Healing the Earth Through Regenerative Farming with Will Harris

Is industrial farming bad for us? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly learn about the future of food production, regenerative agriculture, and greenwashing with herdsman, land steward, and author Will Harris.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, we're going to look at regenerative farming, where our food comes from and what its impact will be on climate as well as our health and more on StarTalk.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk's special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And with special edition, we explore the human condition as it is bolstered or interfered with by emergent technology and who and what we are as a species and our relationship to machines. Man, you made this show sound important.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man. That was. I didn't even, I didn't even know we were doing all of that. Nice.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stand-up comedian, actor, still acting like a comedian. Acting like a comedian. Yeah, all right. And Gary.

• 1:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ex-pro footballer and broadcaster.

• 1:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we, we, okay, we've got an interesting show today. Gary, you put, you put together a show I didn't even know was possible in our repertoire. Tell us about it.

• 1:25Gary O'Reilly?

  We found someone who we are going to orbit around who has made this possible because about 25 years ago, a farmer, yes, a farmer, decided that he no longer wanted to be part of industrialized farming. So he threw away the pesticides, threw away the hormones and started to listen to Mother Nature. He is a soil scientist, a hydrologist, a biologist, a chemist, a nutritionist, a weather expert, and a community leader, something very, very important. He now operates one of the largest pasture-raised livestock operations in the USA and was the first outfit to sell a pound of grass-fed beef to Whole Foods.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 2:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. He calls himself radically traditional while his daughters call him an iconic icon. We're just going to be calling him Will Harris.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, his daughters call him an iconic icon?

• 2:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Organic.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Organic icon. Yeah, that's great.

• 2:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, that's doubling down on the icon status, but no, organic.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. We have In the Flesh from Georgia.

• 2:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming in, one of our old time farmers, Will Harris. Will, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me. It's an honor.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. You are a fourth generation farmer. Will, I can honestly say I can probably count on one hand how many farmers I've ever met in my life. And you've been a farmer for four generations. And how old is your farm that you're working on?

• 2:53Speaker 02

  My great grandfather came to this farm in 1866, and we've been farming.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. Oh, okay. That's how. And the name of your farm, White Oak Pastures. We might have seen that on some food. I shop at Whole Foods, you know, I, you know. Look at you, Mr. Fancy. Maybe I gave you some of my money.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  That was then, but he's thrown me out now.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got to find out about that. We're going to find, we're going to get into that. Find out what happened there. You're the author of Bold Return to Giving a Damn. That's. That's a great title. That's awesome. And that just came out in the fall of 2023.

• 3:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That explores the link between and among food, health, and climate change. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so let me, let me start off by asking you, Will, why would you move away from industrial farming? I presume industrial farming made everybody make much more money faster. And it allows us to grow more food on less land with fewer people than ever before. So why would you ever walk away from that?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Well, the short answer is unintended consequences. Everything that you said is true. More food, less land, probably more profit. But there are unintended consequences, and the unintended consequences are followed on the backs of the animals.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  The land, the environment, and the rural economy.

• 4:31Chuck Nice?

  Hmm. So these unintended consequences, normally when people say that, that's a bad thing. I mean, because unintended consequences just means something happened that you didn't foresee. That can be something good. So what, what is the bad?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  I meant it before, not the law. There's, there's, there's a bad thing.

• 4:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  The bad things would be the impact on the envi- you know, to, to, to operate a modern farm. There are a lot of products used, the end of the name is CID, C I D E. That's Latin for kill.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, like homicide, suicide, that's what you mean.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, homicide, insecticide, pesticide, herbicide. My father took over the farm in nineteen forty-six and turned it into a modern industrial linear farming operation. I followed him and never wanted to do anything except what he did. Went to the University of Georgia when I came of age. I graduated in nineteen seventy-six with a degree in animal science and learned a lot about how to kill pests. And I came home and implemented those teachings successfully financially.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these would be insects, but also I guess weeds too? These are both of those you don't want in, on your farm.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Anything you don't want. That could be pathogens, it could be insects, it could be weeds, it could be so, so many things. Whatever you don't want is a product out there to.

• 6:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you want a don't want to side. That's what you.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All purpose thing for everything you don't want. That's what you, you want to side it.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not the way it works. But yes, you're, you're right.

• 6:23Chuck Nice?

  I, I gotta tell you, Neil, if Dow Chemical comes out with don't want to side, I'll know that they're listening to this show.

• 6:31Gary O'Reilly?

  So Will, how long did it take, once you made the changes, once you decided, you know what, that's it? Taking the chemicals out, I'm gonna let this Mother Nature project take. How long does it take for a reset? For you to now make something positive happen out of this action?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  When you make the decision to cease to use all those technologies, you take a production hit immediately. And it takes a period of time to overcome it. I would say five years, but I don't know. I don't know if that's exactly right. It's gradual. The things that you can do to accelerate it. Uh, and to be, to be, to be honest, you never get back up to the level of maximum production you had when you were using all the technologies.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  You don't create the unintended consequences. You don't kill the flora and fauna in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a lot of favorable things that you don't do. But no one is overplaying, to my knowledge, that you maximize production on the land by giving up the technologies. You don't. You, uh, but what you do is you restart the cycles of nature. The cycles of nature yield an abundance. The cycles of nature would be, for instance, the energy cycle, the water cycle, the mineral cycle, on and on. When those cycles are operating optimally, as they do in nature, they produce an abundance.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  All that oil and coal and gas in the ground is the abundance of nature when it was operating optimally. And we've been using that since. So what we've been is, uh, cease to use the sides that, that end lives and, and work to, uh, generate the abundance that comes from all the cycles operating as optimally as we can make.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that makes you the, the weird farmer among farmers, right? What, what, why, why even go there? What, what, what motivated you? Did you watch some documentary one night and said, oh my gosh, I've been wrong?

• 8:44Chuck Nice?

  Cause it sounds like, uh, it sounds like you were working against your own interests by making this decision.

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly. And, and did you have like a come to Jesus moment on this one? And you say, I gotta change.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  You know, the, the, the sad truth is I probably came to see the damage I was creating because I was a bit of an abuser. You know, I was a very heavy-headed farmer. And if the label instructions said to use a pint, I might use a quart. If it said to use two cc's, I might use three cc's. So when you uh overuse the tools, you see the damage the tools cause. And when I started moving away from it, I was not moving necessarily to this uh model that we embrace today. I was just moving away from that one.

• 9:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Hmm. And I'm I'm very pleased that it did.

• 9:42Gary O'Reilly?

  When when you say about the health of soil and things like that, what were you? Had you got to the point where we were kind of getting, is it desertification of the soil? Where it just, just is just dirt and barren?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  That that's a good question. And I think that most of the land that's industrially farmed today is desertifying or has been desertified. And the example I'll give you is uh organic matter, the the carbon uh percentage of of the soil. My land had gotten down to one half of one percent organic matter.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  After twenty years of farming it uh in accordance with nature, it's five percent organic matter. That's ten X. And let me tell you what that means. One percent of organic matter will absorb in the soil, will absorb about one inch rain a bit. That's twenty seven thousand gallons of water per acre. So my land at five percent will absorb a five inch rain event. And we get them in Georgia.

• 10:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  When it was a half a percent organic matter, it was only going to absorb a half an inch of rain. I don't care how much it fell. And organic matter is not the only thing that's important. The microbial uh component, a lot of things are important, but that's just the easiest one to state the case for.

• 11:08Gary O'Reilly?

  What about animal welfare? Because you raise cattle. You know, you've got a field to fork process that we'll get into, I'm sure. Um, so how, how long did it take for you to see the benefits in the animals themselves?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  That was much easier.

• 11:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh huh.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Animal welfare, as an industrial cattleman, had come to me and you keep them well fed, you keep them well watered, you keep them in a comfortable temperature range, you don't intentionally inflict pain or suffering. And that's good animal welfare. That is the accepted standard. And I did that and I thought I was, I thought I was really good at that. I thought my animal welfare was above approach. I came to realize that in addition to those things, good animal welfare also means you give the animal the opportunity to express instinctive behavior. Cattle were meant to roam and graze, logs were meant to root and wallow, chickens were meant to scratch and peck.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  And the industrial model, the way we, we do it today industrially, does not allow those instinctive behaviors.

• 12:21Chuck Nice?

  So you go up against nature?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. You're going against nature. And you know, you could, you could go against nature raising your children. You could lock them in a closet.

• 12:30Chuck Nice?

  I do it all the time.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  That's right. And nobody, and nobody will abduct them. They won't fall off the bike. They won't get tackled on the end run. You know, so it's just, it's a good, safe place to raise them. It's probably not, it's probably not the best rearing your children can have. And that's what industrial animal production is, is monocultural confinement production.

• 12:59Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you a question. This is slightly off of what we're, where we are right now, but since you brought it up about animal welfare and grazing, um, I was on a shoot in Dallas, not Dallas. It was outside of Dallas, but it was a cattle farm. And, um, the cattle were grazing, they had two parts of this farm.

• 13:24Chuck Nice?

  And the gentleman who was my liaison, I was like, oh, look at that. So that's, that's your grass fed. And he was like, yeah. And I was like, I like that. I like grass fed. Um, and he went, you know, I'm not a grass fed person because I feel as though it doesn't give you the same type of fat content that a corn fed cow would have. And so you end up with a different taste of the beef. I'm, I'm a corn fed person. It, it, it, does it really come down to that? Does it make that much of a difference that you're going to get a different product at the very end? Uh, if something and, and the way, the way he put it, they're, they're worlds apart. Now I wouldn't know, but.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  What that gentleman told you was absolutely true and accurate. It's exactly the way it is. But I'll put a little different slant on it for you.

• 14:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  A grain fed animal that's butchered typically will be about, will probably less than two years of age. They'll probably weigh 13 or 1400 pounds. You probably have at least a half an inch of back fat. And it would be, it would be an unnaturally obese creature that would never survive in nature. And if it were left in that environment, that made it so obese, it would not live a normal lifespan. In fact, it probably wouldn't live, I'm just going to guess, a half a natural lifespan. Now, is the beef from that cow tender and

• 14:59Speaker 02

  juicy? Yes. Is it, is the weight put on at a very competitive cost? Yes. But I'm of the opinion that eating a creature that is unnaturally obese and dying from the, uh, conditions of sedentary lifestyle and obesity probably ain't good for you.

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  You know, when you put it that way, it makes sense. I mean, basically you're, you're eating the cow that sits on the couch, watches TV and eats potato chips. That's what you're doing.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With, with a beer. Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  My cow are, my cow are athletes. They should be our athletes. And the life, the life expectancy of a cow.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  I think he's 24 years of age. I think that's what I saw is the normal life expectancy. We don't, we don't let them live that long, but I think that's what it is. And I have every reason to believe that my animals would live to be 20, 24 years old. If I just left them out there where they are right now. But I'm sure they wouldn't live to be 24 years old in that environment, that feedlot environment that we just described.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:45Gary O'Reilly?

  You mentioned the term earlier, linear, linear farming, the industrialized farming. And we've discussed soil well-being, water content quality, animal welfare. But you're based in one of the poorest rural counties in the USA. What impact was linear industrialized farming having on the people? Not just the soil and the ecosystems?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Well, moving to the linear model is what has impoverished rural America. We move, rural America has continued to be where we produce the raw material that most food is made from today. We do not add the value here anymore. We produce the cattle or pigs or beets or cotton or corn or whatever. And it is moved in a very linear manner to another production sum, to another, to another, where the value is added. And that has impoverished rural America.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because all the value is not earned where the farm is?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Correct, almost. In fact, a very small percentage. I think that the last number I saw is that something like 15 cents of the food dollar goes to the farmer. So the rest of it goes to someone else. And I'm not saying those people are getting money without deserving it. No, of course not. They had, they had value, but it's impoverishing rural America.

• 18:22Gary O'Reilly?

  So why, why then, in, in your opinion, is the food that is produced by big agriculture, big food, if, if you want to call it and tag it that, why is, why is the food that we're consuming so messed up if there's a way to make it happen differently?

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why doesn't everyone do what Will does?

• 18:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More or less, that's what you're asking.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  It's, it's a great question, and it's because the consumer has wanted cheaper and cheaper food, aggressively demanded cheaper and cheaper food, at least since World War II. And we provided it. We being the, the farmer and being all the way up the chain. We provided cheap food. In fact, I would say we, we provided obscenely cheap food. That was, that has become just wastefully abundant.

• 19:17Chuck Nice?

  Right, right. And, and how much is that, how much is that is related to the explosion of retail eating in this country? So, you know, your McDonald's, your Burger Kings, your this and that, the, all these restaurants. I mean, when you look at it, the mainstay of all these restaurants is beef. So, I mean, how much does that have to do with it?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Well, I think that the, the retail food business that you referenced was one more step of taking cost out of production, of taking cost out of food provision. The fact is, McDonald's can buy beef and cook it and serve it cheaper than you, you can buy beef and cook it in your apartment or house. It's just as simple as that.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That tips the scales and there's no going back from that.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  And there may be no going back. Uh, yeah, I, I hope we can, we can some extent go back. You know, the, uh, I think that there is a segment of our population that has figured out that cheap food really isn't that cheap.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  I don't talk too much about the impact on health. I mean, I believe there is one, but I'm a farmer, not a doctor, not a dietitian, and I don't want to get in that vein.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  But when it comes to the impact on the land, I know that industrially produced food is really, really bad. When it comes to the impact on the animals, I know that industrially produced food is really, really bad. When it comes to the impact on local rural economies, I know that that industrial food is really, really bad. And I don't know of any reason to do it other than it's cheap. It is really, really cheap.

• 21:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it sustainable as a model to, to continue industrialized farming? And just keep making cheap food and piling it high and whether you eat it or, or it goes to waste, is it a sustainable model?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  I'm convinced that it's not. You know, that is a source of great debate among the people like me versus big food, big tech, big ag. But I don't believe that it is.

• 21:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm. So.

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, you don't believe that mega farming is sustainable?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  I do not. I do not believe that.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Uh, I believe that we are exhausting irreplaceable resources and that it will end poorly.

• 21:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but, but suppose, I mean, I'm a fan of science and technology and every time something turns wrong on it, some innovative clever person comes up with a solution to it. So if you went down the list of everything that was wrong with Big Pharma and somehow you magically could correct it, then Big Pharma might be okay, right?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  If, if it were magic, I don't think.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:18Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, you, you, you've tagged your, your way of farming as field to fork.

• 22:25Gary O'Reilly?

  And I think we can all visualize exactly how that works. But what does that entail? Because it's, there's all these, this has to all now be connected as opposed to these individual silos that industrial farming has where someone takes hold of this and someone takes hold of that and someone takes hold of the other. So how does that entail filter fork for you?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And that's where it becomes most difficult. When we, my dad's generation and later mine, turned food production into something very linear, they set it up for scale, to have huge plants and factories producing food, taking raw materials in at a very minimum quality standard and further processing it, it became a marketable product. That simply does not work well in this model that we have.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  It is, it is not linear, therefore it doesn't blow up as well. It's escalated in terms of numbers, but it does replicate in terms of numbers. We believe that there should be food production in every county, every agricultural county in the country. And a benefit we hadn't talked about that is during the pandemic, when the food was gone off the food shelves and the big meat plants.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only that, the underwear and the water, I mean, the, the.

• 23:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Toilet paper.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The toilet paper and the water went off the shelves just as fast.

• 24:04Gary O'Reilly?

  It was bicycles, you couldn't get a bicycle.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  If you're rating those, you know, the food is, is pretty close to the top with the, with the toilet paper.

• 24:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, very closely related.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  But during that time, meat plants ceased to operate. And of course, I was, I've lived in fear that mine would too. We never missed a day. We never missed a day operating our red meat plant and our poach plant here on this farm. That's because our model is not nearly as scalable, but is far more replicatable and durable.

• 24:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, you've, you've been in the farming business for quite some time. You've established that, your historic, traditional.

• 24:53Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. Climate change. Does it affect you and how you farm? Um, or is it, you know, what their cattle, they'll eat grass, I'll let them, they can wander around, be happy? Or are you actually changing?

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It works both ways. Does heat affect your climate change?

• 25:09Gary O'Reilly?

  And?

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does climate change affect you, Matt?

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Both. I think that, I think what we do impacts climate change. I think that when I was farming industrially and buying thousands of tons of chemical nitrogen per year and releasing it and oxidizing, God knows how much carbon in the soil. I was contributing to climate change. I know that what I'm doing now is a benefit to mitigate against climate change. I mentioned the fact that the organic matter in my soil. Uh, so I'm, I'm, I think it works both ways.

• 25:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Not to mention, um, in addition to climate change, from an environmental standpoint, you know, big agro farming, just the runoff alone because of the chemicals that are used is extremely deleterious to surrounding communities, leads to health problems, uh, damages, uh, waterways, it contaminates groundwater in some instances.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Carl Sagan said, air molecules and water molecules don't carry passports.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right across borders.

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  They don't, that's right.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  My farm, where I'm sitting right now is about eighty miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. And there is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, it's about the same size as Massachusetts. And when I was a kid, when I was a kid, the oysterman literally brought oysters, Lake Litch, Oyster, ten miles that way, once a week, we had fresh oysters. They banned, uh, oystering in the Gulf of Mexico now, except for some, uh, cultured stuff they do. So, you know, the impact on the, the impact that industrial agriculture has had on the environment is not arguable. It's not arguable.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  You know, there is a study on my website, whiteupasses.com, called an LCA, Life Cycle Assessment. It was an eighty something thousand, eighty something thousand dollars stated that a customer paid to have done on my farm by a third-party environmental engineering firm from Chicago, I think. And they came here to see what we were doing and the expectation was that we were contributing to carbon depletion in the soil and all those other things. But what they found is that our cattle operation actually sequesters three and a half pounds,

• 27:49Speaker 02

  listen to me, three and a half pounds of carbon every pound of beef we produce.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's not magic?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  No, it's not magic. It's nature. It's nature. You know, I could argue that nature's a little bit magic, but it's nature.

• 28:20Gary O'Reilly?

  We talk about nature and I said earlier on in the show that you started to listen to Mother Nature. And if I remember rightly, you say that Mother Nature will provide everything you need to be successful in farming. Now, that's easy to say, but how do you get to a conclusion like that?

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, nature, there's a lot of poisonous stuff that'll kill you outright in nature, right? So, nature doesn't always equal good and non-nature doesn't always equal bad. So, do you tread that line?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not sure that nature doesn't always equal good. It doesn't always equal life. You know, yes, there's stuff out there that will kill you. There's stuff out there that will make you strong. You should eat what makes you strong. You should not eat what will kill you. One way or another, you'll figure it out.

• 29:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Or not.

• 29:14Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, hopefully, somebody will figure it out for you.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tester, yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  When the guy beside you eats that green thing and falls over, you don't need to eat that green thing.

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Will, tell me about this book you just released, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn. And it's...

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The the future matters to us all in so many ways and everyone thinks they have the answer and people are fighting over who has the best answer or who's moving fast enough or not fast at all. Where does your book land in this? Where where are you taking the reader in your attempt to show the world through the lens that you have so hard earned in your life?

• 30:02Speaker 02

  So, the book is about my 25 years of returning this farm from a very industrial, monocultural cattle production operation to a very, what I believe is a very perpetual sort of farming operation that feeds us and does so in a way that is humane to the animals and improves, not not degrades the landscape.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So agriculture 2.0 is what you're talking about here. This is a new mindset, or maybe maybe 3.0, because 1.0 was farmers before there was technology, then there was technology, and now you're kind of going back back back to roots here.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  I think it's 3.0.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  And we, you know, my family has been on this farm for 160 or whatever years and we farmed the way that in a way that's similar to what I farm today, but we forgot. Let me say this, I am not anti-technology. You know, we've got, I'm on my fourth drone.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Did you lose them?

• 31:17Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Will, are you telling me that you're bombing other farmers?

• 31:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop. A drone is just a flying thing that has cameras and other stuff. It doesn't have to be dangerous.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  You know, we've got a lot of technology here and I embrace it and I use it and I'm glad we got it.

• 31:44Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're not anti-science and technology, you just got questions over the application?

• 31:48Speaker 02

  I'm trying to use it in a model that that does not detract from the natural flow of things.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if you if nature has a natural flow and then you try to go against it, what are the consequences?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  They're bad. I mean, you ought to be more specific, but we're doing it right now.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, I know. Okay. Almost everything we call civilization has been a pushback against nature. Right? We build a city on the water's edge and then, yeah, storm comes in every now and then, there's a flood. Nature's fighting back. But no, we won that fight. We build a dam to create electricity and fresh water. That's a fight we win against. We've fought a lot of battles against nature and won in the service of civilization.

• 32:35Chuck Nice?

  But there's always the consequences of that of that battle that you're talking about. In that dam, you often end up killing the wildlife that uses that waterway. Or you have to make some type of concession, for instance, I'm thinking salmon particularly. You have to make a concession for that particular water wildlife. You know, when it comes to storms, if you don't have marshlands surrounding that city, that city will flood and the storms will destroy the city. So the fight has to have concessions that allow you.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or it has to be intelligently done.

• 33:07Chuck Nice?

  Intelligent, right.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  These are unintended consequences and the unintended consequences can be devastating. And I don't know, I don't, you know, I'm not the guy that's smartest, which ones of these ideas are good ideas and which ones are bad ideas. But I do know, because firsthand I witnessed on this farm of the degradation that came from using these technologies to kill something. Yeah, we get back to that deal outside. When I was an industrial capitalist, monocultural industrial capitalist.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Every single night, I went in my pasture and looked aggressively for something to kill. A pathogen, a weed species, an insect.

• 33:58Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this, because this is fascinating. I can't believe we didn't get to this earlier. What did you replace that with? If you're using something with a side on it, okay, just to stop using it, you still can have invasive, whether it's a pathogen, whether it's a pest itself, or, you know, whether it just is another species of plant that you don't want coming in to your crops. What did you replace that with?

• 34:25Speaker 02

  You're exactly right. There will be another pest that results from the use of that side. There is a side for it, too.

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  It's the endless, constant use of killing something. My goal, when I was an industrial monoculture cattleman, every day was to kill what displeased me. Now, my goal is to make these things live, because every single species out there has a role in that natural environment.

• 34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you get rid of the weeds, then? How do you get rid of the parasites that are eating the food you're trying to grow and sell? How do you do that without the magic of modern, met, modern chemicals?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  It's the same way, the same way that it happened for thousands of years. I ceased to have the monoculture of cattle, because the weeds were eating me up. And I've got sheep, and goats, and hogs, and poultry, and they handle it. Now, my pastures are not pristine. When I was farming industrially and monoculturally with cattle, it was like my pastures were a monoculture. Tifton eighty-five Bermuda grass. That was bred by the University of Georgia, and it will assimilate incredible amounts of chemical nitrogen and turn it into forage for cattle. It's incredible.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  But the use of that level of nitrate fertilizer literally destroyed the organic model and oxidized, as we're oxidized, the organic model in my soil. And I had the other species would appear, and I would spray it. Gray zone P and B herbicide. And the army worms would eat it up, so I would spray that. The list just goes on and on and on.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, okay, okay. Yeah. So, so if you're, you are successful in the context of your mission statement, I have, has this caught on to other farming communities, other counties, other, I mean, ideally, that's, that's what you'd want.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  It is what I wanted, and sadly, it has not caught on. I don't mean I'm the only one doing it, I don't mean that, but it has not caught on because, primarily because of competition from big multinational corporations.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah, but consumers are not without power here. Yeah. So if people wanted to get, you know, they read your book and they say, we are all in on this. What do we do as consumers? Just be very picky about what we buy as an endpoint in the production cycle?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  You, you're right. The consumer will determine how this all, all goes down, how this proceeds forward, and if they decide to find farmers like me and support them, there will be more farmers like me for them to support, and it can grow.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Because that's how that goes.

• 37:26Gary O'Reilly?

  So we, as a consumer, we need to adopt a local farmer. Is this what we're thinking? In the sense of not, not to give them a home, but to support them, you know, by buying their produce?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  You're, you're, you're exactly right. And, and I, I got to say that because we, why the class has started very early, I'm selling as much product as I want to sell. I'm, I'm fine. I'm not trying to grow this business. But I'm selling it in forty-eight states, and that was not my plan. You know, I, I can't sell as much product as I need to sell in Bluffton, Georgia, with a population of a hundred and twenty people. But the multinational, big companies have

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Seeing the acceptance of some of this messaging that people like me are putting out. And so they greenwash their product. And greenwash product is the nemesis of this kind of farming.

• 38:28Gary O'Reilly?

  How are they greenwashing?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Well, I mentioned earlier, you can bring grass-fed beefing in from thirty countries and label it as a product of the USA legally. The animal is grown, slaughtered, processed, packaged in Uruguay, New Zealand, Australia, twenty-something other countries. But then it's legally, and that got changed in two thousand and fifteen. You couldn't do that, but you can label it product of the USA because value was added in this country. And it was again.

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's how that works.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  That's how it works. It was a game changer and it was wrong and it was done because multinational corporations have so much power.

• 39:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Damn. Wow. So, I mean, the way around that, direct to consumer sales, is that something that needs to really be?

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  And education. I think what, what, what, education is a big thing. Where it is catching on, and we've all seen this, especially here in the New York area, is farm-to-table restaurants, where the restaurant owners are making the decision to source products from local farms so that they can have a better product on their restaurant table.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Farm-to-table.

• 39:52Chuck Nice?

  Farm-to-table. So, you know, it is catching on in some respects.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  If the needle is moved on the way we produce food in this country, it's going to have to be done by the consumer. It's not going to happen through land-grant universities or through politicians or through big gag, big food. I can give you a long list of people or entities that we'll not include. If it happens, it's going to be because consumers drive it. And sadly, it's got to be the, it's got to be the consumers that can't afford it. Now, let me say this, be clear on this. My food is not as cheap as commodity food. It's not. We don't expect it to be.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  All those costs that are thrown out of the commodity model absorbed in my model. I can't grow food the way I grow it instead of in the commodity market. It's got to go to a consumer that can afford it and will choose to afford it. Now, still, I worry about the people that can't afford it. I worry about that, but I can't, I can't solve that problem at the same time.

• 41:00Gary O'Reilly?

  You, you went to university, studied animal science. Are universities or colleges teaching this, your kind of farming model? Or is it, you know, well, industrial or nothing else?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  That's a good question. That's a great question. So the answer for the most part is it's strongly influenced by the big food companies, big tech companies that donate money to them very strongly. But there are a few. Michigan State University has a, is a savory hub. That's kind of a long story we didn't get into, but there's a holistic management, land management system, savory, not like savory foods, guys, name Alan Savory. That's what I was wondering.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Alan Savory is a guy from South Africa that, that we, I took my holistic training under him in, in South Africa. All right.

• 42:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Before you go, Will, is this quote attributed to you? Mother nature knows everything, forgets nothing and bats last.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  It absolutely is. It's the truest now thing I've ever seen.

• 42:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  That's a great, great quote.

• 42:22Gary O'Reilly?

  That's a wonderful quote.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Knows everything, forgets nothing and bats last. That's, that's badass right there.

• 42:29Gary O'Reilly?

  That's some serious wisdom going on. If you can look at the, the world that you operate in, in that way.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  This is a connection. It's a serious connection.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mission statement and wisdom rolled into one. Yeah. So guys, we got to call it quits there, but oh my gosh, I'm delighted to learn from you, Will. Yeah, Will, thank you for providing us with authentic food. We appreciate it. And that you exist in this world. This is an important cog in a wheel that is being built and slowly being turned. And maybe one day we'll look back on this show, it's, oh, that was, he was a pioneer. Now everybody does it. You know, that's kind of what we, what maybe is That would be nice. The arc, the arc of progress.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  I am very grateful to you all for having me on as your guest. Thank you very much.

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are welcome. All right. Well, you can check out Will's book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, From an Authentic Farmer. So Gary, Chuck, thanks for being my co-host. Pleasure, Neil. It's a pleasure. All right. This has been StarTalk Special Edition, all about the future of farming and how to make it sustainable in this world, in this universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.