POSTED BY WHITE OAK PASTURES TEAM
SEP 24, 2020 5:01:59 PM
When Will Harris III inherited White Oak Pastures, the farm totaled about 1,000 acres. As we transitioned toward regenerative agriculture, bit by bit, we started acquiring nearby farmland. Today, our farm owns or manages around 5,000 acres of pasture.
Much of the farmland that we’ve acquired was previously commodity row crop land that grew peanuts, corn, and cotton in a monoculture system. This soil is dry, dependent on fertilizer, and contains less than 1% organic matter. On windy days in South Georgia, you can see this kind of dirt blowing away in the wind, the land eroding right before your eyes.
A conventional farm neighboring White Oak Pastures. When the field is stripped bare after the monocrop is harvested, topsoil blows away across our pasture.
Industrial farming practices added chemical fertilizers and pesticides to this land while removing biodiversity and nutrients. There are no functioning natural cycles left on this land.
And yet, again and again, we have turned this kind of soil into perennial pasture, land that is teeming with life. How?
We restart the natural ecosystems through age-old methods that, to be clear, we did not invent: animal impact, rotational grazing, and holistic land management.
Here is what the regeneration of monocropped land actually looks like.
Our cattle on formerly monocropped land, recently acquired by White Oak Pastures. Notice the contrast with our pastures located across the road.
Rotational Grazing
We start with what we call “hay bombing”. We’ll leave a large herd of cows, calves, and bulls in a portion of the new land for a period of time. They forage what they can find on the land, and they are also fed upwards of 40 bales of hay each day.
Cattle are like walking fermentation tanks. These large ruminants eat and eat, and their urine and manure feed the soil. Their hooves knead leftover hay into the soil and begin to break apart the land.
By the time the cattle are done, the field is bare, brown, and ugly. But they’ve kickstarted natural cycles again. The ecosystem is primed for us to plant warm-season perennial grasses.
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Additional information:
Regenerating Soil: Applying Erosion Control to Former Monoculture Cropland
POSTED BY WHITE OAK PASTURES TEAM
MAY 28, 2020 7:00:00 AM
At White Oak Pastures, we regularly add new pieces of land to our farm, either by buying or leasing nearby parcels. Almost all of the land we acquire is degraded cropland that for decades was used to grow monoculture crops, with the help of extreme chemical fertilizer and pesticide use.
A family with a plot of land near Bluffton recently started to lease some of their land to White Oak Pastures. As Will Harris recounts,
“This land was intensely farmed all of my life, with monoculture corn, cotton, and peanuts kept in strict rotation with the input of chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and tillage.
This unnatural system was very hard on the land, and by the time White Oak Pastures took it over, there were extreme erosion problems and less than 0.5% organic matter in the soil.”
Typically, our holistic, regenerative land management practices can repair damage on previously misused land, simply by ceasing to misuse it.
- As we plant perennial grasses and the perennial roots increase, the soil’s organic matter percentage increases.
- Perennial pastures grow the soil’s capacity to absorb rainwater (each 1% increase in organic matter absorbs roughly 1 more inch of rainwater), and this is enough to mitigate erosion.
The former row crop land before we started our regenerative grazing practices and erosion control
However, after we planted this new land with perennial grasses, we realized that this land required some intensive care to stop the erosion that had gotten out of control. White Oak Pastures had the land surveyed by a professional, who used a laser leveler to plot elevation changes and used flags to mark where water should be going (instead of immediately flooding off of the land, into nearby waterways, and creating another Providence Canyon).
With this surveyed map, we took tillage equipment and opened up the land, creating our own waterways. These slices of land allow the water to soak into the exposed soil, keeping the water in the pasture and stopping the land-degrading erosion.
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