticides was produced, the, the, the, uh,
chemists, whoever produced it probably thought he had, he or she had come up
with, uh, a technology that was gonna benefit mankind and through production.
But I don't think that's true anymore.
I think that the, uh, the sophistication now is the point when, when these
manufacturers of pesticides sell a product that fixes a problem,
there's every understanding is gonna cause another problem.
It's gonna require another pesticide that's gonna fix that
problem, but create another problem that for another pesticide.
And there's no end to it.
There's simply no end to it.
And all that money, those pesticides is flowing from rural America into
these multinational pesticides and.
Rural America.
This is where the people are getting cancer, atrazine in ground, on we
extinction, and all these terrible things.
And there's so much money involved.
I dunno how it's ever gonna be corrected.
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Well, Zach Bush has done, you know, he often talks about the glyphosate.
I can't, Mississippi River, the glyphosate or something.
Glyphosate and.
Health impacts, you know, disease and cancers, um, as glyphosate use increased,
there was this sort of, you know, increase in that, in those health impacts.
Yeah, Zach, so you gotta talk about that.
I mean, he Yeah, that's right.
That, that's his, that's his thing.
But it's like it's, I mean, but it sits reasonably comfortable comfortably in
this conversation in terms of, you know, that's the result of the intention or
the business model more, more, more so.
And
there's, I mean, I certainly can't prove, there's no doubt in my mind
that, that, that it's what's happening.
And I believe that the brilliant people that run these companies
probably know and understand it.
It's just so much money you can't not do it.
Yeah.
Tell me, um, I had, I put a little call out to some of my followers
people the other day yesterday.
I was actually, and they, I said, you've got any questions for Will?
And I had a few that'd come back.
Can we get, given we're in a sort of big pharma world, um, what's quite topical
in Australia, and I'm sure it's to some extent over here, but I think you guys
in, well I say you guys in the US it's been sort of happening for a lot longer.
The mRNA vaccines that are being developed and researched for use in livestock.
That's a big thing.
Like literally in the last couple of days, there's been reports
about different departments.
Funding research with other organizations, and I think a pretty clear signal that
it's gonna be, you know, encouraged and supported to be made available
for livestock use, if not mandated.
Hopefully not.
What, where's that up to over here?
Have you got a, do you
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I can't tell you, I know a heck of a lot about mRNA vaccines, but I
can tell you that when I was operating Uber industrially, my drug salesman
loved me and I loved my drug salesman.
And he would come by and say, we've got something new.
And we, when he said that he had my wrapped interest, whatever
he had to sell, I would buy it.
And, uh, I, I, I simply gave them everything that the drug salesman
wanted to sell me.
And, and I can't, I can't tell you that I ever saw, uh, an ill
effect of, of a bat with my eyes.
But when I made the decision to change, I ceased to give my animals anything.
I can give any vaccinations.
We have a disease called black leg.
You have that in Australia.
Mm-hmm.
It's, it's in, it's in the soil, but it doesn't manifest itself unless
the conditions are just right.
So, uh, uh, one year I lost I, a dozen or so cast a black leg.
Hadn't lost, hadn't given black leg for years.
Hadn't lost in, for years that year.
I guess the conditions were just right.
We lost, lost some calves and I told my guys, you can go back to giving them.
And,
but I don't think we, I that think that black vaccines has
got some other things in it.
Yeah.
Like a, like a one or something like that.
Yeah.
But, uh, but we're very lean on the side of getting, uh, vaccines or
antibiotics or, um, as far as, or we don't use any fly control, uh, at all.
You Yeah.
And you certainly advertise, you know, front and center.
You are not using glyphosate and not using, I can't
remember what the wording was.
You know, chemicals generally in, certainly in the paddock situations.
Yeah.
I hadn't used any chemical probably 20 years.
Any pesticides on, on 20 years.
Um, I got a new.
Noninvasive plant called tropical soda apple and it kicking my, but right now,
the organic spray that's supposed to, which we're experimenting
with it, I hope it does it
so is a, it's a commercial product you've found that someone
else makes, it's not a brew.
You, you, you together
knew, bought it, bought, yeah.
As a organic, I hope it, I hope it works.
It, I dunno what I'll do.
If it doesn't, I'll we'll figure it out.
But it's, it's a problem.
You know, it's a non-native invasive, what that means is you came in here
from somewhere else and we didn't, and we didn't, we have not brought in what
controls it, where it was, you know, when you've got a, a, uh, a, a biome,
you know, you've got all kinds of, of, of living creatures and you've got things
that control those living creatures.
And we do things that get it thrown off and wasn't the case of this.
I think that.
How it got here, birds or whatever.
But it, it's, it's here.
And it didn't used to be here.
Is there a biological control?
Is there a bug or a beetle or a
weev or something?
Uh, so the University of Florida in Florida is 50 miles that way.
Mm-hmm.
The University of Florida, uh, brought up some Beatles from Paraguay
Oray, south American country.
And, uh, and they, it was cleared.
They, they were, they were found and believed to be safe, not, not become
another pe And they, they sent me some to try sent and I, you know, some day,
this is last year, some days I think they're working, some days I think
they're not working, but, uh, they, the concern was that we're a little too far
north that they may not over winter.
So I don't know whether they're working or not, but they're, they're
certainly at this point not adequate
and nothing's gonna eat it.
Your goats not eating it.
Sheep, nothing tastes like shit.
Well, it's, it's just arm, it's got thorns on it.
Yeah.
Uh, my cow, my cow manager told me he thought he saw some cattle eating
really young, tender stuff and I can't, I can't catch him doing it.
He may be right.
He's more time with him than I'm, um, I spend a lot of time, but he's more so
he, he would see it before I would, he, he thinks he's seen it and, and maybe
it'll, you know, maybe they'll develop an appetite for it and help, help control it.
I guess.
I, I've seen things like that happen before.
Yeah.
And I guess know the more diverse there, the normal diet is in their pasture base,
the more they might be inclined to nibble on it every now and again, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Because it's sort of, you know, something in there, they're so clever that something
that in this diverse pasture might offset toxicity or even things like you put out,
you said magnesium, you put out bent.
Is it bentonite or dolomite?
What do you pull out in, is it a, what's your magnesium?
Um,
it's a, uh, I, I dunno.
Yeah.
I buy it from a, a, a supplement company.
Yeah.
The tags here somewhere.
Yeah.
That's
cool.
Well, because something like dolomite being like a clay, it'll,
it'll help, you know, drag out some of those toxins in there.
But it, anyway, that's another, that's a whole nother thing.
Tell me, um, I'm going to step back in time again to, um, get a bit
chronological home to the farm.
No Uni, Georgia State University, univers of Georgia, the University of Georgia.
Did your studies there,
came home, did it as dad did.
And at some point.
There was, I don't know, was it a single event?
Was it an epiphany?
Was it a series of tension events that kind of went, ah, like I
gotta do something differently?
Was there, you know, what was the, is there a moment or was it just
a, like a long period of stretch?
Kind of both.
I think that the, what happened over a longer period of time is, uh, because
I was a very heavy handed abuser, you know, if the rate, if it was two
ccs per hundred, I'd give them three.
It was a pipe I put.
So I think that, that, that had caused me to start to, uh, see at some level
the, the unintended consequences of the, of the, those technologies.
What
did you, what
Well, the best example would be that soil I told you about.
Just, just the difference in where, where it was.
Can
I get that soil over there?
You stay there.
Yes, sir. Because this is, this is really interesting.
But if there was an event,
it was, we were loading out a load of Cal one morning and you can put,
you can put nearly a hundred, 500 pound calves on a double decker truck.
Mm.
And we loaded a truck and, and the ones on, I've done it a lot of times in my
life, but the ones on top, urinating and defecating on the ones on the bottom.
And they were gonna be on that truck maybe 30 hours without food or water or rest.
I don't do this anymore.
I didn't.
And when was that?
20, probably mid nineties.
Trying to get you to focus
there
again.
Mid nineties.
So what's
that?
30 years ago.
But now you know that that's when I, that's when I started the change.
Yeah.
I'm not, I'm not gonna tell you, I hadn't used any of those technologies
over 30 years, but by the time, by, by the time I was 20 years into, or 25
years, I had ceased to use all of them.
So you didn't go cold Turkey.
You just, you you eased out of it.
It it, it was pretty cold Turkey, but not completely cold.
Pretty cold.
I'm just trying to get you focus, don use, have a sip on that.
Trying get that face of yours back in focus.
Handsome.
It's very handsome.
Yeah.
I very, very handsome.
I get it all the time.
Well, I have to say, you know, Mads mad Maddie, who?
We, we came with a trip today.
Come with us.
Our, our nanny Madeline Mads in car.
No, no, that's Lila Mads, who's our, um, nanny.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She was telling me about.
She was really excited to be here for lots of reasons, but she said, oh,
Will's voice is just like, she was good.
She's a sweet child, sweet
child.
How she was very excited to just hear your voice and to see is it better.
So,
um, I'm trying to en see clearly so those Australians can understand what I'm saying
and profoundly sober.
I love it.
I don't want you to go faster and I want you to tell us everything you can.
Um, tell me, so over that five years, what did that look like?
That, that, that chain, so you went, you know, those shooting and pissing on each
other and there's like, I cannot do that.
What was the, what was the next step?
What, what, what was the, what was, like, did you sit down there and write
a list of things you didn't wanna do?
Did you I
don't list, I'm not, I don't write list down much, but the equivalent of that,
you know, uh, the, the hardest thing I did was give up the nitrate urea fertilizer.
That was hard, man.
So hard.
It's just such a
beneficial flush.
You see the good, you don't see the bad.
As we discussed earlier, you know, you give a, an animal a hormone implant.
You see the difference over day period.
If you got one out there that didn't get it, but it just doesn't,
you use nitrogen fertilizer, it's just so apparent, so beneficial.
Giving, giving up nitrogen, fertilizer hard.
And we, and we learned how to do without it.
And um, and then some other inputs.
It's just, it's, it's hard to give it up, you know.
I've never, I've never had a drug problem.
I understand people have drug problem.
You had an addiction.
I had an addiction.
I did have an addiction.
That's exactly right.
And you'd, you said you got rid of the vaccines.
You went, oh, I'm not gonna do this.
Like, you know, back then you got, didn't do any of that.
What, when did you stop spraying or killing everything?
That wasn't Bermuda grass.
Yeah, I didn't write it down.
But then it,
in that period, the
same window in early two, you know, 1995, early two thousands, uh,
uh, what were your, what did your staff say were you, were
your family, was your dad?
Dad.
My
dad had dementia and now he
was not
active in the farm.
Uh, and my staff, you know, I had probably four, three or four employees,
minimum wage, labor, retain that day.
They just did what Will said, and they, they probably thought they
could probably, they're smart people.
They probably see that unintended consequences that weren't good, but
nobody, we didn't talk about it.
We just, right.
I'd known anymore.
But during that window, I ran the farm very autonomously.
So we wasn't doing much discussion today.
There's a lot of discussion because we've got a lot of smart
people that, that have valuable
understandings
and valuable input.
And what about your neighbors?
Do they, um, not that I imagine you'd give a shit about what they
think, but was there, like, were the neighbors saying stuff to other
people and getting back to you?
Did you feel like you were the weirdo doing all this crazy stuff?
Unconventionally Pro
Pro, probably, but nobody said anything to me and I didn't
care what they said anyway.
If they had, I wouldn't have cared.
Uh, they just, that didn't bother me.
Um, I'm sure they would've liked it if I was
music major, but
I wasn't.
You hard, hard
to,
uh, it's hard.
I don't care who you're, it's hard to be uber critical.
You were raised with that weighs as much as you do that doesn't care what you, you
know, it's just, I wasn't a good target.
Mm. I can imagine.
So
I I didn't have any trouble.
No.
Was there, was there a time, can you recall a time when someone or a group of
people went, Hey, will, like, generally curious about what you were doing and
said, can you tell us what you're doing?
You know, like,
oh,
why is that, why is that working?
Or why is that cow look healthier or,
well see, so, uh, not my neighbors, because my neighbors are very,
and it's never the neighbors.
They good.
Huh?
It's never the neighbors.
Yeah.
Well, my, my neighbors are, they're good people.
Yeah.
Now let's just be clear, they're wonderful people.
Totally.
They family people, they work hard.
They, and they, they farm like their daddy and their granddaddy taught 'em to farm.
And like they learn at University of Georgia, Auburn University and they
feel strongly about, these are not bad people, but they're, but they, they're
not interested in what I'm doing.
Uh, but now we do have people that come here and in fact we, uh, we
formed a, uh, I formed a 5 0 1 3 nonprofit, meaning that is this.
We person to run that sessions.
We, we have a meeting up here that we have classes at various, couple
times a month, 15 to 30 people here.
And we try, we teach 'em what we, what we know.
And that is the Center for Agriculture Resilience.
Yep.
Is that, is that online or that's all here?
It's online.
It's online version as well.
Oh, well it has a website.
Yeah.
But, but but to, to to, to join the curriculum and go through that.
It's a, it's a, it's a face-to-face.
Yeah.
I think they're looking at, um,
I think they're looking at putting the curriculum online,
but they hadn't done it yet.
This is, this is not a, for a long time, the only funding it had was me.
And now we get old funding from other people since we got nonprofit status.
But we, we don't have a lot of money, so we just gotta do it as we can.
Mm-hmm.
And I, and I, and you know, I, I never intended for it to be a, uh,
a road show.
You know, I, you know, I strongly believe that one of the things we do
wrong is treat every ecosystem similarly with every ecosystem is, is very.
I don't, I don't want my people going to the mountains or the ra or thes
or the tropics to tell how to do it.
If you wanna come here, we know how to tell.
So I guess that's about, you know, show them what you're doing literally,
and, you know, theoretically and give them the choice to adapt
to this, their environment.
Yeah.
We're not, I mean, we don't try to anybody anything we, we just give,
we give them the benefit of our experience and what has worked, and
we don't mind telling what, what don't work, you know, what does not work.
Mm-hmm.
Just about that.
Angel could ask you the question there in the, in the, in your Jeep before,
and I want to go back to that, and it was around making mistakes or, you
know, some people call it failures, but I get, I get a strong sense from you.
What I know about you and the conversations we've had, you know, getting
something wrong is not a, not a mistake.
It's not a failure.
Like what, what's your attitude to that?
Well,
the difference, a mistake and a failure is a failure is when you
make a mistake and it whips your ass.
A mistake is you make a, a mistake and you fix it.
And we've had a lot of mistakes.
A lot of mistakes.
I wouldn't had a failure because we, you know, I think that, I think
one of the things we do well is acknowledge the mistakes we make.
We make a lot of them.
And
it does not embarrass me one bit to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I thought that was a good idea, but it's not.
Don't do quit.
Let's quit doing that.
Just what can we do to fix what I have done?
And I, I did it.
I need you fix it.
And that
I told you earlier, it, it amazes me how people don't wanna do that.
And it just doesn't, it just doesn't bother me a bit.
You know, I make a, I, I'm, I'm, I'm very bold about making decisions,
making changes, and I'm very, uh,
about the fact that some of 'em work, some of 'em don't.
And I know that upfront and one, one don't work.
It just don't work.
And we're not gonna do that anymore.
And we gotta fix what we, we gotta fix what, what we caused.
And,
and I, I just, I'm, I'm always surprised when people make mistakes
and then want to deny it didn't work.
That just amazes me.
So is there any advice you can give?
I mean, you have.
That.
Um, so they're really hands on for three months at a time.
You have people listening to podcasts, you've got your book, you've got
the, um, center for Agricultural Resilience, you know, what message
in any of that or all of that.
Do you tell those generally younger people, I guess, and they don't
have to necessarily be young, who are, who are wanting to change,
is there any sort of messages you have for them about, you know, that
failure mistake kind of concept?
Yeah.
Uh, just talk mostly well about all those people really.
But the, the interns that come here, one of the things that I drive home to
them is, you know, there are, I, I tell 'em there are three legs on the stool.
There's production out here in the field, and that's the fun part.
That's what we all wanna do.
And then there's processing, which is making it marketable.
And then there's marketing, which is monetizing.
And a mistake I see so many people make is they fall in love
with the production side of it.
It's, it's, it's hard not to fall in love with the cycles of nature operating
optimally, producing on the boomers.
That's good stuff and it's fun, but people don't, consumers don't buy.
Hogs and cows and sheep, they, they buy beef and pork and lamb.
Lamb,
I love it.
And they're not going to buy.
But so many tomatoes not, but so many carrots and all these things
that we produce in these wonderfully operating ecosystems that we developed,
it's gotta be made marketable.
And then after you make it marketable, you gotta find that market.
And I told you, this is the poorest county in, in the country.
I don't sell much in this county except to my employees.
And they, they, they get it for half price.
So, you know, I, I would, I would go broke if all I did was produce and
sell here, I'd go broke quick, quickly.
Quickly.
So finding those markets that will pay my cost of operation
is
three days on the stool.
That's great.
I love that.
That's so that's, you know, it's so simple, isn't it?
You know,
thing pretty simple.
Yeah.
That's
not being a linear,
I, I don't see much if this, if this wasn't simple, I couldn't do it.
But the, not the irony, but the interesting thing is.
You know, you are running, I'm, I'm gonna, well, a simple business, I mean, there's
complexity, actually, let's talk about that complexity versus complication.
Can we talk about that?
Because there's a difference, right?
Mm-hmm.
You, it's, and I think, I think it kind of gets back to that linear versus cyclical.
You know, a,
a complex business is very cyclical.
A linear business is very complex, complicated.
And I think that
whatever business you're endeavoring to operate, you gotta figure it out.
You gotta figure out
what approach to take.
And if you, if you were operating a manufacturing plant, automobile
manufacturing plant with steel parts coming in one end and automobiles
coming out end, that is highly complicated and highly scalable.
And, and on and on, uh,
compared to a farm, which is yang.
And there's also a difference between scalable and repeatable, right?
Yeah.
So, uh, what we do here is not highly scalable.
It's highly replicatable.
Yeah.
There could be a lot of white oak pastures.
And I really, my my hope was that there would be a lot of white oak pastures.
Uh, and then from a scalability perspective, we're, we're bigger
than I ever thought we would be.
And we're probably bigger than I wanna be.
Um, things get things happen.
And when I had to, when, when I ran out processing capacity 20 years ago
for my cattle and had to go to the bank and borrow $3 million and fill that
processing plant that I showed you, you know, I, I, I had to scale up to 20
something million because I had to kill that many cattle so I could service my
debt so I could make my business work.
That, that that was not best case, you know, best case would be, uh, a co-op.
I'm, I'm not really a, basically a co-op guy, but I do recognize ability.
I do see probably can work well.
Uh.
Deciding to, to take on that processing function for a group of farmers.
That, which is what I would prefer to see.
There are a few of those in this country, and I would've been a happier camper
the last 25 years, 20 years if I had not had to build that processing plant.
It, it's still be part of my business that I enjoy the least.
I love what going in the, uh, processing, you know, it's, it's highly regulated.
Uh, know, and I, I I, we do, and I'll say this, I do as little live as I can.
I got some really good people running that plant and they are not micromanaged.
Sure.
You, uh, they do a good job.
Uh,
it's also, as you said, it's essential now for your business to value add, you
gotta that point where you either had to, you might have said it yesterday or today.
You gotta that point where you had to like, shut it all
down or go that next step.
You know, you had to get big or get Well, I
started transitioning the farm from the industrial model to, to this model.
I never intended to, to build a processing plant.
I started out using the excess capacity.
A few very small processes had here, you know, two cows here, one cow there,
three cows over, and there was a market for the product and it was working okay.
What they were charging me was okay, it was all fine, but they could not do enough
volume for me to make my business work.
I was, I was losing money because I, I, they weren't doing enough.
I'd given up selling in the commodity market.
I couldn't sell enough through their market.
And this is in 2006, was it?
When,
when, yeah.
2 26 is when that was happening.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we, uh, uh, I tried really hard to not build a processing plant, uh, offer.
I made these other local
I their.
They just didn't wanna do it.
And, and, and I didn't blame them.
I mean, I, they, they, me, most of 'em, were older people or, or not
in real good shape financially or had some of a restriction on them.
So, uh, ultimately that I tried a lot of different things to not build a processing
plant, but ultimately I built it.
Uh,
uh, a group of farmers about two hours from here were, uh, having
organizational meetings to build a plant owned by a lot of different farmers.
And I was pretty deep in the grass fed beef business by that time,
and most of them hadn't been in it, but they thought it was a good idea
and I really wanted that to work.
So I went to a, an organizational meeting one night, uh, college auditorium, a
high school auditorium in that time.
And by the time the meeting started, I knew it was a non hint, you know, the,
uh, I, I heard farmers, I didn't even know say, well, I ain't gonna do it if
I can't get X dollars ahead from my cow.
Well, you ain't gonna get that.
Or, or I don't think we ought to hire a manager.
I think we ought to all just run it take turns or, and
just all kind of things that.
I knew it wasn't gonna work.
Mm-hmm.
And so I, when the meeting started, I, I there about five minutes and I, I left.
And then on the way home, that two hour drive is when I decided I was gonna
build a plant because I, because I either had to build the plant or go back to
operating as an industrial commodity.
And I, and I hope most people don't have to do that.
I hope they don't have to build that.
So what about, um, replicating in another state?
'cause one question that came through was, you know, will you, could you
set something up in another state, you know, well, another county Yeah.
Far, like geographically, like a sensible whatever that is, distance
from here and replicate it there.
Is that something you'd do?
I wouldn't, I mean, I wouldn't do it.
I mean, I think that somebody
You wouldn't do it because you've got enough should to do.
Yeah.
I'm not, I'm not interested, but I, but somebody needs to do it.
Uh, I think, I think what we've done here is highly replicable and it's
gonna gonna be just like this one because it's gotta fit a different
set of economic circumstances and production circumstances.
But it's highly replicable.
And, and one thing, part of what our nonprofit, CFAR Center for you mentioned
Center for our Agricultural Resilience does is, is helps people understand.
Needs.
Well, I mean, you, I guess if they, you have,
would it be fair to say you, you teach some principles when you
teach what you do here, are there, is there a principle based kind of
a program that people can adapt?
You know, because that's, that's, that's all, that's also, that's
often the, the, the issue, isn't it?
People go, oh, I'm gonna do what will Harris does and I'm gonna
be in Montana and I'm just gonna do this, I'm gonna do that.
And it's just not gonna work.
Like, is there, I guess it's all key in our responsibility.
Yeah.
I,
I think there's, I think there's, while every, every operation will
vary dramatically based on geography and economy and market and other
circumstances, there's a lot to be learned by, uh, spending some time with
somebody who's got a program that's working you, you're gonna find some
things that you like, that you wanna implement, and you're gonna find some
things that you sure don't wanna do that.
Um, so I mean, it's, it's highly.
I think that
if we could possibly get a lot of these started very beneficial.
And the economy, certainly the economy, but I think they're
look very, very different.
And I think that, uh, you know, we ta taking the, uh,
dollar store, build one on every corner, just alike.
Starbucks.
No, it's, it's not gonna be like that.
It's not that model.
Talking about business, have you got any general business advice for, I
mean, you know, let's not even think necessarily agricultural, but is there
some sound business principles that you have developed, you've picked up,
you've adopted or adapted that you could pass on to people, you know, is there
any habits, any rituals in terms of a business approach that you could pass on?
I think I'm probably not the person that I can tell you what may be the
benefit of what I've learned in myself.
You know, I don't think I'm a, I don't think I'm a really good businessman.
I kind of disdain cash.
You know, I, you know, I
explain, I, you know,
uh,
so I, you know, I, I need enough blood pump through my body
to make my, my organs work.
I don't want extra five gallons of blood that go over here in case I need it.
And I realized it's not a good analogy, but I, I treat money that
way, and I need a certain amount of money able to pay my bills every
Friday, pay employees, owe, bills,
owe.
But if there's any extra money, I'm, I'm sort of looking for
something else to do with it.
And, uh, that has been good.
And it's also been bad for us in some ways.
So, uh, interesting.
So my, the rest of my management staff are, are young people, young,
twenties, thirties, and, uh, once a week around this table right here.
And I, I tell you what I, we ought do.
My dog say, oh shit, daddy, we're not gonna do that, are we?
And it's, it's interesting to me because I'm nearly 70 and they're
30 in the thirties, and I always have thought that it was, the young
generation had to be kept back and the, the old man had to be drug followed.
It's kind of the opposite here.
So that's, and they're right a lot.
Lemme say this.
Yeah.
I've gone into a number of businesses part as part of the
farm that didn't work out well.
I, you, you know, you know, producing black soldier flies and I think
that can work, but it didn't work.
I'm, I'm still not flu with it, but I spent a lot of
money and it, it didn't work.
And
other things, you know, that we, I thought was a good idea.
So
do you think that's you, or it's their generation, are they not standing up?
This is not a criticism of anyone or anything, it's just the dynamics.
You are the bot.
Well, I guess, you know, they've got a lot of respect for you and
you are the, the, um, uh, the patron, you know, you are the I
own a hundred percent of the company.
Say again?
I own a hundred percent of the company.
Yeah.
So, well you're that as well.
So you make, I guess you ultimately make decisions, but you also the, um.
Uh, patriarch of the business, do you think they just give you that
opportunity because you are the boss?
Or is it, is it to do with age and, and not being, you know,
is it a generational thing?
Uh, you may not know the answer because I, I certainly did.
I
dunno if this answer or not, but I, my response would be, um, I'm glad I got
'em because I think they keep me from doing things that might not be the best.
I think that, uh, this, this has served me well and not well, but I, I tend to
see all the reasons that it'll work and ignore the reasons it won't work, whatever
the project is, and that is, uh, that will, that will, uh, really propel you to
doing some, some different kinds of things that can also propel you into a problem.
And, and it me both ways.
But I guess that's like, you gotta have the yin and the yang, haven't it?
You gotta have like the Yeah.
Whether it's you or someone else who's going, we should do this and do that.
And you've got the black hats, you've got the green hats, yellow, I can't remember
who was which, but in that six hats thinking, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a healthy dynamic.
It, it is.
And I'm glad we got it.
That's the reason I set it up and I didn't have it for a long time.
And, uh, I should tell you this,
think I this off.
If I started, if I, if I started today, if I, if I continued to stay a industrial
commodity cow guy, monocultural cow guy, and I started today making the
changes to do what I did 25 years ago.
I think I failed dis that I think that the success we enjoyed, uh, was, was,
was a window of opportunity that we just absolutely fortunately fell in.
I, I didn't, I love tell you, I saw it coming and I planned it
and it was brilliant on my part.
It was not.
I built the, i, I, I did what it did for the reasons I told you.
And, uh, uh, I built, I built the slaughter plant to process 50 head a week.
That was my go.
And, uh, and I don't, I, why I thought that was the right number, but I did, I
thought, I think I thought I could get to that level of production on my own without
any cows from anybody else at some point.
And that's where I wanted.
So I built it, I spent two point, I
wouldn't work 50 head a week.
I, I losing money.
So spent another 7,000 getting about 3 million and it doubled the capacity.
So happened that we some things and uh, and it started making
and,
and, uh, so I, I
was producing that level of stuff
and,
and I was able to sell it to Whole Foods Market.
This is, this is the part that's fortunate.
I was able to sell a hundred a week wholesale to Whole Foods Market in
Publix, and I sold Whole Foods Market.
This is the part about the time I sold Whole Foods Markets in public, the first
pound of American grass fed beef that they marketed as American grass fed beef.
And had that not, had that opportunity not presented itself, it wouldn't have worked.
So that was just pure look and I'm grateful for it,
but we gotta acknowledge it.
And, uh, and we, we operated successfully as a wholesale, grass fed beef
producer and had a really good return on investment and did really well.
But, but it changed.
Thousand 15
US changed the rule for product of the SA
prior to 15,
uh, for beef to be labeled product of the USA, the cow had to be born,
raised, slaughtered in the United States, in, in the 50 states.
And in 2015 they changed that rule.
My bet is it was big meat that promoted that change.
But they, I dunno how that happened, but they changed it so that if
value was added in this country, it was a product of the usa.
So suddenly, no, not suddenly, it didn't happen suddenly.
But over the next few years, the door opened and beef from Australia,
New Zealand, Uruguay, 20 something other countries, uh, came into
this country as product of the usa.
Now, I'm not jealous of other countries being able to import
product into this country.
I think it's fine.
I'm a, I'm a free trade kind of guy, but let's be, let's be very
honest about where it came from.
Let's don't say product of the usa, let's just say product of
whatever and that the consumers use.
But when that happened.
For some reason, they're able to produce it cheaper in these other countries.
Or maybe it's just the ability of big meat to shop it at the cheapest place that day.
But my margins failed dramatically.
And I, I, I didn't know if we were gonna be able to stay in business or not.
The pandemic hit and my daughter started the, or fulfillment
center direct to online marketing, and that brought us back up.
We,
well, that was in the 2020
pandemic.
Yeah.
Really?
We, we, she actually had, uh, had started the online store before
that, but it wasn't doing anything.
But when the, uh, and I make a mistake when the, when the pandemic hit, uh, we
sold out of like my overnight in a week.
And in retrospect, I should have cut off all my wholesale customers and
satisfied all my online customers.
And, and I didn't do, I didn't stay with the wholesale customers,
any, any kind of loyalty.
I, I just didn't think it was thing to
do.
But
in retrospect, it would've been,
um.
But what a crazy time.
I mean, what a what a what a crazy time.
And what an opportunity though, you know, like at that point like that.
And that's, that the similar thing happened in Australia.
There were some businesses that all the businesses went under, but the
circumstance for other businesses was like the golden opportunity,
because people couldn't travel.
You know, they had to
same here and would be adapted.
And now we're responding to it.
You saw, we were building a, uh, we spending about 2 million building a, a,
a freezer when I, as the online business, frozen product, the grocery fresh
product, and I got a tiny little freezer.
So now we're building a big freezer so we can accommodate that.
We're making some other changes.
We, uh, uh, I, I, I mentioned the size of the plant and the, the size the
plant wound up being was a, was the right size, but we've outgrown it now.
Uh,
in 2012
or so, I built a poul plant and I, I made a mistake in it.
I overbuilt it.
I, I misread the, uh, market and how much, uh, pasture tow truck could sell.
So it has not been a good investment for us, but now we're re gonna spend
million or so dollars, uh, converting it.
So I can still process poultry, but I can also process hogs and sheep
and case, and that'll take pressure off my red, red meat plant, so
it'll become just a cattle plant.
So, uh, I I think that's gonna be a, uh, a much better operation for us.
It's following the evolution of the market.
I mean, the good news is you've actually got two plants.
You, you can, you can adapt the, the, the cattle one with some freezing, you know,
gets a bit more money and the poultry, you can now adapt to small species.
I mean, that's,
that's cool.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm very pleased that that worked out.
That worked.
And I mean, we gotta, we gotta see it and, and oh yeah, that's, that's another
3 million in expense in, uh, investment.
Uh,
but, but I guess with some, you know, numbers and forecasting and,
you know, let's, I, I can imagine demands not gonna go backwards, you
know, unless knows what happens.
You know, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sure it's gonna work, but don't forget,
I'm the guy that sees all the, I see all the res things gonna work.
Yeah.
You're paying the bills.
You know,
well, I'm, I'm the, I'm the optimistic guy in our organization.
I'm, one says again, I see all the reasons why it work.
I don't see any of the reason why it won't work.
I recognize that, and that's the reason when my, the rest of my staff
speak up with, uh, uh, obstruction.
You, your, I listen to it.
I was gonna say to you, does that piss you off or is that you, I guess
I'd imagine you respect it and you go, well, you know, that's, it's the,
yeah.
Yeah.
And also, you know, I'm, I'm almost 70 years old and, uh, there are a lot of, not
a lot of things there from time to time.
There are things that, uh, you know, I don't wanna force them
to do something they don't wanna do and then die, you know, and,
you know, they need to, they need, they need to, anything
we do that's, uh, a big deal.
Now they, they need to have, uh, again, I own the company,
but they need to have more.
They'll own the company
and,
you know, I don't need to start something they don't wanna do with
the full knowledge that my operating opportunity is five years or 10.
20. Um, we answered that one.
I had another question.
Michael Goodin who, um, he, he's not far from me, uh, in Australia.
He had a question about your bulls keeping your bulls in.
You talk about this morning a bit, keeping a bulls and tire and what that means for
management without, you don't have to go through all the detail, but what are some
of the sort of the, the pros and the cons of that sort of, uh, management structure?
So for those that don't know, sound like this guy, know, for
those that don't know, we leave.
For the most part, leave bulls intact For many years, I left Bulls in intact.
Uh, I, I, I cast, I tell people that we castrated everything born
on this farm that wasn't named Harris for years and about 10 or
12 years ago, whole Foods Market at the time was my biggest customer.
I don't sell 'em anymore, but at the time, I knew my biggest customer, uh,
embraced the Global Animal Partnership, which is animal welfare, nonprofit.
And they, uh, uh,
set steps one through five.
Step five was the highest level.
There was no physical alterations.
So you didn't cut horns, you didn't castrate.
What about, what about, do you do ear marks?
Do you take a nick outta the ear?
No, not, not, not,
not step five.
So you
could, you could put a tag in the, you put a tag.
Okay.
Put a tag in a little puncture punch ear.
You can't, you can't Notch, notch.
Yeah.
Which I used to do.
Yeah.
So, uh, and, and the, the belief is there would be a, uh, a premium
paid for that if you of step five.
So I decided I would try it, and then it, and it worked really well.
I was very surprised.
I think I probably had
six, 700 calves that were born on the farm.
And, uh, I didn't castrate, so it been three something bull.
I didn't castrate them and I was, I had a lot trepidation, but it went really well.
I mean, I, I, I had very little problem, you know, a little pushing,
but they were raised together.
You, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go to the stockyard and buy from
different sources and do that.
Those cans were all raised together.
There wasn't much of a problem.
And what, and by the way, they didn't pay me my premium, so.
Wasn't much a premium, but, and I don't do this with them anymore.
But, but, but the good news is, uh, I realized that I was actually
raising butter bulls than I was mine.
You've seen my cows and they're pedestrian cross spread cattle.
They're not show cattle, but if you have a three 50 bulls to
choose from this, some good ones.
And I was buying bulls from people that had 200 mama cows, so they
had less than a hundred bulls and they were keeping the 10 best ones.
So, you know, it, you know, I, I wasn't getting the, the selection was not there.
So, uh, one of the best things I've done is to save my own
bulls for the last two 12 years.
And I really like what it's doing to my herd.
Uh, their frame score coming down.
I think the, the girth is going up, you know, the, uh, I don't
have Calvin problems anymore.
I used to, I used to artificially inseminate and, uh, really didn't How
long ago was that?
Back in conventional land?
Yeah,
yeah, back then.
Yep.
And I, and I, I, I, I, I can do it myself and I, uh, I used clean up.
And I,
you know, I'd want semen from bulls that were freaks of nature.
Mm.
You know, they would've a, a ribeye as big as my hat.
And, you know, attributes is a zero game.
Yeah.
If you do, if you do something real well, there's probably
stuff you don't do too good.
Yeah.
Okay.
And, and what this did for me is it allowed me to, to, uh, pick my own
bulls that were not freaks of nature.
And,
and it also allowed me to have a lot of bulls.
I,
but, uh, uh, a friend of mine was a, and the, uh, were the
originators of the Beef master breed.
Master Beef
Master.
Really?
So, yeah.
And, uh, he's dead now, but he had, he sent me a, uh, a handwritten
doc copy of a handwritten document.
He had, had something like 120 mama cows and put about 20 bulls
in there with them and, um, bred them when the calves were born.
He took, uh, this is very early on when this before became very popular, but
he would take hair from the calf, from the tail head and have DNA tested dna.
Yeah.
Right.
And you, you would think if you had 120 cows and 20 bulls,
there'd be about five or 10 bulls.
Calves per bull.
No, no, no.
One bull.
70 calves.
One bull 20 then ones and twos and zeros.
So it
was a hierarchy, right?
It was a hierarchy of, of, of the bulls in that bull.
Well, I
think it, what I think it was is the bull that had the most libido
and four good legs and two good testicles and one good penis.
Yeah.
And then felt good.
Yeah.
Was getting the cows br Yeah.
And I want my herd to come from that bull.
Yeah.
Aga a doula.
So a
do
and you know, if, if by area are half inch smaller side side.
So, uh, I embrace that and now I save my own bull closed herd.
I like to think I'm originating my own breed of cattle.
Have you got a name for that?
Harris.
Harris, I
think, I think it takes two, three or four five gener people's generations.
Not cow.
I'm not, I'm not anything.
You better think of a name though.
So Jenny's Jenny or Jody's kids.
I think it's
a early,
the ge the gestation period is 2 83 days.
We, we ain't gotta come up with a Right.
So
that'd be, that'd be great.
Legacy,
I think.
Well, I
we don't call them will the
will mask?
No, just,
I'm gonna think of it for you.
Okay.
You work, I'm, you work on that.
Have you got a suggestion box somewhere?
Um, so that's good.
Michael, would you be satisfied with it?
I had, I wanted a quick one about the, um, and what about the quality of the meat?
So that's obviously the, the, the batteries are left in there is, yeah.
The, the, the natural hormonal cycles and flow and whatever else
chemistry is, is, is natural.
Well, how does that impact on quality and management?
So, well, yeah,
that, that, that's a good, that's a good question.
And the first one you got
is that, is that my first good question?
No, a good question
yet.
Another good question.
It's the second one
yet.
Good question.
So, uh, uh,
you know.
I know how this, in this country, it's prime choice standard, you know?
Yeah.
The
grading, and it is all based on how fat the animal is.
And the fact,
and the fact is, uh,
intact, you're not gonna, especially on grass, you don't get any prime.
Yeah.
If
you castrate them on grass, you ain't getting no prime, you know?
But
it's not getting
fat, it's not getting that.
They
don't get that fat.
Yeah.
So, uh, I think that if you, if you are selling, if you below prime in
choice, it's not that much difference.
There is some difference.
And by the way, we sell it as bull meat.
We, we, and I, and I think there are, and there's a limit how much you can sell.
I think there's a, uh, there is a market for that bull meat and maybe, and I don't,
maybe it's the guys that are on a, uh,
bodybuilders
pro, something like that.
Yeah.
But we, uh, and, and Jenny, you know, Jenny manages inventory very, very
carefully and you know, we, you know, she be sure we don't raise too much of it.
I'm actually, I gonna sell.
On the pasture.
So we, we castrated a percentage of the bull.
You did
too?
Yeah.
Um, well, I'm gonna, maybe that's another suggestion I can
put in the suggestion boxes.
Like a new brand.
It's Abus brand.
Yeah.
I'm probably not gonna
Bishop,
be a Genie or somebody.
Don't, don't put, don't, don't put it in here.
Okay.
Well I won't waste my time giving it to you then.
No, that's my point.
Um, okay.
We better wrap it up pretty soon because oh one that, um, I, I've got two more.
Um, you are, you are making a bit of a few waves and news and I noticed your
little award over there, um, is back to Front Solar Rancher of the year 2024.
You've done some pretty interesting things with sheep.
We,
we just got that this week.
Uh, so, uh, uh, we, uh,
because land is, is precious and, uh, we, uh, several things happened.
Uh, one is we got the appetite for more land than we can afford to buy.
That's one thing.
The second thing is a, uh, solar.
Acres of land, uh, about six from family farm
array.
And I seen so many solar arrays go in and just rate the land.
I mean, just bulldoze the hills, uh, raw dirt, not soil, raw dirt under it, and
mowing with lawnmowers and spraying with chemicals.
And I, I really hate to see that land done that way.
And, um, it's a long story, but I used some political capital and got
the CEO to come down and I was lucky.
Again, Reagan Farr is his name, and he's the CEO of, uh, Silicon Ranch.
That's the, that's the operator.
And Reagan is a attorney, a CEO, an MBA, all those letters.
And a brilliant guy and very non-agricultural.
But his dad was the, uh, poultry director.
University.
And while he is a Ivy League businessman, he was raised chickens and he, so he had
a level of understanding and we showed him the benefit ecologically of grazing, not
mowing and spraying, and he embraced it.
And, uh, we'll be at about 2000 acres of solar arrays, uh, hopefully this year.
Uh, and she, I can't put, uh, cattle or goats under them too Frail.
The are not rigid, but sheep work well.
Yeah, right.
And so, yeah, because the cattles, they're too high, high.
And the goats would want sort of clamber and jump around.
I guess I'm
gonna say this, we're we're, I'm gonna from my plant and
on that I got some, uh, some funding from the federal government
and we'll find some more.
It's gonna be what's called a cattle tracker, which will be high
enough for cattle degrees under, and I think that's gonna be a real,
uh, game changer, dual purpose.
Um, my question around that was, do you know, has anyone done any research on.
The impact, potential impact of like EMFs, electromagnetic frequencies and so on.
Like there's a lot of current going through that system on animal
behavior, reproduction health, you know, is there, is there any, has
there been any work done on that?
I dunno,
we've got about 2000 head that's a lot of shape under the solar array and I
think we're gonna go to about three head as the, the land is degraded
with the construction process.
So you know about a sheet per acre about all can stand, but land improves.
We can get the numbers up, but we report is we, we've got a good
sheep eyebrow and we, I, I see.
I'm not a scientist and I don't have a control group,
but I see no adverse effects.
There may be some, I'm not here to tell you.
Oh, it's fine.
Just fine.
I'm not saying that.
Yep.
But if they're gonna build solar voltaic arrays, this is a heck of a
lot better ecologically than the other
thing.
Well, in some ways it offsets the, well, certainly the impact and may
regenerate that disturbance of the, all that construction, the whole thing.
You know, they
absolutely do.
And keep in mind, you're in the coastal plains of Georgia and this was a forest.
Yeah.
A field with solar pounds emulates that Forest shade.
Yeah.
A whole lot better than a
global field of soybeans or peanuts or corn or,
totally.
I mean, there's, you know, there's, there's, there's
economics behind it as well.
Um, final question.
Will, um, Angelica and I were talking about, as I mentioned before, you
know, our favorite, well my favorite thing is our job as parents is to
prepare our children to leave us.
Do you have any parental advice that you as a father, as a parent you can impart?
Has there been any tips and tricks or any sort of mantras that you, you know,
I'll ask my wife and get back to you.
That's
a cop out.
No, there must be something you didn't interact with your daughter.
Well, my wife and I been married.
Same woman for 40 something years.
50 plus.
50. Don't tell her, I dunno how many.
It's a long time.
I'm not gonna edit that out.
Yeah, she, she listens to this.
She's not gonna watch this.
She, I might just send her, it's too long.
I might send her this minute.
Yeah,
yeah.
I might come to Australia.
You're welcome
parent.
We have an old fashioned relationship in that I ran the farm and she
ran the house and the family, and she did a really good job.
She raised three, uh, wonderful children.
I, I slept in the house, but I was gone before they got up
and got home after went bed.
Uh, but two of the three daughters decided to come back and join the farm, which
was a, a very pleasant surprise for me.
Uh, but no, I'm, I, you know, I'm just not the best person to give
you, uh, child racing advice.
I'm, I'm the best to give.
You need cow raising.
Is there any, is there any, any parallels?
Probably apart from the, apart from the castration bit, probably.
That's right.
I didn't castrate any of my children.
They were, they were,
they were,
they were lucky for them.
Yeah.
Um, okay.
So we'll defer, we'll, we'll defer to your, your lovely wife.
We'll, um, we're gonna wrap it up.
That's been a while.
Um, what I'm gonna do is take a section outta that and I
made some little notes there.
I'm putting that into a separate little thing for.
20, 30 minutes, it'll go to a subscription, our subscribers, and I'll
get that, um, separate to the rest of it.
Um, what I'm, if you are happy to, we definitely need a break now.
We might turn that air conditioning back on for a minute.
Um, I just wanna do 10 minutes of a, a quick q and a sub standard little
questions, but let's have a break.
And can I just say what an absolute honor and joy it's been and I, I'm,
I'm, I'm surprised because I didn't know you well enough up to this, up
to the point of being here yesterday.
But now your generosity in your, your time, your wisdom, your, I
mean, it's clear this community is a result of your generosity of,
of, in so many different levels.
We had such an interesting walk around, uh, drive around today, uh, chats
last night and chats at at lunch.
Um, I can't thank you enough for the time you've put aside to, um,
to speak with me and my family and to, to, to capture this gold.
Um, so I just can't, I dunno how, oh, you know what I, I was gonna bring, I've
got 'em in the house down there, you know, have you got Tim Tam biscuits?
They're chocolate biscuit.
Oh, you're in for, so my grandfather, um.
Invented his biscuit called the Tim Tam.
It's a chocolate biscuit.
And in 19 54, 19 56 in a Kentucky Derby, there was a, there was a
1954,
it was a 54 Kentucky Derby, or 56, oh, there was a horse running called Tim Tam.
And my grandfather was in the states at the time and didn't go, I don't think
he went to the, the horse race, but he saw the, you know, the form guide.
He went, wow, that's a great name.
And he was making this biscuit and he, he patented the name or whatever You did.
Trademark it.
Anyway, that's become Australia's most famous biscuit.
How about that?
And, and I brought a packet from Australia for you.
Well, thank you sir. And I also brought a bandana on these.
I've got about six colors.
Yeah.
I'm gonna give you, you can choose which color.
Wow.
There's a pink one there, there's green, there's blue, there's all sorts of, I
better, I better move that pink one.
I don't
You look good with the pink
one.
Really?
I reckon.
Any color?
Yeah, I probably good with any color.
You are.
You, you'd be good with any of it.
So that that's, that's my little bit of generosity.
So you, oh, you got one there?
Yeah.
Is that your hanky or do you like dab it down?
Yeah, it's more like that.
Yeah.
Wipe it down.
I notice you haven't, it's getting warmer in here and you haven't used it.
We used it.
You just sneaky one, you sand.
Sneaky little dab.
Yeah, sweat.
It's getting warmer in here.
Um, let's leave it there.
We'll, um, if we do another quick 10 minutes after you've had a little
rest or a little stretch mm-hmm.
And then you are officially released from your duties.
And I, again, so appreciate your time.
Thank you so much for coming.
Will Legend.
Thanks so much.
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