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The western Canadian regenerative agriculture conference season kicked off last week with an inspiring and informative gathering hosted by the Manitoba Forage and Grassland Association. As with every other regenerative agriculture event, the number of attendees is accelerating, and expanding well beyond the pasture-based farmer crowd.
One of the agenda’s highlights was White Oak Pasture’s sales and marketing manager Jenni Harris, daughter of founder and author Will Harris. Jenni offered up rare gems of strategy behind the business’s development of direct-to-consumer sales and livestock processing in the remote rural community of Bluffton, Georgia.
Hope, courage, connection and tactical wisdom characterize the White Oak Pastures business, where 154 full-time employees process 40 head/day in a federally-inspected meat processing plant located on the farm. Currently, sales are about 50/50 split between wholesale, i.e. into grocery outlets like Publix and Whole Foods, and direct-to-consumer households.
Keys to Success
It’s the kind of thing that’s been tried and failed repeatedly in North American farming communities in recent decades. Jenni outlined the steps her family took to make it a success, hoping to inspire more new farmers to start.
- First, they built a farm based on core values and regenerative principles. Everything they do revolves around animal welfare (defined as raising livestock in their natural environment and maintaining the ability to express instinctive behavior), while protecting local wildlife, and reinvesting in community.
- They scaled up and diversified the processing plant beyond cattle into pork, chicken, goats, sheep, chicken, turkey, ducks, geese and guineas, to become full-time operational, achieving enough scale to access grocery retail at a narrow enough spread to commodity meats.
- They scaled up and diversified the processing plant beyond cattle into pork, chicken, goats, sheep, chicken, turkey, ducks, geese and guineas, to become full-time operational, achieving enough scale to access grocery retail at a narrow enough spread to commodity meats.
- De-commoditized, de-industrialized and de-centralized, White Oak Pastures’ products represent a safe and secure food supply.
- The brand’s communications inspire customers to learn, come back, and “vote with consumer dollars for the future they want to see.”
- Founder Will Harris “took the succession planning hit,” instilling “the gift of fight” along with financial transparency, measured control, and long-term stability into White Oak’s inter-generational farm transfer.
How many commodity producers today can boast a successful farm transition, steady growth in sales and community strength, an engaged and excited customer base, all while contributing to food security? This is a very unique story, one that bears repeating began with the establishment of core values and regenerative principles across the farm business’s landscape.
Possibilities for the Future
These days, agriculture industry stakeholders are contemplating – either with great excitement, panic, or a good measure of both – the unprecedented potential for deregulation of food and agriculture in the U.S. under the incoming administration. During such times, it’s necessary to understand case studies like the business that White Oak Pastures is proving works, alongside the mainstream status quo.
The most interesting take-away from Jenni’s presentation related to federal inspection, which dictates that meat can’t be sold commercially unless the animals were slaughtered in the presence of a government representative. This means plants need to be a certain size, and to consistently access just the right balance of sales and supply.
The ditches are full of failed rural small-scale meat processing business plans and co-operatives that just haven’t been profitable, possibly because having inspectors on site makes them uncompetitive compared to mass-produced commodity meat. But that meat isn’t so cheap anymore at the grocery store… and it will struggle to compete alongside traceability and compelling brand values in regenerative meat labeling.
Key Takeaway
According to Jenni Harris, White Oak Pastures minds the meat inspectors at their plant less than the big packers do. She says it’s because their last name goes out on every pack, instilling direct accountability on the part of every worker in the business.
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