Southern SOIL (con tinued f r om page 15)
shifting his farm away from the industrial model
will work! If you’ve got 12,000 acres of paid-for land
and during that time he has become a leader in the
in an impoverished area of Georgia,” he says with a
regenerative farm movement. The farm has also
shrug “… well, it’s situational.”
grown considerably in that time. “If you’re in the right zip code, it’s easy. If you’re in When it comes to feeding the world through
an impoverished area, it’s not easy.”
regenerative agriculture, Harris sees it less as an issue of scaling up and more about replication.
Harris suggests instead that farmers keep in mind
He also doesn’t view other regenerative farmers
that there are three key areas which need to stay
as his competitors, he saves that distinction for
in sync: production, processing and marketing/
industrialized ag companies. As he sees it, there is
distribution.
plenty of room for more farms like his serving their own communities.
“What’s important is there’s three legs on the stool.
As a leader in the field, one of the questions Harris
is what we all love and it’s what we tend to focus
gets most is, “at what scale does this type of
on. There’s processing, which means taking the
farming work?”
production so that you monetize it. Consumers
There’s production out of the pasture or field, which
don’t buy cows and hogs and sheep, they buy beef His answer: it’s entirely situational!
and pork and lamb. And then there’s the marketing/ distribution - you’ve got to get to them.”
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“It could work on a very small scale - if you’ve got a ¼ of an acre yard in one of those zip codes in
“Any scale can work, as long as you keep the
Massachusetts with a seven-digit annual income, it
three legs on the stool coming up or going down
