Logan Duvall (00:01.99)
All right, Will Harris, so glad to be visiting with you again, my friend. We were able to go down in January and film. We know with seasons, it's not exactly what it looks like all the year with that lush green that you got going on now, but we were able to see some amazing things that you and your family have done. And then with, you know, sewing prosperity, that being what we, what we're,
focused on, you have taken the community building from business and agriculture to a whole nother level, but you've also done it in that you have written a book or you have a book coming out, what is the bold return to giving a damn. So how did you get here, my friend, how to writing a book from farming?
WILL (00:58.182)
Well, I'm certainly a farmer and not an author. You can believe that. My degree is from the University of Georgia College of Agriculture, Animal Science, 1976. And I don't know that I ever read many books. If I had, I probably wouldn't have graduated with that proud C average that I had. But we were contacted by a...
Penguin Random House about writing a book and they contacted me and I told them we didn't want to do that. And they wound up contacting my daughter Jenny who you know and Jenny and them did a deal and they told me what they had done and I cooperated fully, which is what I do.
Logan Duvall (01:53.319)
You do. Well, you know, Jenny is a hard one to argue with. She's got it going on.
WILL (02:00.838)
She is a little force of nature. She and her sister both. I'm very proud of them and what they get done. But they sold the book rights to Penguin Random House and everybody was aware that Will was not capable of writing a book, so they hired a very, very sharp.
personable young woman to write the book. Amelie Graven is her name, she's from California. She was a great steward of the kind of farming you and I do, the regenerative, humane, local kind of a deal. And she wrote the book. We spent countless hours together. She came here from California, spent a lot of time, and then we had a...
Every Friday afternoon appointment, there was from one to three hours, and it was just exhausting. She would ask question after question after question, and I would tell her my story, and she weaved it together into this book. And it's a done deal now, and I'm glad, and I give you my word, there won't be a volume two. I promise.
Logan Duvall (03:22.215)
You're done, huh?
WILL (03:23.382)
I'm done.
Logan Duvall (03:25.518)
So what do you think that she was able to capture? And you know, kind of go into that title. Why does it matter? Why should we care? Why should we give a damn about our food and farming?
WILL (03:39.658)
Well, I think it's because we've not given down for so long. You know, we, you know, we, life in the rural South is what I can talk about. It was all about the food, principally about the food, family connections for a big part of what we did, what life was about. Post-World War II, that all changed. You know, we could talk a long time about that, but food became very...
industrialized, commoditized, centralized, and it's been that way, and we didn't know any different. Even my generation, I was born in 1954, I was well post-World War II, so, it's been, for the most part, this industrial food model for all my life, and certainly all your life. And I think that pendulum's swing, and this pendulum has swung so far that
a percentage of the people have interest in it. I don't think it's a huge percent. I don't think it's anything like 50 or 40 or 30, but there are people who have focused on the fact that what we're eating is probably not nearly as natural a diet as what we historically have eaten and probably what we should be eating.
Let me say this, this book is not all about food. I mean, it's not about the preparation of food. I'm not a chef, I'm not a nutritionalist, I am a farmer. And this book is about that side of the business. I really make it my business to stay on my turf. What little I know about is what I talk about.
Logan Duvall (05:04.419)
think.
Logan Duvall (05:29.418)
Yeah, well, I think that you have a tremendous amount of wisdom across a much broader thing, but I definitely respect what you're saying there. The aspect of centralization, can you help me understand that? Because I am in the middle of Arkansas, and there's a company that is pretty well known by the name of Tyson that has a lot of exposure here. And so...
With centralization, what do you mean by that? And what does, I even heard you say at one point, centralization is what's killing rural America. And granted, I agree wholeheartedly, but can you, from your perspective, explain what that centralization means and how it's killing rural America?
WILL (06:16.978)
I can't. It has not been that long ago, World War II, like 70 years ago, that food was local food. There was not centralized food. Every little town, certainly every county seat, would have a little slaughterhouse, probably a little grain mill, probably a little freezer locker, a little canning plant, and
local food was what we ate, or at least what my parents ate, their parents ate. Post-World War II, food became centralized, and you can look it up on the internet as well as I can, but there really aren't that many food companies. But they're just incredibly large international food companies. And they feed us, and theoretically that's okay, but
The centralization has taken the...
WILL (07:21.302)
I guess it's taking the character out of the food. You know, it's all about how cheaply the food can be made. And we've taken incredible cost out of food production. You know, and to a great extent, those costs weren't lowered through economy. They were distributed off to other areas. You know, there's a...
I'm here just north of the Gulf of Mexico, and there's a dead zone out there where you can't oyster anymore. It's a huge oyster production system, but all the agricultural waste going down the Mississippi River, the Chattahoochee River, the other tributaries into the Gulf of Mexico have caused the oyster population to plummet. There's a big dead zone out there that there's no fish anymore.
We can go on and on about the ill effects of industrialization of our food production, but we don't hear about it much because it's controlled by a small number of food companies that have an incredibly loud voice and hire incredibly talented people to message to us. So we think it's all okay. And you know, it's probably not.
probably really not all okay.
Logan Duvall (08:47.146)
Will, one thing about this centralization or globalization that's going on is you almost think that it creates more resiliency because it's more efficient or it's more this more that, but what I've experienced especially through COVID is that it's an extremely fragile system. It's not building to resiliency. That the old model is what built resiliency. On that every town had a feed store and a butcher and
canning. How do you see us going forward? Is it that model in Bluffton? Is it just trying to create some enterprises that build out these smaller food systems?
WILL (09:32.89)
That's a great point. It depends on what the consumer wants. The consumer has wanted cheap food for a long time, and they've gotten incredibly cheap food. We eat incredibly cost-effectively today. The cost of the Western diet is a very small percentage of our income. That's what we all thought we wanted, and that's what we got. And I guess it's fine.
You hit the nail on the head when you brought resiliency into the equation. There's efficiency and resiliency. And we want both, but one offsets the other. And my system is not as efficient as a hundred thousand head beef feed lot or a thousand sile firing operation or, but it is more resilient. You know, the best example is when the pandemic.
panic occurred and the big beef companies, big, big slaughter companies closed down for a period of time and all the meat disappeared off the shelves of the grocery store. We never missed one day, not one hour of one day's production. We just kept going. You know, there was a pandemic here too. It was not, you know, we were not in an exempt area from the pandemic, but we just kept operating.
And it went fine. And that's resilient.
Logan Duvall (11:04.046)
I love how you have been able to take that resiliency to another level though, because through the store you're able to serve food that you have processed right down the road. You've got it raised right there. So you've got this vertically integrated system too that supplies for the community. And that's...
That's really what I wanted to emphasize when we came down and we filmed the documentary Lessons from Bluffton. It's how you're able to build this resiliency by providing what the community want and need. And so with your book, do you feel that it's gonna get out what's actually going on in Bluffton and strike a nerve?
I mean, I guess that's the goal. Strike a nerve with the consumer to care and show an example of what's going on.
WILL (11:59.67)
Well, I don't think that lack of understanding is the reason that we have centralized our food production system. I think that the ceaseless search for cheaper and cheaper food is what brought that on. We started in the grass-fed beef business earlier than most. We're 25 plus years into it.
And a number of my contemporaries that started have sold their businesses to big meat companies that continued. And it was fine. It was fine. They made a business economic decision that I don't begrudge one bit. You know, I'm 69 years old. They would be about my age. And if they didn't have another generation coming behind them, certainly they sold their business. They should have.
I'm fortunate I had two daughters who came back, they're in their 30s, graduated from college, wanted to come back here, wanted to go to work in the business. And we had opportunities to sell to big multinational meat companies, more than one. And we chose not to do it. In the short run, maybe even long run, it might have been the economic best case for us to pursue.
We chose not to do it because we, my daughters, wanted to continue to run it as a family business that they and their spouses came back. Now they have five children who are on the farm. And we'll see whether that was a good decision or not, but it was a decision we made. We wanted to continue to run this business as a family farm. And we didn't have the...
We did not have, would never have, and did not want to have the resources to blow it up into a national or multinational company. That's not who we are. That's not what we do. We sell 20-something million dollars worth of product a year, and we manage the business. If we got much bigger than that, we'd have to hire. We couldn't handle it. We're not sophisticated enough business people to handle it. We'd have to hire a CEO to run our business for us.
WILL (14:23.798)
It's not what we wanted to do. And we believe that food, our kind of food, should be local. We don't want to have the grass-fed beef, pastured pork, pastured poultry business for the United States of America. We want to have it here. We want this to be a highly replicable system.
And I would love to see a white oak pastures in every rural county in this country. And I used to think we would, I worry about it now. Things have gotten hard, things are harder today than it was 25 years ago when I was starting. Country of origin labeling would be the centerpiece for that.
Logan Duvall (15:16.694)
Well, how important is having your own processing facility to what you're talking about?
WILL (15:26.178)
I don't think that having your own processing facility is part of the equation and I hope you don't have to do it. It's a whole separate business with a different set of skill sets that we had to develop because there was no processing here and I either had to get in or not get in so I got in and it was hard and it worked. We made it work. But I think that you...
It is absolutely essential that the farmer have access to slaughter and processing. I mean, don't save the animal and finish them if you don't know you've got access to slaughter and processing.
Logan Duvall (16:12.59)
What's the biggest challenge with processing right now, do you think? Well, just kind of, you know.
WILL (16:17.582)
Well, I think there are two. One is just the cost of it. You know, a plant, depending on what it looks like, will cost you a big seven-digit number. You're talking about millions of dollars, not thousands of dollars. And that's certainly one. The other is the USDA inspection, the onerous things that have to be done.
And I don't want to be too critical of that. You know, I want food to be safe. You know, and we know that if you leave entrepreneurs to their own designs, they, we will take shortcuts and food will not always be safe. You know, that's just, that's the way it works. So we've got to have regulation.
And I think that all the regulations that are on the books are there for a reason. They go back to some incident that occurred that shouldn't have happened and it's a regulatory step to prevent it from reoccurring.
But its regulation is also more efficient in a big high volume plant. You know, we slaughter 20, 25 of cattle a day here, when we're slaughtering cattle. Hogs would be 40, et cetera. Sheep would be about the same. A big industrial plant will slaughter thousands of head per hour. So.
the cost of inspection for the government is much lower at a big high volume plant. And they tend to write the rules, and the rules don't always lend themselves to working in a small plant like ours. It's okay. I mean, it's just, it's a problem. It's okay. The cost of the plant, that's a problem. It's okay. The rigors of inspection, it's a problem, but it's okay.
WILL (18:18.114)
I do hope that farmers can find a way of having their product processed without having to build their own plant. You can do it, I'll show it to you, but it's hard.
Logan Duvall (18:33.818)
Another aspect that you have done with the processing was taking what would be waste products and getting value from that through increased fertility and the composting program you all have got. That's fantastic. Talk to me a little bit about that composting. That way, we saw it, we weren't able to dive into it through the documentary like maybe we could have. But what you're able to do is actually combine a couple of quote unquote waste products
and add value. So can you go into your composting program?
WILL (19:07.19)
I will, I love talking about it. So a hero of mine is Dr. George Washington Carver. He said a lot of wonderful things. But one of the statements he made that I like most is, in nature there is no waste. And that's just so profound. You know, in the modern food business, there is incredible waste, incredible. It's just astounding. So we built this business on the...
premise of zero waste. Now we're not at zero waste. We're not. In the processing plant we are. We take the what would be considered packing plant waste, which would be a viscerate gut fill, feathers, maybe some hooves, whatever. Whatever is not marketable. And we compost it. We generate about eight tons a day of packing plant waste.
That's what the industry calls it. To me, it's a nutrient stream, but they call it packing plant waste. And we compost it and make wonderful, unattractive compost. It doesn't look good, but if we do it right and we know how to do it right, it doesn't smell bad and we use it all on our pastures. We've got 3,200 acres of pasture here.
grazing relationship on another 2000 something makers. So we've got plenty of place to put it. I don't sell any of it. You've got to be licensed and I don't want to go through that. I'm regulated enough, thank you very much. But it's just this wonderful plant food and I really enjoy having that. We also along the lines of zero waste.
uh... i didn't do i did that did the compost but the uh... other members of my family and employees here uh... pet food business with bones and rawhide chews and other products that has just been a great way of monetizing something that otherwise would be wasted
Logan Duvall (21:28.886)
Yeah, that whole process was fascinating. We were able to capture a lot of that. It just really, really neat, especially the bags and the leather products y'all do. Why is it so important, Will, to put this compost back on the land, back on the to build soil? Why does that matter?
WILL (21:49.634)
Well, you just can't keep hauling out of a warehouse and not put anything back in it. You wound up with an empty warehouse. And your land is the same way. You know, it was... So this gets maybe a little deeper than we need to get in this, but what we do here is very cyclical. We strongly believe in the cycles of nature. Everything's very cyclical. When my dad's generation industrialized food production, and I fell right in behind him, we made it very linear.
something that was supposed to be cyclical became linear. So we hauled off the land, we take the cattle and send them to feed lots in Nebraska or Iowa or whoever, and then we brought mine fertilizer, phosphorus, potassium onto the land, just a very linear kind of a situation, and did incredible harm in doing that.
The fertility of the soil is supposed to come from the microbes. Well, not only did we starve the microbes by not putting organic matter back out there, we poisoned the microbes with the fertilizer and the pesticides we used. So we had to buy mined fertilizer, very linear. It took a beautiful, beautiful system and turned it into something that was just very, very damaging.
a dozen different perspectives is very damaging. So what we have done here, and I didn't realize this at first, but I've learned it over the last 25 years, is that the cycles of nature yield an abundance. And that abundance is what we live on. And for the farmers, what we live on is what we monetize to keep it going.
WILL (23:50.122)
We are...
Logan Duvall (23:50.761)
of the guts.
Logan Duvall (23:54.11)
I've got Judith Schwartz coming on, the podcast coming up. She wrote Cow Saved the Planet, and she's got another one that talks about the water cycle, and she spent a lot of time with Alan Savory. The one thing that sticks out to me was when we were riding around in the Jeep, you pointed out the ants, and at all these red clay ant mounds that you had, and you said, you think that's good or bad? And so I just kind of paused and listened to you.
You had a completely different perspective. I think everybody hates fire ants. But you talked about the importance of them. Can you tell us what you told me that day on the fire ants?
WILL (24:35.778)
Well I do, I think my fire ants are very beneficial to my farm. You know, they get on me and bite me just like they get on you and bite you. And I don't like them much when they do that. But these fire ants burrow into the soil and those burrows, those beds we call them, are eight feet deep. I literally took a piece of wire and fed it down there and it was eight feet deep.
and that eight feet is they have burrowed in that soil so it is just super permeable to rainfall. So when we get a, and we are here on the coastal plains 80 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, it's not unusual to get a two, three, four, five, even six inch rain. And it's just a
WILL (25:36.294)
in the rain to see what it does and it's beautiful. And I'll say too, fire ants are not native to the southeastern United States. They are a accidental unwanted import, but they provide a function here. I'm sure they probably do a little harm, but there's an offsetting benefit. And I think that's the way nature works. That's what the cycles of nature are about.
You know, birth, growth, death, decay. Birth, growth, death, decay. That's cyclical. What we humans do, especially post-World War II, is won't everything be so linear? And it's just not meant to be that way. There are things that should be linear. I'm so glad I got this electronic device right here. It's super linear. It's so helpful. You know, I don't know how I'd live without it, but.
I don't want to try to recreate my farm on a linear model just because I really like my device. But that's what we've done.
Logan Duvall (26:42.498)
Yeah, we've tried to take farming and agriculture and turn it into that industry that control every single aspect of it and not let nature do its thing. You have spent time and even visited with Alan Savory. What is he like and what is Zimbabwe like? And how have you taken lessons that he's kind of very much known for and applied?
WILL (27:12.138)
Yeah, that's kind of interesting and humbling, but I'll tell you the story. So I met Alan Savery 15 years after I started my path to regenerative land management. And I'm a gracious Southern. I would not have said this out loud, but I thought I probably knew as much about regenerative land management as anybody on the planet. I wouldn't have said it, but I thought it.
And I went to a American Grassroots Association convention in Denver, Colorado. And Alan was the keynote speaker. I'd never heard of him. And when he started talking, I realized that, whoo, he knows way more than I do. And I, as a result of that, we became one of the first savory hubs that they had in this country.
And at that time, it was required that the hub leader, that'd be me, go to Zimbabwe to his farm and spend two weeks, I went on to spend nearly three weeks there, learning holistic management from Alan. And it was an humbling, great learning experience. And I came back and emulated, to the extent I can, the work he's done now.
Logan Duvall (28:40.294)
He's definitely fascinating. And I saw where he endorsed your book and wrote a thing that was so kind, so amazing. So that's big, that's big having his support. Another one of your friends, Gabe Brown, visited with Gabe not too long ago and he's talking about his Regenify, that certification deal. And you have been pretty outspoken on the whole greenwashing topic. Why?
Why is it important to have some consistency and some standards with something like what Gabe's doing?
WILL (29:13.39)
We're Gabe Brown's best friend I got on the planet. And I have nothing but respect for him. He's as good as he gets. And he is one of the owners of the business that started that certification program. And I'm sure that is as good a certification program as there is. And I support him, I support it.
uh... i'm a little bit lost and i don't think i'm lost i'm on a path towards uh... my opinion on certification let's just talk about it so i i'm not sure that we're doing the right thing having these big omnibus certification programs that cover great areas of land
You know, you, uh, and this is true of Alan Savery's program. So many people have programs and I think they all have merit. They're all good. Some better than others, but they're all good. Gabe's is fantastic.
But my experience has been that ecosystem management is so localized that I don't know how you make it national or international. You know, I've been farming this land, this 3200 acres of land all my life. My father farmed it, my grandfather farmed it, and my great grandfather farmed it.
And I know what to do on this 3,200 acres of land. I don't have to go very far in any direction that the ecosystem changes. If you go up the mountain, it's different. If you go down to the coast, it's different. If you go down to the river, the watershed, things are different and they should be managed differently. And the programs that I have seen that
WILL (31:23.47)
teach people how to manage ecosystems are a little bit disturbing to me. And I don't mean to diminish these systems or disparage against them in any way. I think they're fine. I'm just not sure that I embrace that whole thing. We have been asked to participate in some of these programs and we have to some extent. But the further I get into them, the less good I feel about them. Simply because...
You know, an ecosystem is a certain climate with certain microbes, certain plants, certain animals living in symbiotic relationships with each other. And the elevation doesn't have to change much, the moisture doesn't have to change much, the temperature doesn't have to change much, the soil type doesn't have to change much. That that whole balance is different. Not even better or worse. It's just different.
And, uh...
And I just struggle with systems that value one practice over another. I think it's just so situational.
Logan Duvall (32:41.646)
I think that's a lot of wisdom and I appreciate that take on it, but I think that you also just kind of made the argument against centralization of agriculture in general. I think it's very much a parallel issue that you just brought up.
WILL (32:57.87)
Well, I think it is. I think that every ecosystem, you don't have to, we talk about mountains, deserts, tundra, prairie. There are just so many sub-differentiations in ecosystems. And on my farm, when I used to, the row crop farm, certain fields made cotton better than other fields that made peanuts, the better than other fields that made corn.
and I rotated them, I put all the crops on all the fields. But I knew that field was gonna be better because it's cotton this year, it's a cotton field. And that's an ecosystem. And that tiny, I mean, it may only be a half a mile or a quarter of a mile from the other one. I can show you, your soil types change dramatically. I've got what we call ball-bearing sand and what we call cowhide clay.
on this farm, which are just radically different. And they're very near each other. You know, the Gulf Coast is an ancient sea bed. You know, we find, if you drill a well, sharks teeth, you pull a shark's teeth up, literally, literally. I'm sure I can show you some of it. So, you know, I don't know enough geology to know how it all works.
Logan Duvall (34:11.714)
Really.
WILL (34:24.174)
occurs, but I do know there are radical differences and land needs to be managed differently. You know, before we humans so overtly influenced that management, you know, nature did it. You know, this plant would grow here, that one would grow over there. You know, we have kind of tried to make everything, you know, made the whole Midwest a corn field and the whole southeast a...
cotton peanut field and the whole San Joaquin Valley. You know that's not, that's against nature.
Logan Duvall (35:01.494)
Beautiful, my friend. I think that is just such a strong argument for the localization to have more of a integrated system, a hub or a cluster, so to speak, and just have them replicated. We've talked to Sally Fallon Morrell, who Weston A. Price Foundation president, founder. She's amazing, love her. But I saw that she also endorsed her book. And that's a big deal because that is a community that is very health.
focus to. It's multifaceted in that approach of health and agriculture, being conscious, being localized. And so what does that mean to you to have Sally rallying behind the book?
WILL (35:44.97)
It meant a lot because I know her well enough to know that if she hadn't wanted to do it, she would have said, no, I'm not going to do that. I mean, she's a gracious, sweet person. But if she didn't believe in it, she would have just said no. So I'm very grateful.
Logan Duvall (35:53.003)
Yes, you would.
Logan Duvall (36:03.126)
That's awesome. All right, well I got one more biggin' for you. Let's say that the governor of Georgia appoints you to secretary of ag. Or, you know, if you don't wanna go that far, if the secretary of ag came into the courthouse to visit with you, what is that first thing? What's that advice you would say, hey, we've got to change this or do this better?
WILL (36:27.598)
to that person, to the person that was influential with farm legislation, I would do all that I could do to demonstrate what big food, big ag, big tech lobbying has done to our farm program. You know, I think that our farm program, which is billions of dollars, is...
not just over influenced but almost exclusively influenced by the interest of big ag, big tech. And I don't think that we will ever have a meaningful foreign program as long as that influence exists. And I worry about where we will wind up as long as big tech, big ag has that influence. I don't see it ending very well.
Logan Duvall (37:28.162)
Yeah, well, I agree with you there. One thing that I have became very concerned over as I just really dive into it, and I know this topic got you in some hot water and then on the Joe Rogan podcast, but, Will, as I've dove into this, Bill Gates has 48,000 acres of Arkansas farmland on navigable waterways. And I just really am having a hard time seeing how this is a positive.
WILL (37:56.738)
Yeah, I've been criticized for the position I've taken, but I'm unapologetic. You know, when, I believe in property rights. I believe that any person's got the right to acquire property. And I don't wanna get confused with that. But when I see a technocrat like Bill Gates acquiring all this farmland, and
operating it with that very technical mindset, that very linear technical mindset that they have, that has made them rich, then it is very, very disturbing to me because I have seen what that very linear technical mindset does to farms, farm situations, food production, rural communities, and it's bad. It's all bad.
And it's always bad.
Logan Duvall (38:59.778)
Well, my friend, I just want you to know you are so appreciated. It has been a blessing to get to know you and have you in my life. Jody and Jenny are incredible. What you're doing in there at Bluffton, providing jobs, providing housing and services and a product. I'm so excited to help promote the book and especially get this documentary through the film festival session and out there to the public.
Just thank you. Thank you for everything you're doing, buddy.
WILL (39:30.542)
Well, you are very kind, very gracious, and I appreciate the attention you've given us, and thank you for your friendship.
Logan Duvall (39:38.178)
Thank you, Will.
