The Old-school Cowboys Fighting Climate Change With Regenerative Farming

“I am one of the good old boys that produced food industrially”

Will Harris is a fourth generation cattle farmer from Bluffton, Georgia. Back in 1946, his father began using a miraculous new product on his pasture: ammonium nitrate fertiliser. By 1995, the pasture was failing, the soil was dry and the once busy Bluffton was a rust belt town that had all but disappeared. What’s more, after twenty years of turning a profit using the industrial farming techniques he was taught at university, Harris no longer enjoyed his job.

“Nobody sane and normal should enjoy watching a cow in a feed lot or a hog in a gestation crate or a chicken in a battery cage”

When he discovered a demand for grass-fed beef, Harris jumped at the opportunity to free his cattle from their cramped pens. He stopped feeding them corn in confinement, stopped giving them antibiotics and gave up hormonal implants. Then, he went a step further, abandoning the use of chemical fertiliser and pesticides on his pastures altogether.

Today, Will Harris and his thriving farm are literally breathing new life into their environment while still making profit. Not only are the levels of biodiversity at their highest in living memory (a breeding pair of Bald Eagles has been spotted for the first time) but in providing 150 jobs to his area, Harris has resurrected multiple properties in Bluffton for his managers and their families to live in.

His secret is a rich soil, now able to draw in large quantities of carbon and therefore teeming with the microbial life that decades of chemical fertiliser had eradicated.

Harris’ story is the first episode in the brilliant “Carbon Cowboys” mini series by Peter Byck, our latest Free of the Week selection.