Harris, Will (2023) A Bold Return to Giving a Damn. One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food. With Amely Greeven. Viking. ISBN 9780593300473. 304 pages.
Ellen Messer
What’s so obvious in literature on sustainable or regenerative farming is that it takes lots of land. And if you haven’t inherited that resource endowment, land is very expensive to acquire. It also takes significant investments of labor, which makes farming a risky proposition for those lacking strong backs, mental toughness, unswerving motivations and similarly dedicated (a more negative word is exploitable) family or fictive kin whose labor builds on trust and love, beyond transactional relationships. Risk, or high tolerance for risk, is another huge factor, because even the best intentioned and most skilled farmers make lots of mistakes or suffer unavoidable calamities as they try to match optimal scenarios to fickle weather, soils, markets, and regulators. Such hard-working “resilience” farmers also need to experience farm and farming life as joyful and fun, as a cultural calling that more than counterbalances the physical and financial pain and occasional or more frequent disasters. In multi-generational farms, there also needs to be an unextinguishable spark to hold on to the family heritage, to restore the destroyed fertility of the soils, the natural habitats that support glorious biodiversity of cultivated species and the uncultivated species that underlie holistic and appreciative, not cog-in-a-machine or node-in-a-food-value chain relationships between humans and animals, and people living in a community that values rebuilding a holistic ecosystem and rural society rather than a maximally efficient food business. In this case near coastal Georgia, one also has to be willing to endure the seasons that bring uncomfortable weather and nasty critters, many insects and other invertebrates that threaten comfort and in the case of venomous snakes, human lives. The ever evolving environmental, food-safety, and financial regulations, and greedy maximize-profit oriented marketers present their own dramatic set of challenges, which savvy farmers have to negotiate and circumvent to avoid going out of business or cutting back on operations.
The volume, which reads like a memoir but intersperses history of food and rural society in this part of the US, is extremely well organized, and manages to communicate not only this farmer’s personal story of transitioning from industrial to regenerative mixed livestock and pasture farming, but also a cautionary tale for all those thinking about what it takes to enter this idealistic approach to food systems. The writing, which is lush and fluidly links a series of first-person personal farming vignettes, retains a salty vernacular and attention to sensory and psychological detail that makes the ecological and economic principles and evidence flow easily throughout.
The first chapter, “A different kind of Eden,” describes his disillusion with industrial farming, which had captured the imagination and practices of his father’s generation in the wake of World War II and the dictum, “Better living through chemistry.” A sample passage (p.8) describes how he has rethought his mode of farming:
…When you farm industrially, you don’t create a Garden of Eden. You destroy one.
As the sun drops lower over the horizon and I continue the evening surveillance of my herds, here are a few of the things that my senses are taking in.
I notice how turbocharged the pasture’s thick carpet of grasses, forbs, and foliage appears. It’s a treasure trove of plant life constantly photosynthesizing sunlight then converting that energy into sugars and proteins that are the first step on the food chain leading all the way to your plate.
I take in the unmistakable freshness that only a big rain delivers, which tells me that the previous day’s rainwater has infiltrated the healthy, microbe-rich soil, which is holding it tight like a giant-size sponge instead of letting it rush off into the watershed like poorer soil would do.
I observe the calves staying close to their mamas, a sign that my herd has good maternal instincts bred into it, and the humidity lightly clouding the savannah’s towering hardwoods—my farm’s longest-living organisms help to create our farm’s very moist microclimate—tells me that the water cycle on this land is working properly.
And I appreciate all the shit. The manure that my cattle and other livestock have deposited all over the pastures is what I call the currency of life; it started as plant matter, got fermented in their bellies, and is now food for microbes that will help it cycle back knot the soil and promote more plant growth.
The text continues to unpack all these concepts, and contrast what is right with this newly recreated “Eden” versus what is wrong in industrial cattle operations, on which the author was schooled. There are lots of numbers (e.g., 97 percent of the beef and 99 percent of the eggs and chicken in the US comes from concentrated animal feeding operations) and careful description of animal diseases, like bird flus, all presented in vernacular, easy to comprehend terms. From beginning to end readers encounter strong evidence-based critiques of Big Ag, Big Food, misleading use of regulated (organic) and unregulated (regenerative) value terms, and the short-sightedness of policy makers, influenced by corporate money, who make life difficult or impossible for small or medium sized farmers.
Some memorable takeaways in these accounts include his observation that renaming of “Animal Husbandry” departments as “Animal Science” clearly demonstrates the influence of ag-chemical lobbyists that moved education away from holistic visions to narrow sci-tech problem formulations that would have technological solutions that then created new sets of problems to solve. Some highlights include: his anecdotes (in multiple places) about bothersome bald eagles, a protected species that lustily feasted on his pasturing poultry flocks, only partly deterred by growing numbers of protective dogs. His speculation about the natural resistance of his pasture-raised diversified poultry to bird flus that decimated industrial operations and prompted official mandates for widespread sacrifice of millions of animals as one preventive response. His detailed descriptions of having to take on debt to expand his operations in order to remove outside corporate meddling with his carefully constructed, ‘whole animal life cycle’ regenerative, animal welfare oriented food chain, the difficulties of negotiating regulatory interference with his control over his own slaughter-houses, uncalled for harassment which he speculates was motivated by Big Ag/Big Food that saw his alternative operations as a threat to their dominant business model, some very shrewd critiques of agricultural banking and finance, which refuses to distinguish higher value for restored land that promises greater productivity and resilience but continues to assess risk and financing on undifferentiated land size basis.
Included under Part Two, “Repairing What I Broke” are step by step descriptions of how he restored the land and returned soils and ecosystems to their “natural” fertility, populated the terrains with multiple species and varieties of animals, intentionally raised the forages to feed them, and sowed additional garden and orchard crops to feed local humans. A nasty episode in the marketing piece of his grass-fed, animal welfare cared beef, is his experience pioneering this innovative category, and then watching his clients (Whole Foods for one, but also big box stores) abandon him for lower-cost non-local suppliers, who somehow manage to produce and ship lower-priced meat and undersell him (the example is grass-fed New Zealand lamb). Under Part Three: The Fight for Resilient Food, Chapter 8, “A More Honest Accounting: the True Cost of Food” (pp. 208-241) calculates value added through agro-ecological practices, not just costs borne by external parties in industrial operations. There is also a wonderful story about Harris’ interactions with representatives from the fast food, industrially-raised chicken sandwich chain, Chick-fil-A, who were naively exploring ways to improve their “sustainability” credentials. After breaking the ice by assuring his visitors that they could not afford his pasture-raised chicken, they entered into an enjoyable and lively farm tour, which ended on a friendly note that their chicken break-even price point couldn’t even afford to buy White Oaks trimmings and ends for broth. The anecdote leaves one confident that such conversations are taking place and also wondering about the real future of food.
Chapters, organized under themes of family farming history, repairing his broken food system, and fighting for resilient food do not shrink from describing the risks and challenges, but always put the satisfying achievements first. They also feature a social component: restoration of rural community, deepening relationships among increasing numbers of workers, successful diversification of income streams including tourist cabins and a restaurant. The final section and addendum include the names of institutions where interested readers can learn more, the Savory Institute, and several certifying agency and holistic/sustainable farmer websites. The text also provides clear descriptions of ecological outcome assessments, verification, and honest labeling as marketing tools and value claims (pp 230-231):
…By measuring ten factors including biodiversity, water infiltration and retention, ground cover, and soil health, we get a read on our total land health that we can monitor over time, and we can demonstrate the results to the public. Having this data in hand let me confidently proclaim to the land appraiser that my soil organic matter was five times richer than surrounding industrial farms, and four times better at holding water. It’s like giving the land a voice to report how the cycles of nature are working. (This is different from what is tracked by most third-party certifications for animal welfare or even certified organic food. Those things track that a farm is following certain processes or achieving standards in their methods. They don’t actually track whether the results of those processes are better for the land or the animals or, frankly, for the consumer either.)
There are also telling examples. One is a brief history of the Paleo snack company Epic Provisions, which featured their White Oaks Pastures regenerative beef story in their marketing. The company was acquired by General Mills, which required third-party certification to satisfy their legal team, so White Oaks Pastures got an LCA analysis from Quantis, paid for by the company. As explained by the General Mills’ VP for Sustainability, Jerry Lynch, LCA was a method that evaluated the environmental impact of their farming methods, with principal focus on generation of green gas gases (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide) into the atmosphere and amount of carbon sequestered into the soils. The researchers sampled soils from fields at seven different stages of regeneration—from recently purchased degraded to regeneratively farmed for at least 20 years. They then modeled the data (p.231). The diction then shifts from simple communicable science principles to Harris’ folksy farmer vernacular:
… I can tell with a shovel alone that the carbon footprint on my farm is pretty damn good. A few big scoops of soil that looks like chocolate cake because it’s so rich in carbon-based organic matter, tells me all I need to know. But I understood why an upstart “good meat” brand with a solid mission needed hard numbers in their pocket; knives are drawn and claws are sharpened these days when it comes to telling a better story about meat and the environment. The anti-meat brigade are so relentless in their crusade to make cows the villains of climate change …a message more aggressively and well coordinated and funded by the year, as far as I can see—is bullshit.
On p.232 he cites Diana Rogers book, Sacred Cow , co-written with Robb Wolf, and gives a point by point critique of the anti-meat eaters’ numbers and arguments, which refuse to distinguish pasture-raised meat from industrial meat supplies. On p.233 he describes the carbon cycle in regenerative pasture operations, and on p.234 continues to rage against vegans, who, in his opinion, enable continuation of industrial farming with all its harms as distinguished from his animal-impact holistic farming model. The happy conclusion of Quantis’s LCA analysis, confirmed by MSU’s Jason Rowntree, was that White Oak Pastures beef sequestered 3.5 pounds of carbon per pound of meat produced. This contrasts with the 3.5 pounds of carbon emitted by conventional agriculture production of the vegan ingredients that go into a pound of Impossible Burger plant-based meat-alternative. “A person would have to eat almost exactly one pound of our grass-fed beef to offset the carbon emitted from a pound of their highly processed stuff made from industrial, monocultural commodity crops.” (pp.235-236) Harris’ harangue about vegans and their search for more justifying measurements concludes:
The fake meat corporations hire scientists to create confusion about which scientific method is proper for measuring stored carbon in the soil. All of these methods seem less than perfect to me. But I ain’t in the business of measuring stored carbon. I am in the business of storing carbon. And no one who looked at our LCA could argue with the fact that we are doing exactly that.
He adds that “the myopic focus” on carbon measurement and carbon credits is too reductionist. A full “value” analysis would begin with cash flows, then add in factors including building land resiliency (water resilience in unirrigated land), jobs, rural communities, and customer satisfaction (happiness), and additional savings to society from costly health impacts and habitat destruction associated with nitrogen runoff into the environment and also waste disposal (White Oaks aims at zero waste) and animal suffering. A conservative holistic evaluation arrives at a 6 fold increase in hypothetical monetized value; a more expansive evaluation incorporating carbon credits and chemical pollution forgone shows 10-30 times the total value (pp.238-239) assigned by “a tight-assed, constipated, suit-wearing bank executive with a limited viewpoint …”(pp.239).
“Know your farmer” is Harris’ concluding guidance to those who would like to live and eat according to “regenerative” farming systems values. To participate in a better food system consumers will have to do the research, including visiting farms to see whether the real farm workers are practicing “resilient” and family-friendly farming methods or false impressions funded by “monopolistic corporations” who engage clever web marketers and social media to fake those images. Harris provides some resources to start such inquiries as well as plenty of questions about the real future of food.
FoodAnthropology 