Will Harris, White Oak Pastures, Bluffton, Georgia. Credit: White Oak Pastures.

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

Will Harris owns and operates White Oak Pastures located about ninety miles from the Gulf of Mexico in southwest Georgia near Bluffton.  Established by Will’s great-grandfather in 1866, Will is the fourth generation to own and manage the farm.  After World War II, Will’s father, ran the farm using the industrial model. Will helped his father with the farm when he was growing up and then came back to the farm to take on full-time management after graduating from college in 1976.  For the next fifteen years, Will continued raising calves and operating a feedlot using industrial practices, but declining profitability through the 1980s caused him to begin exploring higher-value alternative markets. In the mid-1990s he began to transition the farm from industrial to grass-finished beef production using management intensive grazing practices.

Today, White Oak Pastures produces a diversity of livestock and other products on about 2,500 acres. All the livestock produced at White Oak Pastures are pasture-raised and processed on farm in state-of-the-art USDA-inspected beef and poultry processing plants. The plants were designed by Dr. Temple Grandin, the animal scientist renowned for her pioneering work in the humane handling of livestock.  The whole farm is designed as a zero-waste system and the inedible materials and wastewater from the processing plants is recycled back to the farmland through composting and irrigation systems. The farm is powered by a large solar array that provides about 30 percent of power needs. 

With the help of his daughters Jenni and Jodi, and Jodi’s husband John, Will manages the one hundred and twenty employees needed to make this diverse farming system work. Together they use multispecies rotational grazing practices to manage the production of red meats from a 700-cow beef herd, 1100 nanny goats, a 1000-ewe flock, 150 doe rabbits, and 30 sows, and poultry meats from the 320,000 chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks and guinea hens raised on the farm each year. The farm also produces organic vegetables on five acres, offers education tours of the farm, and recently added on-farm dining and lodging facilities. 

White Oak Pastures sells its products through wholesale and direct markets. The farm has a CSA and an on-farm store and restaurant and distributes fresh meats to grocery stores and specialty markets throughout the Southeast. All of White Oak Pasture’s employees make above the minimum wage, have health insurance and get a yearly bonus.

Drought and heat have long played an important role in shaping the potential productivity at White Oak Pastures.  Will thinks that temperature and precipitation have grown more variable during his lifetime at the farm, but not to such an extent that he has had to adjust any production. Part of this may be due to his long experience raising livestock and to the flexibility of raising livestock on pasture. “If I do say so myself, we’re pretty good cattle people,” says Will. “We’ve been doing it for a long, long time on the same farm. We haven’t made a lot of terrible mistakes in recent years, because we learned how to do it. Our success is mostly at the mercies of the market and the weather and this gets into some of the changes we’ve made.” Will goes on to explain that improved soil quality on the farm has increased forage production and lowered production costs. “When I started changing the way I farm,” he says, “the organic matter in my soil was less than one-half of one percent. Today it’s over five percent. We’re able to grow our own forage and that takes a lot of the cost out of this compared to buying and bringing forage in.” 

Will uses a no-till over-seeding system to produce high-quality forages for his livestock throughout the year on non-irrigated, warm season perennial pastures. For winter grazing, Will overseeds the pastures with annual cool-season forages such as cereal rye, ryegrass and clover. “I either mow or graze very short ahead of the seeding and then broadcast annual forage seed over the pasture with a truck,” he explains. “After the pasture is seeded, I come behind with a harrow that I’ve modified so I do not disturb the soil too much and then an aggressive drag behind the harrow to put the seed in good contact with the soil surface. Then I put the animals through the pasture to walk the seed into the ground. We don’t disturb the turf much this way and I always get a stand. I probably put a little too much seed in there, but I get a stand.”

The ability to control processing on-farm and sell into high-value markets has also made the farming system more stable despite increased weather variability and extremes. “We’ve gone from selling live cattle to pasture-raising and on-farm processing five red meat species and five poultry species as well as organic vegetables and eggs. What we think is probably the coolest part of our story is the way the farm has come full circle in the century and a half we’ve had it. What we do today is so remarkably similar to what my great-grandfather and grandfather did, except we’ve got refrigeration, internal combustion engines and regulations. It’s very similar to what they did, much more similar than what my father did and I did when I was a young man.” 

Will says that other farmers in his region have also noticed more variable precipitation and higher temperatures and most have adapted by increasing their use of irrigation. “There is far more irrigation in my area than there ever used to be. Way more. The only reason I don’t have it is because I’m not on a good aquifer.” Will goes on to share his concern about the waste of water he has seen in his region. “Forever I’ve heard about water wars in the West.  I don’t know too much about them. In the East, there’s always been plenty of water for everybody, and water here is free. There’s some very token permitting that’s required, but there is not much to it. Once you get that, you can dig as big a hole as you want and pump as much water out as you want, and the only costs to you are the energy costs to doing the pumping and also digging the well. As a result, we grossly waste water.” 

Will has seen farmers in his area irrigate in order to moisten the soil to prepare for planting, then irrigate again to water in fertilizers and pesticides, and then water a third time after seeding the crop. “That happens a lot,” says Will, “not occasionally … a lot. We’re now starting to feel a little bit of competition for water with environmentalists and urban communities. I think that if things continue, and they usually do, there’ll be some sort of regulation put on water use in agriculture and that will dramatically affect what we can grow. My system of farming struggles to compete with irrigated cotton and peanut farms, because they are growing subsidized crops and they gross a lot of money per acre compared to my grazing operation. It is very difficult to pay one hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars an acre annual rent with a grazing operation, but if water becomes scarce, land rents will come down and we could afford to expand what we do.”

As weather variability and extremes have increased, Will says that he has put more time and effort into looking for new opportunities that might come with the changes.  “I’ve read a little bit about climate change,” Will explains. “I don’t know much about it, but it seems that for me, the bad part is more extremes in terms of temperature and rainfall, but the good news is it’s generally warmer and wetter, and warmer and wetter grows stuff. If it’s going to be warmer and wetter, that will benefit some of our species more than others. I have goats, sheep and cattle, and I don’t know that I know what works best, but I’m going to be sensitive to it, to see what does the best. I do know that geese, guineas and ducks handle heat and cold better than the chickens. If the weather becomes warmer and there is more moisture on an annual basis, but it is more erratic, I might change the species that I grow in the pastures, both the crops as well as the livestock. I’m at least taking some notes. I’m still growing more what the market wants than what is adapting well, but I’m sensitive to that. I’ll get the boot on climate change. It’s either happening or it’s not, but I will be watching closely to see if there are advantages we can take of it.”

Will says that if the changes in weather variability increase in coming years, he will have to make some changes, particularly if dry periods and droughts intensify. “Sooner or later, I’ll have to find some way to irrigate,” he says. Will thinks that soil quality will continue to increase on the farm and that will help to buffer more variable rainfall. “The 5 percent organic matter of the soil will keep building,” Will explains.  “It already helps make the land somewhat drought tolerant, not drought proof, but drought tolerant. If the variability stays about like this, we’ll be okay. If it gets a little worse, we’ll have to irrigate. If it’s a lot worse, even irrigation won’t help.” 

Will Harris is active in community and agricultural organizations and has been widely recognized for his innovative production system and marketing practices. He was named the Georgia Small Businessman of the Year in 2011 by the U.S. Small Business Administration.  The Georgia Conservancy named him 2012 Conservationist of the Year. Will was named the Georgia Farmer of the Year in 2012 and in 2014, Will was nationally recognized by the Natural Resources Defense Council as a recipient of the Sustainable Livestock Producer Growing Green Award.

Tom Trantham, Happy Cow Creamery, Pelzer, South Carolina. Credit: Cooking Up a Story.

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

When Tom Trantham got into the dairy business in 1978, there were more than five hundred dairies in South Carolina; in Greenville County, where Tom’s farm is located in the upstate region near Pelzer, there were thirty. Today, there are just sixty dairies in all of South Carolina and Tom’s Happy Cow Creamery is the only one left in his county. What made Tom Trantham different? Why is he still producing milk on a small family dairy farm when so many others failed?

Like many American farmers feeling the pain of consolidation in the agricultural sector the 1980s, Tom was producing a lot of milk but barely turning a profit. “I went through some really rough times in those days, we all did,” he recalls. “I know there were more suicides and broken homes and divorces and bankruptcies in the ‘80s, because our parity was taken away from us in 1981. After that, corporate America priced our product and whatever they said it was worth is what we got paid. You never knew what you were going to be paid or how the price was set. You didn’t have any control of your product. So it went from a wonderful family life to an almost impossible life.”

Although Tom had long been among the top industrial milk producers in South Carolina, rising feed and farm chemical costs and falling prices left him with few options when he was refused an operating loan in 1987. Tom could see no way to continue in the dairy business. One sunny April morning that year, his cows broke through a fence to graze a mix of rye grass, clover and fescue that Tom had left standing because he couldn’t afford the seed and fertilizer to plant a corn crop. That evening’s milking yielded a two-pound increase of milk per cow and Tom thought, ‘Why not give my cows twelve Aprils a year?’ After some research into annual forage crops and intensive grazing practices, he successfully guided the transition of his ninety-cow dairy from a feed-based to a pasture-based production system, dramatically lowering his costs while increasing both herd health and milk quality.

The heart of Tom’s “Twelve Aprils” system is the successive planting of short-lived, seasonally adapted annual crops on about 60 acres to provide his cows with high-quality forage every month of the year. The forages he uses include grazing maize, sudangrass, millet, small grains, alfalfa and clover. Variables such as weather, forage needs and field-specific conditions mean that no two years are exactly alike, but on average Tom makes five to seven no-till plantings a year. Cows graze a planting once or twice and then the forage is cut for hay or bushhogged to prepare for the following crop. Tom’s Holsteins consistently top a 23000-pound herd average and many of them are still producing well at ten to fourteen years of age.

With the opening of the Happy Cow Creamery in 2002, Tom’s transformation from commodity dairyman to specialty milk retailer was complete. Tom built the creamery in a Harvestore silo he no longer needed for storing feed. The milk travels directly from the milking parlor to the processing plant, where it is low-temperature pasteurized and whole milk is bottled. Chocolate milk and buttermilk are also made and bottled on the farm. The milk is sold into direct wholesale markets in the upstate region of South Carolina and at an on-farm store that also retails a diverse line of mostly locally-sourced fresh and processed products including produce, fruits, butter, cheeses and meats.

In almost forty years of farming in upstate South Carolina, Tom can only remember one serious drought, in 1986, but he says that some drought and high temperatures are to be expected every year. The biggest change in weather that Tom has noticed is in the number and quality of summer thunderstorms. “When I started farming in ’78,” he says, “I remember night rains and thunderstorms in summer, and the lightning would just light up the whole sky, and we had rains, adequate rains. For the last ten or fifteen years, the thunderstorms don’t seem to be the same. They are more frequent, but yet we could still have a shortage of rain during July and August. I’ve also seen a difference in the storms. When we first moved here, we would be out on our porch looking at these thunderstorms, and they were very beautiful. It wasn’t like now, they’re so harsh. I’ve noticed a change in the harshness of the thunderstorms, I think. I can’t understand it or really put a word to it, but I know they are different.”

Tom appreciates the flexibility the Twelve Aprils system gives him to adjust to changing weather patterns through the year. “I prepare for what I think the situation’s going to be,” Tom says, “and then if it doesn’t work, I just bushhog it and plant something else. That’s the great thing about my system.” The ability to recover quickly from mistakes or the unexpected has been particularly helpful over the years. Using no-till also provides a lot of flexibility, plus it saves time and money in fuel and equipment costs. “There’s always a challenge in farming,” he says, “but if you make a mistake … or maybe it isn’t a mistake, maybe it rained too much or it was too dry, with my system you’re not set back too much. Just the number of days it takes for you to get back out there and replant. But when you’ve got a hundred acres of corn silage, and you lose it, you don’t have another shot until next year, so you’re done for. You’ve got to buy feed and all, and that’ll break you in a heartbeat, to have to purchase feed.”

Twenty-three years of diverse no-till cropping and management intensive grazing have produced very high-quality soils throughout the farm. “The organic matter in my soil is just unreal,” says Tom. “Now the way that I do that is by managing my forages so that I graze below the knee, mow below the waist (for hay) and bushhog above the waist [to control weeds and prepare the paddock for the next planting]. Now farmers think I am crazy. I just bushhogged all that feed. But this is what gives me high-quality forage and it does great things for my soil too. When a raindrop hits my ground, it’s just like a sponge. Hardpan is not a problem on my farm. When you walk on my fields, it’s like you’re walking on cushion.”

High soil quality and diverse cropping have also maintained soil fertility and reduced pests on the farm. With the exception one year when he applied fertilizer to plots being used by researchers on his farm, Tom has not used any chemicals or fertilizers in twenty-seven years. “The one thing that I really believe in, as much as anything I’m doing, is no use of chemicals or fertilizers,” Tom explains. “You can see many of my fields have less weeds than a field that’s been sprayed with every kind of thing you can think of. I really like to be able to do that.”

Tom is upbeat about his farm’s ability to remain productive if weather variability and extremes increase as projected for his region. He views the combination of high soil quality, no-till planting, diverse, short-season annuals and management intensive grazing as a very resilient production system. “I guess it depends on the degree of weather extremes that we are talking about,” says Tom, “but with my system, I am able to adjust. If one crop goes, another one’s put right in. I can respond rapidly to a situation that maybe others couldn’t.”

But Tom remains concerned about the continued growth of industrial dairy production and the continuing decline of family dairy farms in the United States. He heard recently about a dairy farm in Indiana that is milking thirty thousand cows. “How about having thirty thousand cows in South Carolina, but in three hundred, one-hundred-cow dairies?,” he asks. “Every community would benefit. I spend a lot of money in my community here. Everybody that touches an agricultural product after it leaves the farmer’s hands makes money, everybody, and a lot of it.”

Tom thinks back to the days when he was selling his milk to Dean Foods. “In the 1980s, the CEO of Dean Foods made a hundred-and-fifty-something million dollars in eight or ten years and then retired. That was my milk money. That’s why I was bankrupt. When there is that kind of money on the top end of the product and the guy that produced it couldn’t even get enough to pay his bills, that’s where this country has really messed up. It’s going in the wrong direction as far as agriculture. We’ve lost 90 percent of our dairy farms in this country since 1970. That’s just not how it ought to be.”

Today, the few remaining small-scale family dairy farms continue to struggle with rising costs of production and low milk prices. Tom understands how hard it can be to think about making radical changes when under the stress of managing an industrial dairy farm.  “I know if somebody would have walked down my driveway,” Tom explains, “and said, ‘Hey, Tom, I want to talk to you about this Twelve Aprils dairy system,’ I would have probably told them to leave. Dairy farmers just like me won’t accept that because they can’t take the chance. They are thinking, ‘What if it doesn’t work? I’ve got this big loan to pay and this feed bill to pay, and what if it doesn’t work?’ The thing about it is, it works so quick. It works so quick! It’s almost an instant thing. There are so many things that are so different here that it’s hard to see that it is actually easier than what they are doing now. They look at it as harder, which it just isn’t. It’s smooth as silk. The Good Lord woke me up back in 1987 and said, ‘Tom, you’ve had enough. Now follow your cows. They’ll show you how to be a dairy farmer.’”

Over the years, Tom has shared his experiences with countless dairy producers, researchers and policy makers throughout the country and abroad and he has provided leadership to many agriculture organizations over the years. In 2002, Tom’s innovative production system was recognized nationally when he was honored by the USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture, Research and Education Program with the Patrick Madden Award for Sustainable Agriculture from the . Tom received the 2014 Career Achievement Award from the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.