#782: Fiat Food Is Destroying America with Will Harris

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just going nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In a world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Will Harris, welcome to the show, sir.

**Will Harris** (0:38)
Thank you for having me.

**Marty Bent** (0:40)
You were just saying you're honored to be here before we hit record. I'm honored as somebody who's been following your work from afar for many years now. Like I was telling you, we've had a pretty big focus on shaking your rancher's hand here at TFTC over the years. A lot of our audience is going out, meeting their local rancher, buying a quarter cow, half cow, going to their local farmers' markets to support local farmers and I view you, Joel Saliton and others of that caliber is really leaving the chart. So this is a bit of a treat for me specifically, but I guess let's just jump into it.
Starting with White Oak Pastures, why decide to go from industrial farming to regenerative farming? And guess we can get into a conversation about the differences between the two.

**Will Harris** (1:34)
So I was the fourth generation of my family to operate this farm. My children were the fifth. My grandchildren hopefully will be the sixth. My great-grandfather and grandfather operated the farm in a very pre-industrial kind of a way. My dad, born in 1920, took over the farm post-World War II, and he is the generation that really industrialized the farm. On his watch, he became a monoculture-only cattle. Previously, he had done a lot of different species of animals.
He was kind of a pioneer in becoming a link in the chain, the industrial chain that beef goes through from the cow-calf producer to the stocker, out west feed lots to big beef companies. I don't know that my father would like that. We didn't talk about it. He was cowboy, I was cowboy. We didn't talk about stuff like that. But he was successful with it.
I never wanted to do anything except run the farm industrially, just like my dad. I loved it growing up. I went to the University of Georgia, majored in animal science, came home and ran it industrially for 20 years. Then just for a fairly short period of time, I really got tired of it, really got disgusted with the excesses of it.

**Marty Bent** (3:07)
Yeah. I think that the excesses of it is something that's become clear to me. A lot of the conversations we've had around cattle ranching, particularly over the years, have been around where the centralized points of the industry really lie and how that's corrupting incentives for farmers across the country, where you're really not incentivized to produce the best product, but to produce as much product as possible, get it to these large slaughterhouses, and then distribute it from there. Then not only that, but the whole aspect of bringing meat in from other parts of the world, just to increase margins.
The big question I want to get out is, how do we move from this hyper-centralized, big farm, or excuse me, big farm industry here in the United States to a more decentralized, and where does regenerative play into that?

**Will Harris** (4:04)
Well, I think you were on the path for answering that, what you just said. You know, when my great-grandfather and grandfather ran this farm, they raised a lot of different species of animals. They and their employees got up way before a day, every day, six days a week, and they killed something. Might have been a cow, might have been two or three hogs, might have been a few sheep or a few goats or something. Loaded on a mule-drawn wagon without refrigeration or without USDA inspection. Came up the dirt road three miles to Bluffton, the little town that's where I'm sitting right now. And they peddled the meat. They would sell it to the hotel, to the boarding houses, to the more fluent citizens and sold the meat. They had slaughtered that morning and they had to sell it. It was sell it or smell it. There was no refrigeration.
And they were incentivized to have a really good product because the consumer knew exactly where it came from. And they would not buy from them anymore. So they were incentivized to make it the best it could be.