The open-top Jeep bounces down the highway under a royal-blue sky and tufts of billowing white clouds. Loose gravel kicks up under the tires as the steering wheel turns sharply away from the blacktop and we veer off to visit the town of Bluffton, Georgia. The driver quickly downshifts through the gears with a firm grip and the engine hums as we settle into a slower pace. It’s midmorning in late spring and the air is already dense, hot, and thick; the sun aggressive. It’s going to be a South Georgia scorcher.
My friend and guide, Will Harris III, is a cowboy straight out of central casting. He’s tall and rugged with a rich, deep voice and a legendary drawl. His gun lies beneath the seat and his knife rests on his belt. He is a Deep South cattleman from the top of his Stetson hat to the tip of his well-worn leather boots. His family has lived on the outskirts of Bluffton for six generations. An untrained eye might take a look at Will sitting in his truck with the gun rack in the back window and simply see a South Georgia farmer. They might hear his thick accent and assume his thoughts and concerns about the earth were about as deep as the red Georgia clay caked on his leather boots. They might make all the social and educational assumptions that one might make about a South Georgia farmer. They would be wrong.
I know Will Harris. I know that his ancestor, James Edward Harris, founded White Oak Pastures when he returned home from fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War and that the land has been farmed by his family for 150 years. His daughters are the fifth generation to farm this land. I also know that he has the largest USDA Certified Organic farm in the state of Georgia; he grows vegetables and raises cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, poultry, and rabbits by the same methods his great-grandfather used 150 years ago.
This wasn’t always the case. Formerly, he was part of the commodity system as a Cargill executive. But in 1995 he made the conscious decision to return to a production system that would be better for the environment, for the animals, and for the people who eat his meat and produce. There wasn’t a single epiphany. He drawls, “There was no lightbulb moment or burning bush.” It was just a slow and persistent realization that factory farming wasn’t the right thing to do.
We’re on a tour to see his farm and view his expanded vegetable operation, but there’s more to this trip than the story of one Southwest Georgia family. Our tour is not solely about White Oak Pastures; it’s the story of American agriculture. Will wants to show me what has happened to the family farm, not by what is in Bluffton but by what is not in Bluffton. The streets are mostly vacant. A handful of folks still live there, but there are no businesses—no stores, no shops, outside of those that are part of White Oak Pastures. We pass a bent, elderly man slumped over the wheel of a riding mower as he motors in an even course across his lawn. We zip past another man ambling out to his worn and dented pickup truck. Will waves his hand to the first, tips his cowboy hat and nods his head to the other. We halt to a dead stop in the center of the former town. As soon as the wheels slow to a stop, gnats begin to buzz incessantly around our eyes and ears. He points out where the motor court had been, the feed store, the movie house, the drugstore, and the juke joint where he used to get a griddle-fried hamburger and an ice-cold Coke—a setting out of a Rockwellian boyhood. What was once a busy little town is now a series of dilapidated buildings.
I grew up two hours northeast of Bluffton and I have seen dried-up Southern towns like this all my life, but I had no idea why they had ceased to be vibrant communities. I was accustomed to seeing boarded-up brick warehouses with faded “For Lease” signs, rusty window frames with the glass shattered by restless teenagers. I had never seen those small country towns busy or thriving. All my life I thought enticing jobs pulled people away to the big cities. The truth was the opposite: Lack of work pushed people to leave the country. There’s a huge difference in being pulled and being pushed.
The South was an agrarian-based economy for over 250 years. Changes began with the end of slavery and continued as the industrial revolution introduced cotton mills. However, Georgia remained a primarily agrarian state until after WWII and the advent of industrial agriculture. It used to take one man a full day to plow an acre using a mule and plow. With modern tractors, one man can plow a hundred acres in a day. There’s a 10,000-acre farm near White Oak Pastures with only five men running the place. What brought this change? A desire for inexpensive food. We wanted cheaper food, and industrial agriculture delivered with breathtaking efficiency. The drawback? We now have a food system plagued with problems. As Will says, “Food is cheap, but someone else is paying for it somewhere else.” More and more, people understand the negative impact that industrial agriculture has on the environment, public health, and rural communities.
Industrial agriculture requires monoculture, the practice of growing single crops on a very large scale. Corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice are all commonly grown as single crops across the entire United States. Monoculture fields are highly attractive to certain weeds and insect pests. And growing the same plant in the same place year after year robs the nutrients from the soil. Therefore, monoculture farming relies heavily on pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
The truck pulls up to a barren, grassless expanse of red Georgia dirt with cattle at the edge eating a bale of hay. Will had just bought the land, which had previously grown cotton. He explained that the soil was dead, but feeding his cattle on the land would both aerate and enrich the soil. “Nature abhors a monoculture,” Will says as he tilts his head toward me. “We didn’t mean to turn our soil into a dead mineral medium, but we did. We didn’t mean to implement a confinement system that deprived our animals of the ability to express their instinctive behavior, but we did. We didn’t mean to contribute to the economic and social decline of our rural village, but we did.”
As part of their commitment to full-circle land stewardship, White Oak Pastures started a small-scale organic farm on the property in 2009 and now grows more than forty different kinds of heritage vegetables, fruits, and nuts—all planted and harvested by hand and fertilized with rich compost produced on the farm. They do not use pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. The tractors run on biodiesel made from the recycled cooking grease and tallow from their On-Farm Dining Pavilion. They manage a 200-share Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program with drops in three states—Georgia, Florida, and Alabama—along with a wholesale boxed-vegetable program with chefs and grocers.
Will Harris and White Oak Pastures are enriching both the soil and the soul of farming in the South.