The owner of White Oaks Pastures Will Harris III
My "Meat the neighbors" piece--a profile on some local meat farmers in Atlanta Magazine's Local Food issue--has hit the stands. Here is a little taste:
It’s a sunny spring day, and I’m clinging to my seat as Will Harris III cracks jokes in his epic South Georgia drawl while expertly maneuvering his battered white Lincoln Navigator over the bumpy green fields of White Oak Pastures, his Bluffton farm. Jenni, the middle child of his three grown daughters and his right-hand gal, points out ripe blackberries near a gator-filled pond. Without hesitation, Harris swings the car over. We jump out and stuff sweet berries in our mouths as Jenni warns us to watch out for snakes. As we resume our ride, I turn to Harris and tease, “Who needs a spa when you can have days like these for free?”
But life on a cow farm isn’t always sunshine and blackberries. After his father gave him control of the farm in 1995, Harris, a fourth-generation cattleman, wanted to make some fundamental changes. Raising cattle had changed substantially since post–World War II America, and Harris could no longer bear to watch the livestock he’d raised leave his farm literally stacked on top of one another in a tractor-trailer that would carry them for thirty hours without food or water. “It was like raising your daughter to be a princess and then hauling her off to the whorehouse,” he says.
