Book Info
Will Harris: A Bold Return to Giving A Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food
The book talks about White Oak Pasture, how it transform from an ordinary farm to a regenerative ones.
True cost of food is much higher than you can think. The current ‘cheap’ price is because of the sacrifice of soil quality / farmer’s wellbeing / animal welfare.
p55The three ugly sisters of industrialization, commoditizaton and centralization turned nature’s complex, and still somewhat mysteriours, supply cycle into a linear and efficient supply chain.
Nature is a complex system, by simply forcing them into a linear process, it can reduce price but at the same time, turning the whole environment to be more fragile.
p90It would be nice if some outside expert could hand you a step-by-step guide for building or operating your regenerative system, but it just wouldn’t work. That kind of thing only works for complicated systems, like spaceships. No one can write a how-to manual for a complex system.
True cost of raising a chicken properly:
p55The farmer’s true cost of properly raising a chicken for market is over four dollars a pound.
On Husbandry:
p56Husbandry asks you to see the whole: to understand the herd and the land and the cycles of nature. Husbandry is something of an art, and it requires skills, experience, and knowledge.
A new way of valuating the true land value is to include the biodiversity, the manure, the number of livestocks as well as the soil quality and microbes in soil. A holistic approach is the only way to genuinely estimate the value of the land.
But it is not as cashable as other type of assets.
Big Ag, Big Food and Big Groceries are making their very best in manipulating the market, and maximizing their profit. It is a very effective machine, costing the decay of rural America.
Some product of USA meat product are infact imported from Australia and New Zealand.
White Oak tries to sell directly to customer to reduce the cost of middlemen.