SAVED IT
Farm towns all across America have become impoverished since the end of World War II. There is no arguing that very visible fact. The more agricultural the town's economy was, the more impoverished the town became. Bluffton Georgia has never had a factory, never had a plant, and never had a mill... of any sort. Bluffton's economy had always been purely agricultural.
So, when the agricultural economy was centralized & industrialized & commoditized... Bluffton was hit harder than most.
Clay County, Georgia, was listed by USDA as the poorest county in America in 2020. Not the poorest county in Georgia… it was the poorest county in the United States of America.
One of the accomplishments that White Oak Pastures is most proud of is our role in turning this impoverishment around. In the early 2000's our farm employed 3 or 4 minimum wage employees. Our farm was part of the economic problem. Today, we have about 170 employees and our payroll is over $100,000 every Friday. We became the economic solution to the problem.
In 2000, the only thing that you could spend money on in Bluffton was a postage stamp (iif you were fortunate enough to catch the post office open). There were no stores of any sort.
Today, White Oak Pastures has opened a General Store, a restaurant that serves 3 meals a day - 7 days each week, guest lodging, a RV park, horseback riding, bicycling, farm tours, and more...
White Oak Pastures operates a non-profit called the Center for Agricultural Resilience (CFAR) that holds workshops to teach people how to manage farms regeneratively, in addition to an internship program that brings in 6 interns for 3 months, 4 times each year. (We hire a lot of these interns and they become Bluffton citizens.)
We have bought 20 houses in and around Bluffton and refurbished them and we have started a farm school to educate our children.
Bluffton, Georgia has become a damn nice place to be, and White Oak Pastures is damn proud of it.
Will Harris
White Oak Pastures
