Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1893 - Will Harris
Uploaded: 2022-11-03T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1893 - Will Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-11-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1893 - Will Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-11-03. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1893 - Will Harris

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
All right, so you are actually the second Will Harris I've had on the show.
I should just tell you.
My friend Will Harris is a documentary filmmaker.
He does MMA films, does films about UFC fighters, and he's been on recently.
So people see the name Will Harris, so like, we have to make a distinction.
There are more than one, and you're the different one.
You're the farmer.
Maybe next time I'll be your friend, too.
Well, I first saw you on television doing one of those very quick interviews
where there
was, you know, they were talking about all these issues that you like to
discuss, but
they only gave you a couple of minutes.
And it was really hard because you have a relaxed way of talking, but you were
very interesting.
And I was watching this.
I was like, this is a stupid format.
Like, I want to hear what this guy has to say.
Obviously, he has a lot more to say.
So that's why we're having this conversation.
Well, thank you for that.
Thank you.
That event you're talking about was Fox News.
A guy named Stuart Varney invited me to be on, and he kicked my ass pretty good.
And I accept culpability in it.
You know, I don't watch TV much, and I've never watched Fox News.
Never.
No.
And I should have, I mean, I should have prepared myself, but I didn't.
You know, I took it at its word.
I got an email from this Stuart Varney saying he wanted me to be on a segment,
five minutes,
explaining why I didn't think it was good for Bill Gates to own so much farmland.
So I said, well, that's good.
You know, I have definite opinions, thoughted opinions on that.
I want to share them.
So I sat down and wrote up a four-minute explanation of facts of why I thought
that's not good.
And I thought I was going to get to go through my stuff.
And he asked the question, and I started explaining it.
And I'm profoundly Southern.
You know, I speak slowly.
And I was doing what I thought he wanted me to do.
And he said, but why?
Why?
Everything on those shows is just, you got to get to the point, get to the
point, get
to the point.
If we'd been in the cow pasture, I'd have pinched his fucking head off.
Well, unfortunately, that's his job.
He's got producers in his ear.
I guarantee you they're telling him to move things along quicker.
It's a shitty job.
It's unfortunate.
It's a terrible way to disseminate information.
And could you just, like, let's start it from the beginning, like, who you are.
Tell us everybody about your farm and how everything is.
How everything is run.
Because it's very interesting.
Good.
So, I'm Will Harris.
I'm the fourth generation of my family to own and manage white oak pastures.
I have two daughters and two in-laws who are there with me today helping run
the farm.
And I have seven grandchildren.
So, the sixth generation is on the farm.
There's been in my family since 1866.
Wow.
So, my great-grandfather, James Edward Harris, came there in 1866 and
established the farm and ran it all his life, followed by his son, Will Carter
Harris, my granddad, followed by his son, Will Bell Harris, my dad, followed by
me.
And now, again, I've got two more generations in the offing.
You know, I think the thing I enjoy most, and to tell you about the farm.
So, the farm is—that farm is 3,200 acres.
We do some other grazing, but that farm is 3,200 acres.
We pasture raise five different poultry species—chickens, turkeys, geese, guineas,
and ducks.
And we hand butcher them on the farm in a USDA-inspected processing plant I
built.
We pasture raise five red meat species—cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits—and
hand-butchered them in a separate USDA-inspected facility that I built.
We raised pasture, eggs, organic vegetables, honey, and a bunch of other little
ancillary businesses that go from the organism that is white oak pastures.
So, they're very different from what I did prior to 25 years ago.
What did you do prior to 25 years ago?
So, prior to the mid-'90s, I ran it, as my father had, as a very linear, monocultural
cattle operation, the factory farm model.
And what made you make a shift to the way you're doing it now?
Would you call the way you're doing it now regenerative agriculture?
That's how you would describe it?
Yeah, I would—you know, it's just a matter of days before big food takes, you
know, that description away from us.
But, you know, it was sustainable.
It's been organic.
Now it's regenerative and makes it be resilient.
But it is a kinder, gentler agriculture.
And it's an agriculture where everything works in symbiosis.
Is that a safe thing to say?
It's a great thing to say.
The chickens grazing, the manure that the cows lay, everything goes back
together.
Exactly.
It's—we call it biomimicry, the emulation of nature.
You know, it's a very imperfect emulation, but it's better and better.
And it serves to restart the cycles of nature, which we broke through
industrial farming and make our living off the abundance that comes from
properly operating cycles of nature.
And did you go out on your own to learn this?
If your father was a monocrop agriculture guy and you developed the farm in
this way, obviously it must have taken a lot of planning.
So how did you decide to make that shift?
And what was the motivation?
I'll give you the motivation first.
I was—I operated the farm very industrially, as my father did, for the first
20 years.
I graduated from the University of Georgia, College of Agriculture, with a
degree in animal science, not animal husbandry.
And I operated the farm very industrially.
By industrially, I mean I used a lot of technology.
You know, we misapplied technology.
We—group of some therapeutic antibiotics, ionos phoas, hormone implants.
Hormone implants?
Yeah.
How does that work?
You know, from an endocrine point of view, you've got to talk to somebody else.
Oh, okay.
But the way it works is you can buy hormone implants for cattle,
and you actually give little pellets that you put in the skin behind their ear.
And it causes them to grow faster.
And we—
Wow.
Is that commonly used?
Yeah.
In the industrial model, it's very, very commonly used.
It's a multi-million or billion-dollar industry.
Wow.
So they give the cows extra hormones so the cows get larger,
and they try to feed them quicker,
and they're feeding them mostly green to get them fat.
Correct, which is a very unnatural,
feedstuff for a ruminant animal.
Yeah.
That's a fascinating thing, isn't it?
Because so many people like green-fed steaks.
They like that real fatty—
and that if you give them a grass-fed steak,
it's almost like, hmm, this is interesting.
Tastes different.
Like, they're not accustomed to it.
It's a little chewier.
It's a little different.
It is.
And, you know, we never market our product by saying,
this is the most tender steak you've ever put in your mouth.
Right.
I hear grass-fed producers say that, and I wince.
Because they're setting an expectation we can't get to.
Well, it's also we have to look at the reality of why
that animal is so chewy, or it's so easy to chew.
It's because it's got no—like, the body is unhealthy.
There's so much fat in the system
that the body's marbled with fat.
Like, if that was a human being and you saw it like that,
that person would be sick.
Like, if you look at one of those cows
that's, like, completely infused with fat,
if that was your body, you'd be like,
wow, I might need to get myself together
because this is not good.
This is not a good look.
A feedlot cow is an unnaturally obese creature
that would never occur in nature.
Never.
Never.
So a bull or a heifer that I slaughter
would be two years old.
It would weigh—live weighed 1,100 pounds.
It would have two or three-tenths inch of back fat.
And if I gave it—if I gave that animal
a presidential pardon and said,
we're not going to slaughter you at two years' age,
they would live to be 20-something years old, probably.
That's the normal life expectancy of a cow.
Contrast that to a feedlot animal
that would yield prime or choice.
They would be probably 16 to 18 months of age,
not two years.
They would probably weigh 1,300, 1,400 pounds,
not 1,100.
They would have three-quarters of an inch of back fat.
And while I have not done this,
I would be willing to bet you
that if you left that animal in the feedlot,
gave it that same presidential pardon,
it wouldn't live much over another year or so.
You're eating a naturally obese creature
that would never occur in nature
and is slowly dying of the same diseases
of sedentary lifestyle and obesity
that kill most of us.
So you're saying that a cow
that's with a grain-fed diet,
before they slaughter it,
they just let it live.
It would only live a year or so?
Longer than that?
Yeah, that's my bet.
You know, during the pandemic panic,
when the packing plants were closed down,
they were euthanizing chickens and hogs particularly
because they couldn't slaughter them,
so they euthanized them.
Now, I own my own packing plant,
and we never shut down.
That's a sign of resilience.
But if I had,
I wouldn't have euthanized anything.
They'd been fine.
They would have kept eating,
but they'd been fine.
And you would have gone right back
to the natural cycle two years later
if you had to shut down for that long.
Yeah.
I mean, we would have just kept accumulating animals
in the pasture until I could open my packing plant back up.
Now, why did they have to euthanize the animals?
Because they didn't have the resources
or because the animals weren't doing well?
Like, why euthanize?
To me, when I hear euthanize,
I think something's wrong.
Like, you've got to put them down because they're sick
or there's no room for them.
Why are they doing that?
You know, I would say it's because,
you know, those are confinement animals
that live in very expensive confinement facilities,
and they had nowhere to go with them.
That's hard to deal with.
That's just hard to imagine
that life becomes that invaluable,
that you could just decide to euthanize them all.
No one's going to buy them.
We're just going to kill them all.
I think that's what happened.
So, 25 years ago, you changed the model of your farm
and you restructure everything.
What were the steps you had to do,
the steps you had to take to go about doing that?
Okay.
So, it was, you know, you first asked why.
So, let me answer that.
Yes. Okay.
So, this is not to my credit,
but in my 40s,
I became increasingly aware
of the unintended consequences
of the production model that I was using,
the industrial commodity centralized model.
And I didn't like it much.
The more I looked at it,
the less I liked it.
Animal welfare was the canary in the coal mine.
You know, I really,
what I had previously believed
to be good animal welfare
is what most people still think of
as good animal welfare.
and that is,
you keep the animal well fed,
watered,
in a comfortable temperature range,
you don't intentionally
inflict pain and suffering on the animal,
and you're good to go.
All the boxes are checked.
That's good animal welfare.
But to me,
and I subscribe to that,
but to me in my 40s,
I didn't like that much anymore.
I felt like it was,
in addition to those things,
incumbent upon me as the stockman
to give the animal an environment
in which it could express instinctive behavior.
You know,
chickens are meant to scratch and peck.
Hogs are meant to root and wallow.
Cows are meant to roam and graze.
But in the CAFO confinement model,
those instinctive behaviors
are not an option for them.
And I believe that puts the animal,
I think it's like if you're raising your kid,
let's talk about good parenting.
Good parenting doesn't mean
you take your child,
your daughter,
and put her in the closet.
It's 72 degrees,
you got the light on,
you got a mattress in there,
you give them all the Cheetos and Oreos
and Fritos they want.
And that's good parenting
because they'll never be abducted,
they'll never fall down
and break their leg.
But it's not.
You've got to give those children