09-01-09 Grass-fed beef producer stars in Whole Foods documentary

Grass-fed beef producer stars in Whole Foods documentary
White Oak Pastures also lands shelf space at all Whole Foods stores in mid-Atlantic

By Sustainable Food News
September 1, 2009

Sustainable grass-fed beef producer White Oak Pastures is the star of a new documentary co-produced by Whole Foods Market, Inc., which recently placed the company’s products in its mid-Atlantic stores.

The Harris family has been raising cattle at White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga., for the marketplace since 1866. It is the largest certified-organic farm in Georgia.

Late last month, University of Mississippi filmmaker Joe York came to White Oak Pastures to produce a documentary as part of a series of documentaries produced jointly by the university, The Southern Foodways Alliance, and Whole Foods.

The films focus on food producers in the Deep South who embrace sustainable, artisan, and humane production practices in their effort to provide non-industrial food for consumers who appreciate fine dining.

“We were deeply honored and more than a little worried about how we would look” said Harris.

The documentary is called “CUD.” VIDEO: To watch the documentary, click here.

Whole Foods, the world’s largest retailer of organic and natural foods, now sells White Oak beef in stores from Miami to Princeton, N.J., to Columbus, Ohio.

White Oak’s on-farm packing plant has been in operation for just over a year.

“It is beginning to look as though building it might have been the right thing to do” said owner Will Harris. “Without this support, we would have been forced to return to producing commodity cattle for the beef industry”

The cattle are locally born, raised, and harvested to meet a USDA-approved grass-fed protocol, which forbids the use of artificial hormones, confinement feeding, animal by-products, antibiotics, among other things.

Both the farm and the on-farm packing plant are Certified Humane by Humane Farm Animal Care and also Animal Welfare Approved by the Animal Welfare Institute.

The latter certification requires White Oak’s animals to be allowed to graze on pasture, may not be cloned or genetically engineered, aren't given antibiotics or hormone implants, must be handled humanely, and are given the freedom to express their natural behaviors.

The company’s processing plant is a zero-waste facility, and uses a digester to transform waste into organic fertilizer, and a 30,000 gallon septic system to recycle wash-down water.

White Oak received the regional award for The Governor’s Environmental Stewardship Program in March.