Vertically Integrated Farming

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

06-09-2024 • 14 mins

There are serious benefits to raising and processing your own cattle on your own ranch. Not only does it simplify the process of slaughter, but it also consolidates roles of ranching. This, and the benefit to consumers is how vertically integrated farming has a positive impact.

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Will Harris is a fourth-generation cattleman, who tends the same land that his great-grandfather settled in 1866. Born and raised at White Oak Pastures, Will left home to attend the University of Georgia's School of Agriculture, where he was trained in the industrial farming methods that had taken hold after World War II. Will graduated in 1976 and returned to Bluffton where he and his father continued to raise cattle using pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics. They also fed their herd a high-carbohydrate diet of corn and soy. In the mid-1990s Will became disenchanted with the excesses of these industrialized methods. They had created a monoculture for their cattle, and, as Will says, "nature abhors a monoculture." In 1995, Will made the audacious decision to return to the farming methods his great-grandfather had used 130 years before.

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