White Oak Pastures

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Spanning 8,000 acres, White Oak Pastures is the largest USDA organic certified farm[1] in the U.S. State of Georgia on unceded Muscogee Land.[2]

As the owner of White Oak Pastures, Will Harris boasted to The New York Times in 2015, "We cheat to win," and that confederate general Robert E. Lee is one of his "heroes."[3]

The land at its margins is shadowed by great forests of pine trees, each holding hundreds of pounds of carbon, which once stretched unbroken across the landscape. Bald eagles who attempt to nest in them are hazed and harassed into leaving.[4] The nearby highway is paved over an ancient First Nations footpath. Harris inherited the land from his great grandfather, who settled it in 1866,[5] shortly after the Muscogee people were forcibly displaced along the Trail of Tears.[6]

Will Harris' great grandfather was a confederate lieutenant and enslaver, who forced over one hundred enslaved Black people to leave with him from his pre-war plantation and found White Oak Pastures as a share-cropping plantation.[7] Anti-Black slavery was perpetuated through sharecropping systems throughout this time period after the US Civil War[8][9][10][11][12][13][14], and White Oak Pastures was notorious at the time for its violence and exploitation.[15]

When drinking, Harris turns loquacious. He talks of his great-grandfather, a cavalry officer in the defeated Confederate army, who, like Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, “tore violently a plantation,” working black sharecroppers he paid in Babbitt alloy coins embossed with the Harris brand, which they exchanged for goods at the farm commissary.[16]

A journalist who visited White Oak Pastures in 2016 reported that on the ranch, "casual racism informs life. Whites who work at White Oak Pastures occasionally drop a register when they talk about blacks, as if they know what they’re saying is offensive, but they can’t help themselves."[17]

Devil Worship

Harris is quick to say that he descends from a long line of devils who did everything in their power to retain the land they inherited and expand their holdings while fighting off challengers.... When he quotes his forebears, he often embeds parenthetical apologies, saying, “My father, who was a racist, liked to say…”[18]

Harris keeps an office in downtown Bluffton in a deconsecrated Methodist church, lined with framed press clippings and family portraits, decorated with ram skulls and plow frogs and rusted Coke signs. Over the altar, where a backlit stained-glass Christ once glowed, looms a supersized Harris brand, backed by a blond cowhide. On a wooden communion table, inscribed with the words “Do this in remembrance of me,” sits a bleached white bull skull, his gray-brown horns turned upward like the arms of a prayerful supplicant... But Harris claims he’s not saving anything. Other than his own ass. “If you want to write a story about me and virtue,” he says, “it’s going to be a goddamn short story.”[19]

Greenwashing

General Mills

As a major supplier for General Mills, White Oak Pastures is "not just a small local farm, but actually part of a powerful and massive multinational company, and an important arm of its branding and marketing." [20]

In a 2019 report on White Oak Pastures' carbon footprint, funded by General Mills and published by Quantis, the ranch's importance to rebranding & consumer psychology was made explicit:

Regeneratively grazed beef can likely escape the stigma of extremely high carbon emissions attached to conventional beef. General Mills, Epic and WOP should consider how to tell this story to ensure brand enhancement[21]

Carbon Emissions

According to this Quantis report, White Oak Pastures application of Allan Savory's Holistic Management was so effective that the ranch was producing "carbon-negative beef!" Yet this bold claim was refuted only a year later by a second study funded once again by General Mills, which reported that while White Oak Pastures may reduce carbon emissions relative to other cattle operations, it was still a net emitter of carbon.[22]

Despite General Mills' own privately funded study refuting the "carbon-negative" assertions of White Oak Pastures, both the ranch and the Savory Institute have continued to cite the erroneous findings of Quantis' report.[23][24]

Yet even General Mills' new study was found to have "significant lapses that grossly exaggerate or misrepresent the true SOC sequestration capacity of their farming techniques" despite finding that "“Beef cattle account for about 95% of animal and 52% of land emissions on the ranch.[25]

The study also only used a 100-year timescale to evaluate the heating impact of methane, underestimating its impact by at least 2.5x over the next 20 years. Yet this shorter timeframe is necessary to account for the non-linear dynamics of climate collapse and stop feedback loops from triggering runaway global heating. The latest research shows that immediate and massive emission reductions are required to ensure we avoid this scenario, especially of methane due to its greater impact over shorter timescales[26]

Furthermore, Jason Rowntree, the principal investigator in the new study, had erroneously declared he had no conflicts of interest, despite sitting on the board of the American Grassfed Association and having received research grants from corporations such as McDonald's also seeking to rebrand their beef as 'regenerative.'[27] Other contributors to this new study include individuals associated with EPIC provisions, a "frontier founder" of the Savory Institute; an employee of General Mills; and a contributor to the previous Quantis study in 2019.[28]

Such industrial conflicts of interest in this new study have also been implicated in its dependence on other industry-funded research (funded by the Beef Checkoff program and based on information and direct participation from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association) for its low estimate of emissions: 17 CO2e/kg, compared to "non-industry studies that show 29 CO2e/kg, especially those which factor land use impact that have a mean global average of 60 CO2e/kg."[29]

Savory Network

According to their website, White Oak Pastures is "proud to be named 1 of only 23 Global Savory Hubs" organized by the Savory Institute and participates in Savory's Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) program as a "frontier founder".[30]

According to Allan Savory, scientific evidence against his methods is irrelevant because holistic management "cannot be peer-reviewed." He has made this argument several times, perhaps most recently on Twitter in March of 2021[31] in defense of its application by White Oak Pastures on behalf of General Mills in response to evidence of greenwashing through false claims to produce "carbon-negative beef." [32]

Shell Oil

White Oak Pastures began experimenting with solar energy installations on its ranch in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy.[33]

In 2020, White Oak Pastures and Silicon Ranch Corporation (Shell Oil's U.S. solar platform) announced a partnership to "bring holistic planned livestock grazing and regenerative land management practices to nearly 2,400 solar farm acres."[34] Shell Oil's solar installation on the White Oak ranch is the "first new-build of its regenerative energy holistic approach,"[35] inaccurately presented as "carbon-negative" by White Oak Pastures based on the discredited 2019 Quantis study.[36]

Shell Oil has invested in greenwashing through Holistic Management & its promotion since funding the documentary "Soil Carbon Cowboys" in 2015.[37][38]

Wage Theft

In 2021, White Oak Pastures settled a class action lawsuit for $100,000 of wage theft paid back to its workers [39]

Customers

Whole Foods / Amazon Inc

Now a subsidiary of Amazon Inc, Whole Foods features White Oak Pastures beef prominently in its stores.[40]

Regional Influence

Steaks from White Oak Pastures' beef are cooked and plated in Atlanta's finest restaurants.[41]


Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.wanderwithwonder.com/secrets-of-the-southern-table/
  2. ↑ https://www.earlycountynews.com/articles/harris-shares-white-oak-story/
  3. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/dining/at-white-oak-pastures-grass-fed-beef-is-only-the-beginning.html
  4. ↑ https://whiteoakpastures.wordpress.com/tag/bald-eagles/
  5. ↑ https://bittersoutherner.com/will-harris-white-oak-pastures-farm
  6. ↑ https://medium.com/@unpopularscience/the-regenerative-ranching-racket-fe6cce917a42
  7. ↑ https://www.georgiatrend.com/2014/04/30/2014-most-respected-business-leader/
  8. ↑ https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/sharecropping/
  9. ↑ https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/
  10. ↑ https://wfpc.sanford.duke.edu/north-carolina/durham-food-history/sharecropping-black-land-acquisition-and-white-supremacy-1868-1900/
  11. ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/3514429
  12. ↑ https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-sharecropping/
  13. ↑ https://lpgeorgia.com/juneteenth-not-free-by-tim-smith/
  14. ↑ https://johndurkin8.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/crazy-fun-productive-weekend-part-one-georgia-organics/
  15. ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=IJn_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152&dq=%22James+Edward+Harris%22+%22confederate%22&source=bl&ots=tfxz7c1q67&sig=ACfU3U1b4bf93T2usvMtPN-GTgcoVo6lHw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjhp_7ukf34AhUkIn0KHWWDDqsQ6AF6BQjCARAD#v=onepage&q=%22James%20Edward%20Harris%22%20%22confederate%22&f=false
  16. ↑ https://main.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1018-the-harris-hegemony
  17. ↑ https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-94-fall-2016/the-harris-hegemony
  18. ↑ https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-94-fall-2016/the-harris-hegemony
  19. ↑ https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-94-fall-2016/the-harris-hegemony
  20. ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
  21. ↑ https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf
  22. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20210710172431/https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2020.544984/full
  23. ↑ https://medium.com/@unpopularscience/the-regenerative-ranching-racket-fe6cce917a42
  24. ↑ https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/climatecollaborative/mailings/1633/attachments/original/PPT-FINAL-Regenerative_Mapping-min_compressed.pdf?1579205603; p. 41
  25. ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
  26. ↑ https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00004-0
  27. ↑ https://medium.com/@unpopularscience/the-regenerative-ranching-racket-fe6cce917a42
  28. ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
  29. ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
  30. ↑ https://whiteoakpastures.com/pages/savory-hub?_pos=1&_sid=8b39d043f&_ss=r
  31. ↑ https://twitter.com/allanrsavory/status/1368586780790906885?s=21
  32. ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
  33. ↑ https://www.earlycountynews.com/articles/harris-shares-white-oak-story/
  34. ↑ https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/solar-farms-will-capture-greenhouse-gases-to-store-in-the-soil-300987117.html>
  35. ↑ https://www.siliconranch.com/regenerative-energy-more-than-electricity/
  36. ↑ https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/regenerative-energy-solar-farm-silicon-ranch
  37. ↑ https://robbwolf.com/2016/03/18/sustainability-part-2-the-game-changers-of-small-ag/
  38. ↑ https://jacobin.com/2022/03/big-agriculture-funding-regenerative-ranching-amp-grazing-soil-carbon
  39. ↑ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/employees-working-in-slaughterhouse-3337332/
  40. ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=IJn_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152&dq=%22James+Edward+Harris%22+%22confederate%22&source=bl&ots=tfxz7c1q67&sig=ACfU3U1b4bf93T2usvMtPN-GTgcoVo6lHw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjhp_7ukf34AhUkIn0KHWWDDqsQ6AF6BQjCARAD#v=onepage&q=%22James%20Edward%20Harris%22%20%22confederate%22&f=false
  41. ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=IJn_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152&dq=%22James+Edward+Harris%22+%22confederate%22&source=bl&ots=tfxz7c1q67&sig=ACfU3U1b4bf93T2usvMtPN-GTgcoVo6lHw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjhp_7ukf34AhUkIn0KHWWDDqsQ6AF6BQjCARAD#v=onepage&q=%22James%20Edward%20Harris%22%20%22confederate%22&f=false
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