Episode 157 – Be Well By Doing Good – Tom Wheelwright & Will Harris

Speaker 1: 

This is the WealthAbility Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

There seems to be a major controversy going on in the world today about whether it's okay to make money, whether you have to choose between doing good and doing well. We're here today with somebody who has, I think, proven that you can do good while doing well, and you can do well while doing good. We are here with Will Harris, who is, I think, becoming quite well-known, and I think, Will, you're on the verge of being really a breakout, famous superstar of somebody who has seen something from a business standpoint that needed to be changed and did it not just to do good, but actually to do well, and made a huge bet doing that. 

So, Will Harris of Bluffton, Georgia, it is a pleasure to have you on the WealthAbility Show. 

Will Harris: 

Tom, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure being with you today. I'm grateful to you. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

If you would, let's go ahead and just give our listeners and our viewers a little of your background and the story behind what happened here. 

Will Harris: 

Good, good. Thank you. I'm Will Harris. My farm in Bluffton, Georgia is called White Oak Pastures. I'm the fourth generation on my farm to operate it. My daughters are the fifth, and they have babies who I hope will be the sixth. My great-grandfather came here in 1866. My dad was born in 1920, took over the farm post-World War II, 1946, and really changed the farm dramatically under his watch. It went from a polyculture, a lot of different species of animals living in symbiotic relationships with each other to a monoculture of just cattle. And my dad ran it that way successfully for his career. 

I never wanted to do anything except run this farm. I went to the University of Georgia, majored in animal science, graduated in 1976, came home, and ran the farm very industrially as a monocultural cattle operation as my dad had done for his career. And we were successful. I paid taxes every year. I went back and looked. I never had a year I didn't pay income tax. We certainly did not make a lot of money, but we lived very comfortably. 

Despite that, 20 years in, in the mid-nineties, I became very, very disenchanted with what I was doing. Kind of a long story, but I just didn't like monocultural, industrial, commodity cattle raising anymore. Then I started to evolve the farm, and I did. Today, we raise five different red meat species and poultry. We really turned the farm into a food hub. We've got about 170, 180 employees. We're the largest employer in the county, Clay County, Georgia, one of the poorest counties in the country. This is just a very different operation, and we really enjoy running it. I don't think my daughters would've come back had I remained a commodity cattle [inaudible 00:04:03]. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

If you would, Will, explain what that means for the listeners who are not in the cattle business. What's the major difference here, and what was that trigger? What triggered you to look at going, “Wait a minute. What worked for my dad isn't working for me”? 

Will Harris: 

The commodity cattle business or the commodity anything agricultural business is very linear, very much. It's like a manufacturing company. And I occupied a space in that linear industry where I raised calves and passed them on to the feedlot owner, who passed them on to the meat slaughter people, who passed them on to the groceries or food service. It's very linear, very linear. 

The model that I came back to is very cyclical. There's not a straight line. We raise animals. We slaughter animals. We market meat and poultry. We have an online store. We have a restaurant. We have a general store here on the farm. A number of different … It was very cyclical, very cyclical. Not much spins off. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Got it. So, what was it, what was the trigger? What made you decide to do that, to go from the linear, which is certainly a model that a lot of Big Ag uses to the cyclical model where you're really doing more of a vertically integrated type of an operation? 

Will Harris: 

Yeah, all the Big Ag is very linear. Again, I was right in the middle of that, and it happened one morning. I have a hypothesis of why it happened, but I was loading up calves to ship to a Midwestern feedlot, calves that I had raised, and I was shipping them on a double-deck, 18-wheeler truck. A double-deck truck like that will hold 100 500-pound calves, and the ones on top are urinating and defecating on the ones on the bottom. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Oh, geez. 

Will Harris: 

They'll stay on the truck for 30 hours till they get to Kansas and Nebraska, or wherever we're feeding them at that time in that linear model I described. I had done it all my life. I did it for my dad. I done it. But suddenly that morning, I just didn't like it, and I started moving away from it. One step away from it led to another and another and another until it reached a point that what I do today just barely resembles what I used to do. I'm still in the cattle business, but it's nothing compared to the linear model I was part of for so many years and my dad was for his whole career. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's a big bet you made. What was the short-term effect? How long did it take you to make that transition? 

Will Harris: 

It was a big bet, but it didn't seem like it at the time. I had a lot of naivety. It so happened that, well, my dad had worked and then granddad, great granddad. The farm had no debt, and it was profitable every year. I didn't know you could lose money. I just thought as long as I showed up for work every day and did what I was supposed to do, it would be okay. But I changed so many things that it became not okay, and we actually had some … I didn't know what a loss carryforward was, but I learned. 

But it worked out, and we found that the timing of the change I made, it happened to be so, so, so fortunate. This was the mid-nineties, and nobody had heard of grass-fed beef much until that era. By the time I had something to sell, grass-fed beef was surfacing a little bit in the health food medium, compassionate animal organizations, those kinds of things, so my timing was absolutely best-case fortunate. It wasn't skill on my part. I didn't see that coming. It just came when I needed it, but we were able to move from profitable to loss back to profitable again, mostly because the timing was just so, so fortunate. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I suspect it was more than that, but I appreciate that. I always love to see humility in entrepreneurs, and I think most entrepreneurs feel that way, that they're very fortunate in their timing. 

You said something that really struck me. You may know my background is all tax, and I'm a tax guy. You said that you actually paid taxes all those years. I'm going, “Man, you're probably the first person in agriculture I ever met that actually paid taxes like that, and then you returned to profitability.” How many employees did you have when you were in the linear model? 

Will Harris: 

Four. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Four, and how many do you have now? 

Will Harris: 

170-something. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Let's talk about the town. What was going on with the town while you were that linear model with four employees? 

Will Harris: 

I'm glad you brought the town up. That's one of my favorite things to talk about. The town of Bluffton peaked in population in 1900, and from 1900 till now, there was a decline every decade, every census, just a shrinking economy. Bluffton is in a wonderful area for farming, but it's never had a railroad, never had a … It's been a purely agrarian economy, so it lived and died by that. By the time I came along, well, when I was born, the town was dying, but we didn't know it. But it became evident, and we were just used to it. We just accepted the fact that Bluffton is drying up. It's not the only one. Most of these small, rural communities around here have dried up or drying up. 

So, when I made the change, it was a really big change in my operation. It was all about the land and the animals. That was my focus, and that was what I was passionate about, and that's why I did it. Benefiting the town was never on my radar because I didn't think I could do it. I didn't think I could change that. I can remember years into it, I had a visitor, and he said, “This is a nice little town,” and it surprised me that somebody would say that. 

I looked around and said, “You know, it is. This is nice,” because we had hired people and brought them in and were paying significantly above the county average. That became a focus of mine, and now it's a passion of mine. I'm very proud of what we've done here in Bluffton. I have bought every house except one that's sold here and lot and storefront in the last 15 years. We certainly don't own them all. We don't own half of them, but we own a lot of them. It's very competitive among my employees who gets to live in town, and that's a little problematic sometimes. We're looking for housing opportunities that's better, but it is quite a passion of mine now. It's the land, the animals, and the rural community. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

What do you attribute that to? As you were changing the nature of your business, it changed the nature of the town. What was it, when you're looking back on it, that changed the nature of the town? 

Will Harris: 

Yeah, that was clear to me. My dad used to say that A and B students go live somewhere else. The F students get locked up, and the C students stay here in Bluffton and farm. He was really right. I'm an example. I'm that C student. That's what I did. But when we changed the way we farm, we attracted non-farmer, non-Southern, non-rural people, and I have a lot of people that work here that are … I've had people who had PhDs work here as managing the poultry operation. It is incredible the people that have been drawn to this lifestyle. It's not the money. I can assure you that. They want to be here. 

It just made a nice little town. I opened a store and a restaurant and a RV park and a number of other businesses that we've opened here because we had the need for them. They're not real profitable, but they pay for themselves, and they offer a really nice lifestyle for me and my family and my employees. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's nice. Clearly, you've got PhDs in there. You're doing some innovation. What are some of the innovations that you've had to do in order to make this work? 

Will Harris: 

The list is long. We endeavor to operate. Our meat packing plant has zero waste. I built a slaughter plant for my red meat and my poultry, and we operate those, USDA-inspected, to operate five days a week, each one of them. The waste stream that comes out is not … I don't want to call it a waste stream. It's a nutrient stream, and we take that and make pet treats, and we make a lot of them. We make purses and wallets and those kinds of things. 

What's really the waste, the eviscerate, gut fill, we turn into compost. We generate about seven tons a day of those eviscerate and that kind of waste, “waste material”, that we compost, turn it into fertilizer, and then we put back out on the land. I can go on and on. It's all about using … My hero, one of my heroes is George Washington Carter, and one of the things he said is, “In nature, there is no waste.” We try to run it that way. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's awesome. So, how long before you became profitable? 

Will Harris: 

Well, I lost money last year, but we had made money for a number of years prior to that. We're changing the business. I can tell you about that later, but I guess probably four or five years before the profits were adequate to pay taxes on. I could go back and look. We had some really good years. I sold Publix Supermarket and Whole Foods Market the first pound of grass-fed beef marketed as American grass-fed beef, so we had a really great run of several years. 

Now, imported grass-fed beef has really hurt us badly in these grocery section. I don't sell to Whole Foods Market anymore at all. So, we had to rethink our deal and move more into direct-to-consumer through our online store. That is where we need to be. The pandemic taught us that. Our grocery store business fell off, and our online business just went way up. Prior to that, the online business was just a nuisance, but now it's our direction. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

You said that you've had people come from non-ag from other places, and then you've talked about how your employees fight for getting to town. So, do they stay there? Do they learn and then leave? Are they taking this to other places? What's happening? What's been the end result here? 

Will Harris: 

Yeah, that was exactly what I wanted to comment on. On the farm, the way it typically worked is the patriarch of the farm like my dad, granddad, great granddad, had a number of employees, all male, that went to work for him when they were all young men and worked together all their lives, and then passed it on to the next generation. That's the way the farm model worked, and that's the way it was working for me until it changed. 

When it changed, it changed dramatically. The people that we hire now are not typical. Again, they're not Southern, they're not rural, they're not farm. They're very smart, professional people who've made a lifestyle choice, and they come here not with the intention of working here for the rest of their life. I have come to love that model. They come here with the intention of just being here until they learn what they want to learn to get ready to go somewhere else. I love it that way. 

I'll ask them, “How long do you expect to stay? There's no wrong answer, just let me know.” It's a great model. They come, and they go. They don't just come and leave. They leave something. They figure things out. They help make the operation better, and I love my employees. I love the contribution they make, and I don't expect them to stay here forever.I love the turnover. I like having new ones in here. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Can you give us just one example of when you say they leave something and they make it better of an employee that's made a major difference? 

Will Harris: 

Oh, I can give you many, many. Frankie Darsey, a brilliant young man, no farm background whatsoever. He's a computer guy. Came here and started our pet treats, rawhide program. He took one of my female employees with him when he left, who was brilliant, Lori Moshman, who started our black soldier fly program to raise larva to feed chickens. Another employee started our composting operation, another started our leather business, another started our canned goods, vegetables, jelly, on and on and on. 

Just they come, they want to do things. The first time they ask, I won't let them do it. I make them. I wait till I'm sure they're passionate about it, and then when they demonstrate they've got the passion for it, then we'll invest. It's my money, their time and labor, and it's just beautiful. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's awesome. Outside of the town and the employees, what do you see as the extended impact of what you're doing? 

Will Harris: 

Well, I got to say that generally, that's a disappointment for me. When I made the changes, I thought I was an early innovator in changing the way we're going to farm in this country. I don't think I said that out loud, but that's what I thought. And it has not worked that way. It's harder. It's harder to get a business like this started today than it was 30 years ago when I did it, 25 years ago when I did it. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Why is that? 

Will Harris: 

Because of big food companies stealing the message, the importing I mentioned. A big food company, a big meat company can legally import beef from 20 countries, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand being the three primary companies, and label it as American, grass-fed beef even though the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered in another country. If value was added in this [inaudible 00:22:49] under the country of origin rules, those are label rules, it can be labeled a product of the USA, which is just horribly misleading to consumers, but it's allowed. 

There are other things I could go into, but the big food has so much control over the USDA, over labeling that it is very hard, and I hate it because I really think that there's a lot of beneficiaries to the way we manage our farm, manage our land, and then it's just hard for people to do it today. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Well, and it seems to me like with all of the emphasis on climate and sustainable and all of this, you would think that what you're doing would be celebrated even more than it is. 

Will Harris: 

Well, you would think that, but how many times have you heard that cattle are destroying the ozone layer? I got a big tip for you. They're not. They're not. It's a damn lie. Industrial beef production, maybe. Standing in a lot eating corn out of a trough, that I probably say. It probably is. It's probably very bad. I don't know that. But the way we do it, we actually sequester carbon in the soil. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Really? 

Will Harris: 

On my website, whiteoakpastures.com, there is a study, a scientific study done by Qantis, an environmental studies group, laboratory group that shows that we sequester three and a half pounds of carbon dioxide with every pound of beef we sell. We're the opposite of what the- 

Tom Wheelwright: 

You're a net carbon consumer. 

Will Harris: 

We're a consumer. We sequester carbon. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's awesome. 

Will Harris: 

It is true. The scientific studies show it, and there are others, but you hear that cattle are destroying the environment from so many different sources, such loud voices. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Yeah, you do, for sure. I'm curious. How big is your ranch, and how many people do you feed with your products? 

Will Harris: 

Yeah, so the farm here is 3,200 acres, which is, it's a little bigger than average here, which it would be huge in Connecticut. It would be tiny in Montana. What was the other question? 

Tom Wheelwright: 

How many people do you feed? 

Will Harris: 

That's how big this farm is. We also do solar grazing. We have a vegetation management contract on a couple thousand acres from a company called Silicon Ranch, and they pay us to graze sheep under their solar panels. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Oh, okay. 

Will Harris: 

It's a very good business for us. It's new, and I'm very grateful for that, so about 5,000 acres total. 

How many people do we feed? I've actually done that calculation before, and I think that if we assume … I'm not sure of these numbers. I'll have to go back and look, but if the consumer ate all of our product and nothing else, 90 pounds of whatever, beef, whatever, 90 pounds of chicken, 40 pounds of beef, 30 pounds of pork, it's probably about 20,000 customers. Of course, that's not the way it works. People eat some of ours, somebody else's. 

I'm glad you brought that up. It brings me to something I'm really passionate about is we have grown White Oak Pastures as big as we want to grow it. My children and I, key employees have had the discussion, and we don't want to grow this business so big that we've got to hire executive management to come in here and run it for us. We don't think that's the way a food business should be. We think that food businesses should be local, and I don't know whether that's I just feed Bluffton, or I just feed Clay County, or I just feed Georgia, but I want it to be as local as it can. 

We ship beef to 48 states. We ship products, not just beef. We ship our products to 48 states, but I really don't want to. I don't want to compete with other farmers in Maine and California and Oregon and New Mexico. I want those farmers to have their own local food business. I can't afford to not do it now because I need to sell $25 million worth of product to pay for the $8 million worth of [inaudible 00:28:18]. It is incumbent upon all of us to try to make the food business as local as we can. [inaudible 00:28:28] the result of the large, multinational food industries that feed us. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

What's next for you? 

Will Harris: 

We got a lot of growth potential with the solar voltaic grazing under there. We buy and lease land anytime we can. It's very difficult to compete with corn, cotton, peanut growers that surround us. Those are very heavily subsidized programs by the USDA, and it's very hard to compete, but we try to when land's available. Again, the goal is not to see how big we can make it. That's not what we want to do here. The goal is to see how well we can do it. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Yeah, and do you think you can do better than what you're doing? 

Will Harris: 

Oh, we make improvements every day. We grew this business quite fast. When I had three employees and there was farming beef cattle industrially, I was probably selling a little over a million dollars worth of product a year. Fast forward, I mean really fast forward to today, we're selling $25 million worth with 180 employees, so it took two or three decades to do it, but it's pretty fast. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's very fast. 

Will Harris: 

There's a lot of things that we can do better. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

You're sharing your wisdom now. You've got a book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn. I love it. You're out doing podcasts. What would you tell people, whether it's from an entrepreneurship standpoint, whether it's from a doing good standpoint, whether it's from an agricultural standpoint, what is the message that you want people to learn and what people can actually do? 

Will Harris: 

Well, that's a very broad question, and I'll just try to narrow it down by saying that I think of what we lack. What I see people lack so often in their endeavors is determination. We call it grit, the ability to put up with whatever comes your way and keep getting up. You get knocked down 100 times. You get up 101 times. I didn't expect that question. I could probably do a better job if I thought about it for a week or two, but really, I think that just persistence, determination, grit, not giving up, staying the course. It doesn't mean you can't make changes in operations, but you don't give up the course. Don't [inaudible 00:31:47]. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Yeah. You seem to be very singularly focused in what you're doing, and I am curious. How important has that been over the last 20, 30 years? 

Will Harris: 

Well, I think it certainly has been important to me. I am very focused. I don't want to go anywhere but here, and I don't want to do anything but this. It is much easier for me than a lot of people because my job is my hobby. It's my livelihood. It's my pastime. I do what I do about 12 hours a day, about seven days a week, and love every bit of it, and don't ever intend to do anything any different. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

Well, I love that, Will, because to me, it sounds like it's your calling. This is what you see. This is what you were put on earth to do, and you're all in on this. I think that's a critical message for entrepreneurs, employees, whoever. I think being all-in in what you're doing and only doing something that you're all-in makes a huge amount of sense to me. 

Will Harris: 

Well, I've certainly had my share of problems, but lack of direction is not a problem. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

I love that. I love that. That's great. whiteoakpastures.com is your website. The book is A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food. Certainly, food, one of those key ingredients to life and love. Love, love what you're doing, Will. Any final words for our audience? 

Will Harris: 

Well, I hope you buy my book, and I won't be asking you to buy a sequel because my writing career is over. I'm a one-trick pony, and that was my trick. 

Tom Wheelwright: 

That's awesome. Thank you, Will Harris. I think that this message of doing good and doing well is critical to our world, and I think the message that you just left us with, Will, that it is about focus and determination and grit and really having a passion for what you're doing, I think there is nothing I could say that would be more important than that. I do think that when we do that, we will make more money, that we absolutely will do that. If we invest in things that are productive for the world, we will, as it turns out, also pay less taxes. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Will. 

Will Harris: 

Thank you, Tom. Appreciate you having me. 

Speaker 1: 

You've been listening to The WealthAbility Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes. To learn more, go to wealthability.com.