Rebuilding Soil, Herds and Genetics Drive Georgia Agricultural Operation

YEAGER: Do you know the difference between complex and complicated? It's small, but it's huge. And that is what we're going to talk about today in the MTM podcast. I'm Paul Yeager. This is a production of Iowa PBS and the Market to Market TV show. Will Harris is a fourth-generation cattleman from Georgia — the southwest part of the state — and a sixth-generation farmer. Things have changed. It might not look as green as what's behind me or what you see in your area. He's evolved. He's adapted. He has changed things dramatically since he came into the farm in the 1970s — how things have evolved, how things have regenerated when it comes to agriculture in every sense of the word. We'll talk regeneration of the land and the organic matter. We'll also talk a lot about cattle. We're going to talk about the industry as a whole, what works for him. It is quite the operation that he has there — the number of employees and what he does for himself. I think you're really going to like this conversation. Very easy to talk to. Will Harris. White Oak Pastures is the name of his operation. I hope you enjoy. If you have feedback for me, send it in an email to [email protected]. Now let's get to Will. First off, every cattleman — I've interviewed a couple of cattlemen over time — we've gone to Congress and asked them about their hat. When do you take off the hat? Because as a rancher, you've got expectations.

HARRIS: When I eat, when I go to bed.

YEAGER: What was your first hat? Who gave it to you? Do you remember?

HARRIS: You know, this is an Open Road Stetson. It's what my dad wore, what my granddad wore when I was a little boy. Just like my dad — his hat had barely lasted a year. He would discard it, I would get it, pat it round on the inside, and wear it. Then I finally reached the elevation within the company that I could get my own new hat.

YEAGER: And does your hat now last more than a year?

HARRIS: It lasts more than a year. I don't work as hard as I used to.

YEAGER: You work differently and smarter. Let's go that way.

HARRIS: I work differently, and I hope it's smarter. I've done a lot of work that was not very smart in my life.

YEAGER: Well, we'll discuss. We're not going to go through all of your life, but I do want to cover — you mentioned your generations there. First, tell me about Bluffton, Georgia. Where is that in the state? And as we sit here in the middle of 2026, what are the weather conditions like down there?

HARRIS: Georgia's in the bottom-left corner — southwest Georgia. It's in Clay County, Georgia, and it was the poorest county in America in 2020. That's on my website, that listing. We've improved a little bit, but it's still very, very impoverished — a purely agrarian economy. Corn, cotton, peanuts primarily. Very little livestock, although I'm a livestock guy. And it's a wonderful place to live. I love it. We've probably couldn't have done what we've done had we not been in a place like Clay County. We've got 170 employees. We're the largest private employer in the county. And I've got wonderful, excellent employees. I pay them all I can, but I don't pay them all they're worth. They could probably make more money if they were somewhere besides Clay County, Georgia — Bluffton, Georgia.

YEAGER: Well, what's the main thing the employees do? What are some of the jobs?

HARRIS: Oh, we run the farm. We raise cows, sheep, goats, rabbits, plus fruit and vegetables. We have two slaughter plants — a red meat plant and a poultry plant. We have a fulfillment center where we ship FedEx and UPS. We have a general store, a restaurant — three meals a day, seven days a week. We've got rental houses. We bought a lot of houses through the years, and we rent them out to employees, but we also have a number of them for tourists that we rent by the night. There are a lot of moving parts. If I have to hire someone to do something twice, I just go into that business. We've got a carpenter crew, fence-building crew, landscaping crew, mechanic crew. We try to be quite independent in terms of hiring things out — and that's not just a personal preference. We're in this impoverished area where there's not a lot of commerce going on. It's hard to get things done unless you're doing it yourself.

YEAGER: You sound like my friends in North Dakota. They also have that insulated "we do it all" approach, because they know there isn't a store down the road that's going to come rescue them or get that part. So — about your employees and your multi-generations on this farm — through the six generations of this farm, are you at the highest employment number the farm has ever had right now?

HARRIS: We are. We built the slaughter plants in the very early 2000s, and it was just then that the employee number went up and up and up. I hope we're as big as we're ever going to be. I hope that.

YEAGER: Okay. Well, let's take out the slaughter plants for a minute, because I know that number can get bigger. Would you still be at the highest employment number in the history of the farm?

HARRIS: You know, I've got about 160 employees, probably 30 of them in the slaughter plants.

YEAGER: All right. So — slaughter plants. On our program, we often talk about the big four meatpackers, and on the beef side of things, we try to talk about the independents, the small ones. Are you smaller than a small packer?

HARRIS: Well, I think we're very small. The USDA has a definition — I'm not sure what it is off the top of my head. We slaughter a maximum of 30 head a day, five days a week, which averages between 25 and 35 a week on the cattle side. And that's the biggest part of what we do. We do slaughter hogs, we do poultry, but the cattle are the biggest. I was a cattleman before I was anything else.

YEAGER: Hence the hat.

HARRIS: Yes, sir.

YEAGER: Let's discuss the economics of the slaughter plant right now. Are you enjoying the high prices in the market right now that all the others are, but also having the problem that inputs are so high to get these cattle to where they need to be? Are you isolated from those economics, or are you wrapped right up in them?

HARRIS: I'm right in the middle of it. We have about 1,500 mama cows, so we raise a lot of the cattle ourselves, and we enjoy paying ourselves a high price for calves. The rest come from my producer group, and it's hard to pay them that much for calves. We have been able to go up on our beef prices, but not as much as I'd like to. So the business is profitable now, but it's very, very thin margins right now. And you know, that's okay. I've run this business — we lost money and we made money. I'd rather make money than lose money. But as long as we're able to keep our head above water, and we are, that's what matters.

YEAGER: What makes you different from a cattle producer-rancher — someone in Oklahoma or Texas?

HARRIS: Well, I used to be like them — I was in Georgia, but I just raised calves. My great-grandfather, grandfather slaughtered animals on this farm like I do today, except it was before USDA, before electricity, before cooling, before internal combustion engines. They peddled the meat in the little town of Bluffton. They'd slaughter every day, six days a week — a cow or two, a few hogs, some chickens, sheep, whatever they had — and make their business that way. My dad was born in 1920. He took over the farm post-World War II, and that was a game changer. He rapidly evolved the farm into being just a cattle operation — just raising feeder calves, backgrounding and shipping out for finishing. And he was successful with that. The business was profitable enough that we stayed on the farm, and I went to the University of Georgia. I majored in animal science — which had been animal husbandry at one point — and I did the same thing my dad did for 20 years. But by the late '90s, I started selling beef instead of cattle. And I'm really glad I did. It's been very valuable to us.

YEAGER: Was it out of necessity, or did you just see an opportunity?

HARRIS: I was increasingly dissatisfied with selling calves into the system. The business was profitable — we weren't making a lot of money, but I looked back and I'd paid taxes every year. I graduated from the University of Georgia in 1976, and 20 years later I changed the way I did business. I'd made money every year, paid taxes every year — again, didn't make a lot, but I paid for the farm and we were pretty good at it. In the mid-'90s I changed, and I lost money for a while — that wasn't much fun. But I'm glad I did it.

YEAGER: When you evolved and changed as the fourth-generation cattleman and sixth-generation on the farm, did every generation have a big evolution over the time of your family?

HARRIS: My dad certainly did. He's the one who moved it from slaughtering animals on the farm — in a way that would be illegal for me today — to being part of the industrial cow-calf system. Then I changed. I've got two grown daughters and their spouses in the business now, and they're active in the business, helping me run it. They haven't yet set about changing things, but they'll need to. Economics will change, circumstances will change, markets will change. I've told them: I'm a cow man first and foremost, but if they reach the point that they need to sell the cows, sell the cows. I would hate it. But that could happen. My cowherd goes back to the cracker cattle my great-granddad brought here in 1866, and these are the descendants. They don't look like that anymore — we've brought genetics in — but if the cattle business wasn't working economically, I wouldn't do it anymore. Couldn't.

YEAGER: I know genetics is a big part of seed, and it's an incredible thing with livestock. Tell me why or how your genetics is both an identity for you and a thing to literally hang your hat on — why your farm is different.

HARRIS: It's changed a lot. My great-grandfather brought cracker cattle here, and somewhere along the way — probably my granddad — they started buying purebred bulls to improve the herd. My dad certainly did, and I certainly did too. It was kind of the flavor-of-the-month club. You'd see a bull you'd never seen before and say, what is that? And you'd bring three or four home. No real genetic consistency in the herd. In an effort to improve the quality of the beef, we did some things I now look at differently. It's not terrible, but about ten or twelve years ago, I closed the herd back down. I went back to what my great-grandfather and grandfather did. With the number of cows I have, I think I can do that without inbreeding being a problem. We've always culled heifers, but I started saving bulls, and I really like what it's done. I raise six sire groups of bulls a year, and I'm able to pick the best of the best. I pull one bull to every 20 cows — I really overdo it — but I'm able to pick the best of the best, and my cattle, while not fancy, fit this environment and perform well. I really love what's happened since I closed the herd.

YEAGER: And so they're adapted to your area, meaning they might not perform the same way somewhere else.

HARRIS: You're exactly right. We started a nonprofit — a 501(c)(3) — six to eight years ago, called the Center for Agricultural Resilience, or C4AR. We bring people here and put on training sessions. They always get into long discussions about breeds. And I cut them short. I say, please don't worry too much about that — and I know my friends in Angus and Hereford will disagree. But I tell people: find a good cattleman already established in your ecosystem, as close to you as you can, and tell them you want to buy six heifers a year from them. You want the best ones they're willing to sell. They're going to keep the best ones for themselves, so you want the second best. That's the way I urge people to get started, in terms of breed.

YEAGER: You're not alone in that. Several years ago, we did a story on a cattleman in Montana — I think his name was Wild Hackney — who started a group very similar to what you're talking about. They narrowed the genetics to a specific point, and ten or twenty ranchers in that area all went in with that same genetics, because again, both climate and the herd itself mattered. I want to pivot for a moment. I want to go back to something you said about your area — it is dry. It has been dry. How do your cattle perform in dry conditions?

HARRIS: Well, first I should say — we get 52 inches of rain a year in the coastal plain of Georgia. It comes fairly evenly through the year. Historically, May and October are our two driest months, which is just the changing of the seasons. When we have those dry months, we've always been able to feed our way through them. We have some really good haying relationships with a couple of operations nearby. They have wastewater going out — land application permits, I think it's called — and we're able to roll out hay cheaper than most people roll it here, so we feed our way through the dry stretches. Now, I'm not saying everyone else should do that. That's what works for me. I get amused listening to cattle consultants talk about the optimum carrying capacity of your land. I think a cattleman who intends to stay has to make some decisions, and the decision I made is to stock on the high side of what my farm will carry and then feed my way through it. I'm not saying that's right for everyone. But every ecosystem has advantages and disadvantages. If you're going to be successful, you'd better figure out what your advantages are and use them, and figure out what your disadvantages are and devise a way to handle them.

YEAGER: Your numbers and your approach suggest a smaller, individualized operation. Could someone duplicate what you do a state or two over — or is it back to the genetics and the land having to fit together?

HARRIS: I think what we do here is highly replicable, but not highly scalable. There's a limit to how far you should go in emulating it in other ecosystems. I see people make that mistake all the time. You know, I'm a product of a land-grant university college of agriculture. We had genetics professors, Ph.Ds, fifty or sixty years old — true experts in genetics, in nutrition, in reproduction. They knew a great deal about their specific subjects. They could go anywhere in the country and teach that subject. But I don't think they were good at adapting their subject to a specific ecosystem. I have a very different view in terms of my own education and the education of my employees. I don't want to know too much about any one thing. I'd rather know a little bit about everything. I have a dear friend who's a holistic producer like we are, and when he started talking about mycorrhizal fungi and microbial cycles, on and on and on, I finally said, you know — I believe everything he says. I just don't need to know that much about it. I know a little bit about everything, and I think you can know enough about everything. I used to play a game — I've matured beyond it now — where I'd have various specialists come out to the farm, and I'd show them a problem in the pasture and ask, what do you think this is? A genuine problem. If they were a nutritionist, they'd diagnose it as a nutrition issue. If they were a soil fertility specialist, they'd say it was something in the soil. If they were a genetics specialist, it would be the breed. It was just always interesting to me how they would diagnose any problem based on their very in-depth knowledge of their one subject. I don't want to know too much about any of it. I'd rather know a little bit about all of it.

YEAGER: Well, one of the things we could talk about for hours — what you're saying sounds like agriculture has a bit of a complex to it. The industrial complex. Chemicals chased by this fertilizer, chased by this seed to get this crop. A farmer in Ohio told me a few years ago — he called it the treadmill. Agriculture can be on a treadmill. And it sounds like you're off that treadmill.

HARRIS: I'm way off of it. We talk here about the difference between complex and complicated. This farm is complex — super complex. Everything impacts everything else. But for years, we tried running it as though it were a complicated system. Complicated is linear; complex is cyclical. They're very different. If you're trying to build a computer, that's a complicated system. To set up a functional farm, it's complex. And I think the person who can master one is probably not going to be very good at the other.

YEAGER: Even though those words are so close, they are entirely different — and it's the same on a farm.

HARRIS: I think they're often misused. We use "complex" when we're talking about something complicated, and vice versa. I think a good starting place is to figure out what is complicated and what is complex, and make sure you're prepared to approach each one in the proper manner.

YEAGER: Can agriculture — should agriculture — get off that treadmill and be more individualized, rather than a conglomerate?

HARRIS: We certainly did, and I think we're better off for it. And I think the farmers who don't will pay the consequence sooner or later. My dad industrialized this farm post-World War II, and the space he operated in — raising calves and shipping them out — was pretty good. He did well. I think that economic space has tightened and tightened and tightened until it's not much fun anymore. We've got four big packers in this country controlling about 80% of the market. The cattlemen out in the field raising calves are in a position where they can just be squeezed so easy and so hard. And I think that's why cow numbers in this country are lower than they've been since World War II. Cows are at record high prices, but numbers are not going up much. People have just been squeezed to the point that they don't want to do it anymore. Guys my age were raised watching Westerns on TV, and we romanticized what we did, even when we didn't make much money. But raising cattle is an incredibly capital-intensive business — land, equipment, herd, and so on. And the gestation period is still 283 days. I don't care what you do, it's still 283 days. And then you won't have a marketable product for two years after that. So I think it's just become easier and easier for subsequent generations to say, "I'm not going to do it anymore." And the demand for land from non-producers — not just data server companies, not just Bill Gates, but just people with liquidity putting it in land — I worry about that a lot.

YEAGER: Well, that's another three hours of conversation right there. But I want to wrap up by talking about cattle and the industry making headlines right now in 2026 — small herd, high prices, drought, lowest herd numbers since the '50s. It takes a long time to rebuild, but it's hard not to sell something that's profitable right now. This is not going to get solved anytime soon. Is it?

HARRIS: I'm amazed we haven't opened the borders to more importation of beef. I know there's the screwworm situation in Mexico — that's not what I'm talking about. There's a lot of countries in the world — South America, Australia, New Zealand — that have beef, and while their markets are high, they're not as high as ours. I'm surprised we haven't seen a lot more of it. I'm not advocating for it; I'm just talking about what I see. I'm not enough of a political student to know why it hasn't happened, but I fully expect our politicians to eventually get intimidated enough by consumer dissatisfaction that they find a way to bring the price down. And sadly, when that happens, it doesn't usually ease down. It falls like a rock. I can't imagine politicians telling consumers, "Just wait two or three years and it'll all be fine."

YEAGER: You've heard that before, haven't you?

HARRIS: Yeah, that's right. I don't have a crystal ball. I'm just telling you what I see.

YEAGER: Well, the cattle market is like a tire right now. If certain things happen politically, that tire could run into a chainsaw rather than slowly leaking air over a thumbtack. From what I'm hearing, you're suggesting it's possible we could hit that chainsaw and the tire goes flat instantly.

HARRIS: I'm just speculating. What I do know is that even with these record-high prices, we don't see herd expansion going up in this country. I think that tells you something. We may never get back to where we've been in terms of producing beef domestically. The money hasn't been high enough to incentivize expansion.

YEAGER: Is there one reason why it hasn't tipped the other way — why we haven't expanded?

HARRIS: Well, let's say you sold a business somewhere and got a lot of cash, and you wanted to go into the cattle business. By the time you buy land, improve it to a reasonable cattle operation, buy broodstock, get it all started — fencing, equipment, and then a year or more before you're yielding anything — it may not pencil out. Clearly, prices aren't high enough to incentivize people to do all of that. I just see that.

YEAGER: No one's had a good answer to that for quite a while. We talked about the industrial side — we didn't quite get to the regenerative side. Do you want to quickly walk me through some of the regenerative practices you're doing here?

HARRIS: What I think is important is trying to understand and respect the cycles of nature. The cycles of nature are the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the animal breeding cycle, the microbial cycle, and on and on — dozens, maybe hundreds of cycles occurring in nature all the time, unimpeded. When those cycles occur unimpeded, they generate abundance. All that old oil and coal and gas in the ground that we've been living on the last 80 or 90 years — that was the abundance of nature in the era of the dinosaurs. That abundance still occurs. It's just that we have disrupted it so badly with things like tillage, pesticides, and monoculture farming. What we've done here is — my land has gone from half a percent organic matter to 5.5% organic matter. It took 20-some years. Land that is at 1% organic matter will absorb about one inch of rain — roughly 27,000 gallons per acre. If you've got five percent organic matter, it'll hold five inches. The productivity is way better. So I think ceasing the practices that damage those natural cycles — our own version here is imperfect, but it's pretty good — and I have seen with my own eyes that productivity goes up and many of the costs of doing it go down.

YEAGER: That's right. And still 283 days of gestation — that hasn't changed since your professors taught it at the University of Georgia. They haven't made an evolution there.

HARRIS: There it is. What we do here is just incredible, and I don't mean to drag land-grant universities. I really don't. But they get a lot of their funding from big ag and big food and whoever else, and it has impacted what they teach their students.

YEAGER: When the department chair's salary comes from one of the big food companies or big ag, it's hard to look at the information and the research objectively. I think that's what you're saying, and there are plenty of people who agree with you.

HARRIS: When you know that, you know all you need to know.

YEAGER: Well, I appreciate it. It's so good to get to talk to you. I've been following you for a little while, and I'm glad we were able to have this conversation. Thank you.

HARRIS: I really enjoyed it. You're a good interviewer. 

YEAGER: We are produced at Iowa PBS. Our production supervisor is Sean Ingrassia. His crew is Reid Denker, Kevin Rivers, Julie Knutson, Neil Kyer, and David Feingold. The executive producer of Market to Market is David Miller. I'm Paul Yeager. We'll see you next time.