Ep #13: Why Regenerative Agriculture is the Future with Will Harris
What does it take to transform farmland ownership for the future? In this episode of The Land Ledger, Brian Kearney sits down with Will Harris, a fourth-generation farmer and owner of White Oak Pastures, to dive into the challenges and opportunities of regenerative agriculture. They explore its scalability, applicability, and how it compares to industrial farming.
Listen in as Will explains the financial and logistical realities of transitioning to regenerative practices, as well as how education plays a critical role in the future of sustainable farming. You’ll learn about the economic viability of regenerative farming, the impact of industrial agriculture on natural resources, and why Will believes the current farming system is unsustainable in the long run.
Listen to the Full Episode:
What You’ll Hear About in This Episode:
White Oak Pastures and its history.
Regenerative versus industrial agriculture.
An internship program for the next generation of farmers.
The challenges of expanding regenerative agriculture.
The economic viability of regenerative agriculture.
Challenges that come with transitioning to regenerative farming.
Industrial agriculture's impact on natural resources.
Current farming practices and what needs to change.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“You can raise too much of anything and you can not have enough of anything. So you know that there's a balance there.” - Will Harris
“The internship program... we really tell people, ‘We're not training you on how to farm. It's not enough. We expose you to it.’” - Will Harris
“I believe that every species has a role, even the ones we don’t like. And I think that keeping the system operating optimally means that you're rotating cattle, keeping them moving, trying to emulate nature as well as you can.” - Will Harris
Resources:
Will Harris: LinkedIn
White Oak Pastures: Website | X | Facebook | YouTube | Instagram
A Bold Return to Giving a Damn by Will Harris
Share the Love:
If you like The Land Ledger podcast...
Never miss an episode by subscribing via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or by RSS!
Read the Transcript:
Will Harris: And I was able to sell a Whole Foods market and public supermarket, the first pound of American grass-fed beef that they marketed as American grass-fed beef. We had some good years as a result of that.
Welcome to The Land Ledger podcast, where investing in farmland meets the future of finance. I’m your host, Brian Kearney, here to guide you through the untapped potential of farmland as an asset.
Whether you’re already investing in farmland, want to invest in farmland, or you’re just curious about safe alternatives to stocks and bonds, this is your space to learn, explore, and be inspired.
Your journey to farmland investing starts now.
Brian Kearney: Welcome to The Land Ledger. Today, I have Will from White Oak Pastures. Excited to dive into your business. It's fascinating. I've seen it a few different places and just knew I had to get you on the show to dive in. But Will, welcome to the show today.
Will Harris: Well, thank you for having me, Brian. Pleasure to be here.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, I'm excited. Well, tell me for the audience a little bit about where you're based. Tell me about the farm, just so they can get a real high level view before we dive in too deep.
Will Harris: Yeah. It's in Bluffton, Georgia, which is a southwest corner of Georgia Coastal Plains. My great-grandfather started the farm in 1866, farmed all his life, followed by his son, my granddad, followed by his son, my dad followed by me, and I've got two grown daughters in their forties, thirties, and forties. And their spouses that are [...] I changed the farm dramatically, but today it's 3,200 acres in this place and we graze about 2,000 acres of [...] with sheep. This farm is 3,200 acres. It's raised cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and poultry.
Small, organic vegetable garden. We have a store, a restaurant, little red meat slaughter plant, a cold slaughter plant. There's a lot of moving parts, about 170 employees.
Brian Kearney: Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of moving parts. You said you changed it a little bit from how it was, so tell me a little bit about that.
What did the farm look like and what made you decide to make that change? How'd you start there?
Will Harris: So my dad took over the farm after World War II and he changed it dramatically. Prior to his time, my great-grandfather and grandfather raised a variety of livestock, actually slaughtered them on the farm.
This is before USDA, before [...] before, internal combusting engines. And they sold six days a week. They and their employees got up before a day and slaughtered something, a cow or two, three hogs, chicken. Sold them locally in little town Bluffton, where I'm sitting now. My dad took over the farm in 1946 post-World War II, and he changed it dramatically. Under him, it became a monocultural cattle operation. we did have a feed lot, but mostly raising calves to ship to the Midwest. Graduated high school in 1972, went to University of Georgia and majored novel science. And I never wanted to do anything but come home and raise industrial calves like my dad did. I loved it.
And I did. In the mid nineties, I started moving away from that and towards what we do now. And of course, there's quite a sweeping change and it's still changing.
Brian Kearney: What made you want to make that change? Was there a certain instance that you remember?
Will Harris: Yeah. I went from just being, just loving the industrial cattle production to being disenchanted with the excesses of that management system.
I was, I think I was good at it. I made money every year. But the idea of confined with feeding, which I did, and raising crops, using chemical fertilizers and pesticides and [...] I just didn't like it anymore fairly abruptly and started moving away from it. I was very fortunate. I had no debt, had a paid for farm, had a little bit of money in the bank, and so I could afford to do it. I didn't know it was gonna be as expensive as it was, but I could afford to do it.
I did afford to do it. I went back and looked and I, for the 20 years I raised cattle industrially, I never lost money. I paid taxes every year. I didn't make a lot of money, but I paid taxes every year. And then when I started de-industrializing, I had several years of losses and that was painful and that certainly was well sustainable and my timing was very lucky.
Not smart. Not smart. Very lucky. By then, it was early two thousands and I hadn't made money for a few years and then was not excited about the prospects, but grass fed beef became kind of a thing in the media. And nobody, very few people had any, but I did. Yeah, I had a lot. And then I was able to sell a Whole Foods market and public supermarket, the first pound of American grass fed beef that they marketed as American grass fed beef. And it did. And we had some good years.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Before that happened, how were you selling it? Were you selling still in the commodity market those first few years, and is that why you had those losses? Tell me a little bit about that.
Will Harris: Yeah, when I changed the way I raised cows, I added my cost of production and actually decreased my pounds of production because I wasn't using the tools.
And I was selling [...] and halves and quarters, but I, I had six or seven, six or 700 mama cows at that time. So I wasn't able to sell nearly all of it like that. Right. So, I made money on a small amount. I was able to retail and it was a small amount and my sales were growing because of the timing.
But I didn't know a smaller plant at that time. I was using outside smaller capacity and I could only get so much. I had two or three old local, small [...] I was doing business with and I call and say, “How many can I bring next week?” Lemme say two, I need to bring 10. Of course they won the debate, so.
I did not want a slaughter plant. I did not enjoy owning a slaughter plant, but I could not have been profitable had we not done it.
Brian Kearney: And when did you start that?
Will Harris: I built, I think I built mine as early 2000, about 2000, 2, 3, 4, something like that. And when I built a red meat plant, I later built a poultry slaughter plant. Both of 'em are USDA inspected.
Brian Kearney: Huh. And is that most of your employees count between those two, would you say?
Will Harris: Yeah, it is probably a third of 'em. We raised all those different species as a crew. Each species has got a ment, they've got a crew. I don’t know if I mentioned or not, we got a restaurant, lodging and retail general store and we got little admin buildings, with HR and accounting and, just, you just look up and you got a lot of employees. My payroll is a hundred thousand dollars a week, 52 weeks.
Brian Kearney: Geez. Yeah, that adds up quick. So a lot of the pushback we hear in this area is that getting the customers is just too hard. It's not worth it. What would you say were some of those first successes that really made you be able to scale? Because a lot of farmers sell halves or quarters , but to be able to sell most of your livestock just in this area doesn't happen very often. What would you say that kind of thing was?
Will Harris: No doubt. No doubt. The first success story we had was getting into retail, big retail, Whole Foods and Publix and later Kroger and some [...] and that was good. It was profitable for a number of years. Now, in 2015, USDA changed the rule on product of USA.
Prior to that, the product of USA with reference to cattle was born, raised, and slaughtered in the 50 states. In 2015, they changed it so that if value was added in the 50 states, it was product of the USA.. That Oak for import was from 20 something countries. Australia and New Zealand or Uruguay were the three biggest, I think.
And that really, I kept my grocery customers, but I had to meet the price and that really took the profitability out of it. And we had some rough years. We had some really good years when we made what I thought was a lot of money. Not for Wall Street or Silicon Valley, but for Georgia, I thought was good.
Disclaimer: Yeah.
Will Harris: Then we had several years of competing with import. The Pandemic was a game changer, such a game changer for us. We were able, so my daughter came home from college, graduated college, she started an online store and we do our own fulfillment, and we were doing about a million dollars in volume and it wasn't making any money.
It really wasn't worth fooling with, but we were doing it. The pandemic changed that and immediately we sold out products and that was really good. I made a mistake. I did not cut off my grocery customers. I was selling the excess online. I should have cut everybody off, but I didn't. But this past year, 2024, we actually sold more product online than everything else added together in that I never thought that would happen and we had a profitable [...]
Brian Kearney: Well, that's nice 'cause you can control it too. You can't just be cut out.
Will Harris: Yeah, I like it a lot. I don't like shipping FedEx and UPS. I don't like, but is they're not, those systems are not designed for the refrigerator products. But we've made it, we've made it work. They've made it work. But I do like selling direct.
I used to go visit my grocery customers, big corporate grocery customers once a year and discuss price. And I negotiate it once a year and they negotiate it six times a day. So you can imagine who won that, right? That negotiation. And I really like being able to sell or selling direct online.
If you've got an inventory problem, too much of something, cut the price. If you are out of, chronically out of a product, go up. I mean, it's just so much than negotiating with a professional purchasing agent.
Brian Kearney: Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then I wanna swing back a little bit to when you said you were thinking about making that switch and you were not liking the excesses of conventional cow-calf operations.
And what made you decide to start bringing other livestock on the farm rather than just maybe grass fed cattle. What about bringing in the other livestock made a difference do you think?
Will Harris: It’s a lot like most industrial producers [...] If you're a corn farmer, you don't want anything, your field, but corn, soybeans, anything with soybeans.
I didn't want anything in my pasture, but Tifton 85 Bermuda grass, when I was, pre-making the change, I wanted nothing in my pasture, but 1585 meter grass, which you could put an incredible amount of nitrogen on it and it would assimilate it. And I didn't want anything in my pastures but cattle.
And if you were in my pasture and you were 1585 per meter grass or a cow, I would kill you. I was, I'd become really good at using the cides, side means kill, homicide, kill people, insecticide, kill insects. It was a very linear production system and I wanted kill anything that wasn't 55 grass or cow.
And I was good at it, I've been doing it all my life. My dad had been really good at it. He trained me. I just, it's a different model. Yeah.
Brian Kearney: So what is that different model when you say going away from mon–yeah.
Will Harris: So now, I believe that my job is to keep this echo system going. My belief is not shared by everybody.
I think that every species in the ecosystem has a role, whether it's animal plant, microbe. I think that has a, we may not know what it's, we recognize some species as being beneficial, [...] We can talk about it all day long, [...] legumes, but I believe that every species has a role, even the ones we don’t like, I think they have roles.
And I think that keeping the system operating optimally means that you've got, you're rotating cattle, keep them moving, try to emulate nature as well as you can. They used to, I sell to move my cattle. I had a small number of products, a lot of land chopped up a small number of bigs, and I have herds that were pretty much a resident, herds in those, and just didn't move them much.
Today, there’s 3,200 acres just divided up into 150-something [...] We move cattle every day, only once a day. Some people do more. We move cow every single day. It was a time of year, between Thanksgiving and end of December, January maybe that we don't move cow. We put them in a [...] feed hay for 10, 11 months a year we move and then [...]
Brian Kearney: Yeah. And then for the audience that's listening that do have cattle and might have some out in the pasture, but they're not raising this way. How many do you have in that 130 acre paddock?
Will Harris: The average inventory is three to 4,000 heads. That's calves, cow, bulls, everything. And it varies a little bit, but generally it's three herds. There's a winter calving herd, a summer calving herd, finishing herd. I usually move the bulls and not with the cow.
I move them off the, just to check them in the hotel you might see. And we just, we move them. It's about every, they, return to about every 60 days, a little bit of variance in that for about every 60 days. And I wish, I really wish it was more [...] It is what it is. We really hammer the grass. We graze than most of the experts [...] Then 60 or so, it recovers the kind of grass we got out. It'll be 8, 12, 18 inches deep. We'll graze it hard, then let rest for 60 days. We're steady moving cattle. Moving cow is not difficult. They're trained. It’s real problematic.
But other than that, it's just not a problem. We no longer eat. We used to use horses and [...] that anymore because don't need it.
Brian Kearney: Wow. So that's, I mean, if I'm doing that math right, that's probably 300. Had of cattle on average in one paddock. That's 30 acres?
Will Harris: No, it's about a thousand head.
Brian Kearney: About a thousand. Oh good. Yeah. Geez. That kind of blows my mind. How long does it take to get to that level of production? I imagine it takes–a pasture has not been grazed this way. Does it take a while to get to that capacity?
Will Harris: Well, I don't the capacity of, in terms of land or grass or cows.
Brian Kearney: The grass.
Will Harris: Grass gets better and better when we, I don't use chemical fertilizer or [...] anymore, but now I do–my packing plants generate about nine tons of packing plant waste a day, five days a week. When I compost that, spread it back out on the pastures and it's just magic for pastures. You got compost [...]
Brian Kearney: Huh, that makes a lot of sense. Do the other species you have on that ground, does that make a difference rather than just running cattle, those other species, they eat other things or what's the reason for that?
Will Harris: Absolutely. I only had cattle, Australian cattle, eight-week old puppy. This is not [...] of all, that's what we got here.
So I only had cattle, never really intended to have anything other than cattle. Now I still think I'm a cow guy and that's what I enjoy most. That's what I know most about, most comfortable. But when I only had cattle and I quit using herbicides, I had a lot of stuff come up out now that didn't want. Cattle were really good with grass but not as good with sheep. I got sheep. We go over 3,000 [...] actually follow up the cows is not exactly the right way. It makes it sound like it's just one behind the other. The cattle are only a kind of a fixed rotation. The sheep and goats are kind of prescriptive. It's where we need them, but the sheep eat [...] the goats eat woody species. We got a lot of poultry, and the poultry is really beneficial to nitrogen back in the soil.
We got hogs. Any of these species can be overused now. I mean, you gotta be very, it takes a while to learn how much is enough, but having the right amount of exposure from all these species to get the job done, it’s very workable and it's very enjoyable for me. That's just what I enjoy.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense. I imagine it was harder to find a market to sell the sheep and the goats. What does that look like? Or was that, am I wrong there and that was just the same?
Will Harris: You can raise too much of anything and you can not have enough of anything. So you know that there's a balance there.
Online store is really helpful because you got more control over what you you can sell. You sell anything, if you’re willing to sell cheap enough. You have to sell too cheap, you just don't waste as much.You learn not to do that. We'll talk about that just a minute. Most of the time when I'm talking to people like you, it's all about the production of what you do in the pasture, how you manage the animals, how you manage the land and the plant species. And that's certainly important, but it's like I tell people like three legs on a stool, you gotta know what to do in the pasture.
You gotta get that program right,then you gotta get 'em processed. And so many people go in the business and don't have a plan for getting them processed cost effectively in the right volume on time. And so that's the second leg on stool. And then they're selling it. If you raised it until you can monetize it, you really hadn't done anything.
So many people, we do some education here, we'll talk about that, but people come here and more of the things that [...] we tell them is, “I know you're excited about farming holistically, land management and animal welfare and all these things, and that's great. Before you start, figure out how you're gonna get it processed and then figure out how you're gonna monetize it because until you figure all three of those out, you don't have a problem.”
Brian Kearney: Yeah. That makes sense. Let's talk a little bit about the education. Tell me about what that looks like, how you got started, why?
Will Harris: Yeah. It was just was a couple things. We got an intern program, and I'm not soliciting interns. We get about 30, maybe more applications and we only take seven or eight.
So we're not, I'm not looking for more, but I do, I'm a strong advocate for interim program. I'll tell you how works. And then the other thing we got is a 501CR, nonprofit I started and it's called CFAR. It's the acronym CFAR, Center for Agricultural Resilience. And we put on schools an executive director, he’s a sharp guy.
And he passed sessions and we teach, see they're only two, three days, so kind, special specialization. The internship program is, we have four sessions a year for three months. So we really tell people, “We're not training you on how to farm. It's not enough. We expose you to it.” And we get some really good people here, not just kids or material people. And we hire a lot of them. And that's the benefit for me. We probably hire half of them.
Brian Kearney: Oh, wow.
Will Harris: We make it clear we're not gonna teach you how to farm in three months. We'll expose you and we'll put you in a position where you can go somewhere else. So, I think it's a good program. A lot of 'em come from, literally all over the world, certainly all over the country, kind of all over the world, international people. And I’m not sure that that’s exactly the way that’ll be.
I think that internships are best when the intern studies or learns in the same ecosystem they're gonna be producing in. So if you're from Nevada, you probably shouldn't come to Bluffton. You can, but that's not best case for you probably.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. That makes sense. I guess that actually leads me up to my next question, which is, where do you see this type of model working? Is this something–you've probably had a lot of people cycle through, so most of our audiences, midwest row crop–is this something you can add on to that type of operation to maybe increase some of those returns? What would your recommendation be there?
Will Harris: Well, I think it can absolutely be done anywhere. You get too close to a big urban area or the [...] land goes up, you get too far out here in the farm area. Like me, there's the market's not as good, so there are things to consider.
I think that from an ecosystem perspective, what we do here can work anywhere. It’s different. This ecosystem has–animals or microbes that work best together. And you got, you need to consider that. You gotta decide what the land and climate will allow you to produce. You gotta decide what you can sell. It's gotta be marketable. And then that processing part I mentioned is also critical.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Right. That makes sense. And when people come through your education programs or through that internship. What are you recommending as their starting place? Because I think some people listening to it might think like, “Well, 3,000 head of cattle, there's no way I can ever get to that amount.” And you probably don't need to most of the time. Where would you recommend is a good starting place?
Will Harris: That's a very good question, but my answer is there is no right or wrong size it. It's what suits your situation. What can you handle physically? How much your business acumen, can you manage your financial situation? What can you afford to do? I don't want anybody to think that you can show up at Bluffton, Georgia from New York City with no prior experience and no money, and learn enough that you can go start you a farm somewhere.
Brian Kearney: Right.
Will Harris: That's not the way that works. Like any business, there is a financial consideration. You can't go in the automobile manufacturing business or automobile selling business or auto repairing business if you don't have any financial resources and you don't have any knowledge and experience. Somehow you gotta find both of them. Alternatively, if you don't have any financial resources, you can work on other people's farms for a long time. It's highly situational.
Brian Kearney: Yeah,
Will Harris: A lot of considerations, it’s highly situational.
Brian Kearney: Yep, that makes complete sense. And for a lot of our audience, they might be the 400 to 1500 acre farmers where you might be able to start off with 10 acres, try something really small.
Will Harris: There are people that, you know, the amount of vegetables you can produce [...] You can make a living doing it if that's what you want to do and you've got the market for it and the expertise. Now, that's the reason I say I'm very, noncritical of being too small. You can be too big. You can easily be too big. I don't think this is, I don't think what we do here is a highly scalable business.
We're probably, White Oak Pastures is probably bigger than it should be, and as a family we've discussed it. We don't have any growth plans. We plan a while on what we can do to survive and prosper and opportunity for future generations of just growing this business. Yeah, I don't think it's a highly scalable business.
Brian Kearney: Why is that?
Will Harris: It's highly replicatable. You have a bunch of, you could have, other families can have this, do the same thing or similar things in other markets and other ecosystem.
Brian Kearney: Why would you say it's not much scalable past where you're at?
Will Harris: I think that scalable businesses generally are very linear, go up and up and up. Cyclical businesses like this I think are far less scalable.
We have discussed, this business is as big as we have the business acumen to run. If we got much bigger, we need to hire a CEO to run it for us and we don't want one. We don’t want to do that.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And then, and tell me a little bit about how you see it being, kind of being able to replicate it across the country.
Because a lot of the talk is even if we were to do all of the regenerative methods across the us, we still couldn't feed everybody. Is that something that you think is true, or is it kind of maybe somewhere in the middle? We need both sides. What's your opinion?
Will Harris: I got really strong opinion on that and it’s probably really popular, but I think that the system is feeding us now is not very sustainable.
I think I told you that when I was farming industrially, I reached a point that the organic model in my soil on my land, one half of whoop of organic.
Brian Kearney: Oh wow. Okay.
Will Harris: It is now five of the [...] And it took 20 something years to do it. Everybody. But that's what we did. I think that the farming system that feeds us today eventually will run out of water.
It'll eventually run out of good soil. It'll run out of all the things, all the inputs that go into it. There's only so much potassium in the ground, only so much phosphate in the ground. We can talk forever about the [...] Now, can I produce as much on one acre of land as an industrial farmer? Nah, I can't. So if land is a limiting factor, then this is not the best system for feeding the plants.
Now, if we run out of oil, my system's better. I don't use as much water. When we run out of water, my system's better. I don't use much. A lot of, nutrients, potassium, phosphorus, what that we might, I get many, many scenarios in which my system will feed more people than the current industrial system.
And I don't know. I'm not trying to talk people into doing this. I think it'd be better. I wish they would, but I'm not an evangelist style passing out tracks, willing to help anybody that wants to do it, but I'd like to see it done. There was a time when I started doing this, it had nothing to do with the opinion that I had on how we’re reproducing our food. It was just what I wanted to do. I've been super industrial. Before I didn't like it. Started moving the other way and I wasn't trying to get anybody else to do it. I didn't exactly know what I was doing. Then I went through a period when people were talking about regenerative farming and all those things, and I thought, “Wow, I am what they call an early innovator on this new way of firing, feeding the planet. How nice.” And now I really don't know. I'm not sure that there'll be many people that do this. And I'm not judgmental about what other people are doing. I'm here in the middle of an industrial farm area.
All my friends and neighbors and relatives farm peanuts, cotton and corn in rotation, very industrially. And they're good people, wonderful people. There's nothing wrong with those people. We have a different opinion on how that ought to be. And you know what I believe is that we found a way to make a living doing it this way, and we like it.
I think that one of–I'm pretty well convinced that the industrial farming model that we have embraced as a nation or a planet is not sustainable. And I don't know what's gonna happen with it, but when whatever happens, I think we'll be all right here along within most folks. So we'll–just, you can only control what you control.
Brian Kearney: Right. Right. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And with a business like yours, so again, I know more about the conventional corn and bean rotation and a lot of the cyclical nature there is the commodity market and then its input costs are the two big ones. So your fertilizer, your insecticides, your fungicides, all that.
That's what kind of makes or breaks your profitability at the end of the day. For an operation like yours, what is it that makes or breaks the profitability at end of the day? Is it just that end user and that is it, or are there other parts as well?
Will Harris: There are. There are production issues that you gotta be able, you gotta figure out [...] your processing issues, get that done. Your marketing issues, you gotta find somebody that'll buy it from you or profit and give it to them. So those are all issues that we deal with every day. And I think, and in many ways, it's harder than just being a commodity farmer that accepts the price that the market is. In many ways it's more difficult, but I think it's more sustainable. I think that we have the, I've got the, if I think that I can't sell as much pork as I have been selling, I can cut back on my number of hogs I breed. If I think that it's more, I can breed more. I'm not telling you the business is simple or easy.
The business is not simple or easy, but there's a lot, and in many ways it’s way more difficult to manage because again, I went from four, five employees to 70 employees. But payroll is what payroll is. But I'm happy. My return on investment is not through the roof. We have our stuff. We lost money.
And then we'll have some more years at some point when we lose money. I'm not suggesting anybody do this because they can get a huge return on investment. Our return on investment probably, it may not be as much as what [...] or track it much. I do think that in the industrial commodity production system, there are a lot of cost, are split off for others to bear there.
So I talk about 80 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and there's a huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. There used to be an or stream and that those are, you can't oyster there anymore. It's a dead zone. And the pesticides and chemical fertilize and other things that wash down the creek, stream to the creek, to the river.
It's what killed that. and those costs are being absorbed by the perpetrator. I was one of the perpetrators and I hadn't paid for that, species extinction. I mentioned, I believe every species, plant, animal, plant, animal, and microbe and an ecosystem has a role. We may not recognize it.
We've driven countless species into extinction. Then I don't think it has a cost [...] I can talk about it a lot.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If you were, it's kind of starting to wrap up. Don't want to take up too much of your time. I appreciate you jumping on. This has been, it has been really interesting. I'll have to stop by the farm next time I'm in the area. I've got couple close friends in Georgia that I visit pretty frequently, but–
Will Harris: Where are they located?
Brian Kearney: So they're just north of Atlanta, Georgia, so they're like the Rome area.
Will Harris: Yeah.
Brian Kearney: Yep.
Will Harris: Georgia is the largest state geographically, east of Mississippi.
You know that I'm in the corner, so if you're on the other side of, it's a long–
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah. I've spent some time in Mississippi for the Air Force too, so that is a drive for sure. But, no, I appreciate the time. The last question I always like to ask is if you were graduating from the University of Georgia this fall and you wanted to go into agriculture, you couldn't do it the exact way you did. What would you recommend people do? What would you recommend they look at?
Will Harris: Oh, I just don't think I can answer that question without knowing more about it. I think that, I think that those who want to go into commodity agriculture, [...] So I have three, when I was farming, an industrial cattle guy, I never dreamt that my daughters would come back to the farm. It was okay, and I just didn't think they would. I was the fourth generation. I thought I'd be the last generation. Two of my three daughters and their spouses did elect to come back here, and they came back here because the way we follow the land now pleases them.
I didn't pay more salary than they could get. They got college degrees. I didn't pay more salary than they could get working whatever job they were trying to work. They came back because they liked this lifestyle. My daughter that didn't come back and her husband, I proper figured like probably make more money than the ones that did.
But the ones that came back were capable of doing just as much, they chose not to. I think it was a good choice. One thing about farming, I know you know this, is it's not a high cash return business. If it's run right and the market's right, you'll build a lot of equity in the business, but it's just not, doesn't spin off a lot cash.
And that's okay [...] live comfortably. But we certainly don't be able to luxuriously.
Brian Kearney: Yep. That is definitely the case. That's great advice. Great advice. I appreciate that. Well, yeah, I appreciate your time. Where is the best way for the audience to reach out? What would you like us to put in the show notes?
Will Harris: You know our little book?
Brian Kearney: No.
Will Harris: It's, called, A Bowl Return to Give it a album.
Brian Kearney: Huh? Okay. I'll put that in the show notes. I'll also buy it.
Will Harris: Whiteoakpastures.com and there's all that little silly stuff. There's Instagram and Facebook and all that stuff, but I dunno too much about it. It's all White Oak Pastures.
Brian Kearney: Okay. Whiteoakpastures.com. We'll put that in the show notes and we'll put a link to the book.
Will Harris: I appreciate you having me on. I hope I didn't hope I didn't piss your listeners. It was not my intention to do that.
Brian Kearney: No, definitely not. Yeah, it's always good to hear different areas, what people are doing, 'cause ag, yeah, we all need to work together in ag. Doesn't matter where you're at. The people are pretty similar has been my experience. People who care about the ground, care about their neighbors. So no, this has been great. I'm sure people are gonna love it.
Will Harris: Well, Brian, I really appreciate you reaching out to me. Thank you for having me on the show.
Brian Kearney: Thank you. Alright, talk soon.
And that’s a wrap on this episode of The Land Ledger.
Your path to smarter, more diversified investments is just beginning, so keep that curiosity alive and subscribe to the show.
If you’re ready to take the next steps and reshape your financial future, visit our website at farmlandstocks.com and book a call or sign up for our email list to get tips, updates, and opportunities to join our community.
Thanks for listening, and remember: our goal is to invest in Main Street, not Wall Street.
Disclaimer: Brian Kearney is the CEO of the Farmland Stock Exchange. All opinions expressed by Brian and podcast guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Farmland Stock Exchange.
This podcast is for informational purposes, and should not be construed as investment, legal, or tax advice.