Episode 106: The Cumulative Benefits of Regeneration with Will Harris

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about all kinds of fun topics that are related to regenerative agriculture, to regenerating soil health and regenerating public health and regenerating the planet. But of course, we can't do any of that until we sweep our own doorstep and we begin taking care of ourselves and our families and our immediate communities. And for this episode, I am really delighted and excited to have Will Harris join me. Will and I have been trying to have this conversation for, I don't know, at least a year, maybe 18 months or more. Technology has not been our friend. But today, today the stars aligned and everything is working. So, Will, thank you for being here. I've really been looking forward to this discussion and just delighted to have you here and to have to have to share your perspective with the world, particularly now that you've become a rock star.

That's a low threshold for rock star John. That's a low threshold. I do appreciate you having me on. Thank you very much. I look forward to the discussion, Will.

As I'm really curious about your perspective of the I'm going to use the term the regenerative agriculture landscape. You know, I still remember exactly the time, the place, the day we had a meeting with a group of our team from Advancing Eco Agriculture at place about 25 miles from where I'm sitting right now on a December day in late, I think it was late 2010 or maybe it was January 2011. And we decided to start using the term regenerative agriculture to try to describe what we were doing. And at that point that term was not being used popularly at all like it was. People had talked about it in decades past, but not really recently. And now we live in a very different world. We live in a world where regenerative agriculture is kind of the catchphrase of the day and it's become popular and of course there's lots of people who want to hitch their wagons to that star. And so I'm curious about your perspective. You've been in the limelight a little bit over the last several years and I'm curious to just hear from you is how do you think the landscape has evolved and how does it need to continue to evolve in order to really create the better world that we all know is possible and would like to see come about?

The sad news is I don't think we're going to be able to come up with a phrase that's not taken away from us, the people that we compete against are. Are professional messengers. And there's no word or we can embrace to the little that we'll have unique use of to explain what we do. And that's unfortunate, but I think it's okay because I really want to have a far more personal relationship with my customers than a buzzword. And what we hope to do is build a customer base that is more local to Bluffton, Georgia, that more people know us and we know them. And I realize that not everybody that buys my product is going to come and visit me on my farm. I wish they would. But I do want to create a message here that we make it available for a lot of people to come and visit the farm and see anything they want to see and know exactly what we do. And we talk about it with them and we want other people to come. And if they can't come, they can read what's being said or listen to what's being said and know us.

I think that your concluding phrase is the most important one of all. To know us and for us to know them on some level. It's, you know, the last half a year or so, I've been really emphasizing the point that regeneration is fundamentally about regenerating relationships at all levels. And that includes the level of regenerating the relationship between the customer who is buying food and the farmer. I'm sometimes surprised by farmers who say, I don't care to know my customer. I just want to go grow food. And I suppose there's a certain type of social liberty that emerges from that. But there's also a resulting lack of accountability and a resulting disconnect that really has led us to all of the ills that we have with our current agribusiness that is supposedly supplying the food for the world.

I'm not presumptuous enough to feel that the people that buy my food want to know me. That's not important. These are busy people with bandwidth is important to them. And getting to know Will Harris or. Or my family, I want them to be able to do that if that's what they want. But mostly what I want them to do is know how the food is produced and have the confidence that we're producing it. Right. And have the relationship.

Yeah, the relationships are important. So, Will, when you think back over the last couple of decades or over your life's work, you've now arrived at a place where you are ranching farming very differently from the majority of the people in the country today. When you look back on that pathway in that journey. What are some of the really memorable moments or the highlights that stand out for you that really cause you to reevaluate and to shift?

It happened fairly suddenly. I don't mean one given moment, but my love for industrial beef production. I was a monocultural cattle producer up and up to them. My love for doing that was great, I loved it, but it was full of excesses and I was an excessive person even in the realm of those excesses. I gave a lot of drugs, I did a lot, a lot of fertility, a lot of pesticides, very heavy handed. And when it hit me that that was wrong, it happened fairly suddenly. I'll tell the story about loading out a group of cattle one day of a 50,000 pound double deck load. And it just. I wasn't happy with it at all. Dozens of times, maybe hundreds of times, many, many times. And it was always fine. That day I didn't like it. And the more I thought about it, the less I liked it and just started moving away from it. And when I started moving away from that industrial cattle production model, I wasn't really moving towards anything. It was about, I don't want to do that anymore, I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to do that. Not many real well thought out scenarios of what I was going to do. It was ceasing to do things and I was very fortunate. I had no debt and we had some assets. I was able to do that and make less and less money. Then I started losing money, but we were able to afford it. And then it caught traction. And at the time it was very fortunate for me when I made those decisions and took those actions.

When you think back to that moment when you were loading that load of cattle and all of a sudden you didn't want to do that anymore. What was it about you that repulsed you? Or what was it about that specific scenario that really caught your attention and that motivated you to say, I don't want to do that anymore.

That day we loaded 100 heifers that I'd raised on a truck. They probably weighed a little less than £500 a piece. We put of them on a double decker truck, the ones on the top, urinating and defecating ones on the bottom. And they were going to. I can't remember, we were sending those cattle that might have been Kansas. They were going to be on the truck 30 hours and just suddenly. And I'd done it so many times and felt fine about it, but that day it just didn't feel Right. And I hadn't done it since.

That's an important story, I think, because, you know, one of the things that I don't want to say so many of us miss, but I think many of us have experiences where we do something that doesn't feel right, and it's easy for us to ignore that feeling and to just move on and to keep on doing the same thing over and over again. So it's listening to that, listening to that voice that really was the foundation of the shift for you. So you've invariably, as a result of your journey, you've developed very different perspectives, very different points of view about how you perceive your place in agriculture and agriculture in general, from the way that many people see it. So my question is, what do you believe to be true about agriculture? That is a very different point of view from many others in the farming community.

You know, you're right. When I was an industrial monocultural cattleman, without realizing it, every day of my life I was looking for something to kill. You know, there were herbicides, pesticides, insecticides. Pneumatic side means kill. And every day I spent a big portion of my day in my pastures looking for something to kill that would increase my production. That was the way my dad farmed. It was the way they taught me at the University of Georgia. It was the way my peers farmed. And I felt fine about it until I didn't feel fine about it. And today I spend most of the day looking for ways to make things live. It's an overstatement to say I want everything to live, but I do know that I don't have the depth to understand the symbiotic relationships between species of plants and animals and microbes and understand there's a place for all of them. There are exceptions. I can give you some exceptions, but there's a place for all these in the system. And I feel like my role on this farm is to help these systems proliferate and give off the abundance that is the only source of wealth that we know.

Yeah. Shifting from a perspective of, you know, it's really a subconscious perspective, because I think many farmers don't. They don't consciously deliberately get up with the perspective of they don't get out of bed in the morning with the question of, what is it that I'm going to kill today? Many of them, from what I've observed, get out of the bed in the morning and they have this sense of trepidation, like, what's going to go wrong today? What's going to go wrong in the hog barn today, what's going to go wrong in the poultry barn? There's this constant sense of trepidation about what's going to go wrong. And then that is balanced with this kind of this point and shoot mentality, the pesticide mentality, which I think you could go all the way back and call it a warfare mentality of search and destroy. Identify a specific pest or pathogen or source of a problem and figure out how you can kill it. And so that's a very different and a much less joyful and enthusiastic worldview than one where you're really interacting with life and embracing life and invigorating life and promoting life.

And it's very self perpetuating. You know, when I would go to my pasture and find a target pest that needed killing and kill it and choose a insecticide or my side herbicide, whatever to kill it, it killed other things too. It did not just get the soul organism that I had determined was a pest that day. And when that happens, it throws all of nature off balance. So something else would emerge as a pest. So I would select a weapon to kill that and it would. Those weapons are highly efficacious. They work, they kill the heck out of what you kill. But they kill some other things too, invariably. So it's a cycle, self perpetuating cycle that you buy the pesticide and kill what you determine is needs killing today. But it kills other things causing another problem that require another pesticide, that cause a new.