Farming in the Fringes:
How Jess Shaw is Putting Life Back Into Agriculture

“Wee-ooop!” Jess hollers at her farmhand Kay through a white fabric house one could mistake for a garden nursery. Inside, a chicken flock shuffles away from her. It’s around 8 a.m. on Saturday in late February. An unseasonable frost took hold the night before, and the melting chill has left a slick of dew on the grasses.

Jess has bundled up in a bulky sweatshirt beneath mauve overalls she tucks into ankle-high rubber boots. A floppy, wide-brimmed hat frames her face. With two sorting paddles in each hand, Jess rattles the red and orange vinyl against metal framing intersecting the structure about every yard, guiding the broiler chickens forward. The temperature dampens the chickens’ spryness. They take extra coaxing. Jess doesn’t get frustrated. With her brown hair pulled back in a French braid and inquisitive eyes peering through her glasses, she looks out for any struggling in the cold.

“It’s a hard part about it,” she says as she scoops up a sickly-looking bird unable to walk, “but it’s more humane this way.” She places the bird outside the mobile grazing house.

“Yep,” she belts, and Kay, propped on a front-loader tractor, nearly too distracted by her phone’s screen, jolts ahead, slowly tugging the white structure across a sprawling pasture before the chickens have overgrazed their welcome.

“Wee-oop!”

Kay halts the tractor, and the chickens will spend the next 24 hours in this patch of fresh pasture—foraging insects, plucking grass, and pooping key soil nutrients—before Jess and Kay come back tomorrow to move them forward.

The two repeat this process, clanging and inching, with four other mobile units. It’s an unusual sight because it’s an unusual practice. Jess is raising her pasture-grazed poultry through regenerative agriculture practices, in line with the rest of White Oak Pastures’ operations.

In conventional industrial agriculture, monoculture and efficiency take precedence over all else—animal welfare, environmental and field wellbeing, climate effects, and human health and nutrition. It’s hard on the topsoil, the living layer that sustains life, which is seeping away at an alarming rate. The United Nations warns that soil erosion will reduce worldwide crop yields by 10 percent in the next three decades, as human populations are on track to rise to 9.7 billion by 2050. The use of chemicals required to maintain the productivity of impoverished soil and the resulting runoff harm habitats and biodiversity, including crucial pollinators.

Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, works to promote soil health from careful field management and closed loops that put carbon, water, and beneficial microorganisms back into the ground, spinning off additional biodiversity and environmental benefits.

Jess returns for the birds left behind. She looks each in the eye as she picks them up.

“I grab the legs,” she explains, “then I disconnect here.”

She presents the bird’s head and neck to me, and I try to feel the break, but the bird’s nervous system sends its wings flapping for half a minute until it stops moving. She goes for another, and the bird squeals.

“Oh.” Jess sets it down to test its strength, watches it tumble over on weak legs. She feels its chest and points out an unusual sack of fluids that marks it a goner.

“But, oh.” She groans and grabs the legs, tilts the head down, yanking the head away from the neck and cringing. “It’s harder when they show the will to live.”

Once the living are fed grain and the euthanized birds are loaded for the compost pile, we hop into her black Ford work truck that moves in a similar fashion to Jess—only forward.

“Poultry are one of the hardest animals to raise by their biological norms,” Jess says before she lets out a long exhale, something she does nearly every time before diving into a complex topic and divulging the multitudes of information floating around her head—knowledge she’s been accumulating since her undergraduate degree in biology at Florida State University and from five years of hands-on experiences, deep research and reading, and various programs and courses in permaculture, regenerative farming, and naturopathy she’s taken since.

Even though her chicks land on a better farm, they arrive in boxes, overstressed from shipping. Some chick deliveries—say, delayed by weather—arrive full of death. The other chicks, once they arrive, Jess places in raised, temperature-controlled trailers until they mature enough to move to the mobile pastures.

“They don’t have the feather cover to be outside yet. In nature, they’d stay warm and protected by their mothers.”

Jess is determined to improve things for her flocks. Onsite breeding would take grand infrastructure investments she doesn’t think are feasible, but Jess imagines ordering fertilized eggs to incubate in the near future to close the lifecycle of her animals more. But she’s new here, just months in. She’s careful not to make rash decisions that she can’t back up by careful research.

Jess maneuvers the truck over one of the many potholes in the farm’s dirt roads. “There’s a guy everyone calls Cheetah who can collect like 12 birds at time when we’re taking them in for processing.” Jess frowns before she sighs to explain more.

She prefers to collect them one by one, in the hundreds, per processing day, gently holding down their wings. Even though she’s in charge, she’s hesitant to over-assert herself. So, she’s been observing and building up her case for change. When catchers cause birds too much stress, they flail and bruise themselves. Those bruises not only harm the creature but also develop into green-tinted meat by the time the consumer opens the package.

“I can go into the processing center, and I can tell if the bruise on the meat is new or old based on its coloring, and I’ve seen a lot of new bruising. Now that I have that proof, I’ll make a formal process change.”

She’s amassed a lot of alternative agriculture knowledge in the past five years like this. Before what she calls her “fringe agriculture” journey, though, Jess didn’t trust food raised by the agriculture industry—and she certainly hadn’t realized there were alternative ways to do things.

*

Five years before White Oak Pastures, Jess hefted a backpack over her shoulders. Her Tyvek suit crinkled as she walked, adding another layer of protection between her and the blue liquid sloshing inside her bag. She inched across a northeastern California landscape away from a dozen other conservation workers.

She had ventured here after working in a professional kitchen in New York City with a Michelin-star chef and then at restaurants in southern Florida. None of the establishments she worked at sourced food locally, even where the climate and land, especially in Florida, were prime for the growing.

She wanted to know where her food came from, what was in it, and how it was raised. Since she struggled with acne as a teenager, Jess had found what she put into her body mattered. She also brushed up against experts like her childhood dermatologist, who pushed medications as the cure-all. Jess committed to eating well from an early age. And in that vein, she foraged wild foods on this conservation stint with the Bureau of Land Management.

But on this day, Jess carried glyphosate in her backpack. Each time she saw a stand of corn-like stalks covered in spikes, she had to spray. This Scotch thistle threatened to creep across the landscape, edging out native species from its purple flower plume’s seed. 

Jess understood the threat of invasives on local ecosystems and the reason for the chemical intervention. Yet as she came upon the thistle, she saw butterflies resting on the stalks and small mammals skittering beneath the thickets. Wind picked up her spray and carried droplets to other plants and to waterways crisscrossing the site. These were plants Jess had been foraging, water she had been drinking, land she’d been camping on in this remote stretch of wilderness with her conservation team. And while industry considers glyphosate one of the safer herbicides, recent research has linked its exposure to increased risk of liver diseases, diabetes, and cardiovascular issues.

Jess ended each day with the skin of her neck and upper back, despite the suit, stained blue from the leaky bag, and her idea of conservation and pristine nature tainted red.

“I had a moment where I looked around me, and if I had come here apart from this group, I would have thought this land was untouched, that it was the most pristine of the pristine.”

She moved on in 2018, desperate for more control over what she put in, on, and around her body, and she landed at permaculture, a holistic approach to land stewardship that grows and raises food within highly localized micro-climates and interconnected ecosystems.

While working a contract position for a land grant university department of the United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota, Jess completed an online permaculture program with Oregon State University. She started applying what she had learned in the college’s several-acre garden, teaching students how to incorporate the locally grown food into their meals. She still shied away from agriculturally raised animals, and instead, Jess started foraging fresh roadkill for meals.

“I was driving by deer. You know, it was hit, a head-on collision. The rest of it looked fine. I’d been in that mindset of trying to get wild food. So all of a sudden, I'm looking at roadkill with fresh eyes and being like, ‘Is this an opportunity to consume wild food?’”

Even then, she found wild deer with stomachs full of corn and soy, ingredients she avoids for her health. Wild animals lost their natural and healthy guarantee for Jess. 

When her year contract with the college was up, she typed “permaculture farm” into Google and found an open herdswoman position at a 60-acre farm in Huntsville, Alabama. She returned to the South and put her permaculture knowledge to practice at Duncan Farms starting in early 2020. She raised sheep in family units, pigs in the forest beneath acorn trees, and poultry in pastures.

“Animals who have limited brains and egos, they’re in direct connection with nature. And they help me be in that state,” Jess says. “It’s just very calming and grounding. I liked building that mutual respect and that partnership with the animals.”

In December 2022, the farm owners decided to close for personal reasons. By then, Jess had found White Oak Pastures. Owner Will Harris had already asked her kindly, time and again since they first met 11 months prior, if she’d come join his “farm organism.”

“I first met Jess at the American Pasture Poultry Producers Association annual meeting in Florida,” Will tells me as he accelerates his Jeep Wrangler. “I was very impressed with her interest, enthusiasm, and excitement.” He glances over from beneath his Stetson hat and chuckles. “I shamelessly recruited her.”

“And at the time, you had a poultry manager,” Jess adds from the backseat. 

“I did have one. Yeah,” Will confirms. “He did not succeed in the position, though. It kicked his ass.”

I sit in the front next to Will, my leg against a short-barrel shotgun he uses for wild boars, as he shows me around his farm operation and explains how they manage zero waste and humane animal husbandry within the regenerative framework. The idea is to close loops between the land and what it helps grow and raise, continuously renewing the system so it can grow and feed again without any losses. The complex systems I see across the farm make me understand why, even with just the poultry operations, one’s ass could get kicked.

Will has taken his father’s conventional farm and revitalized its life starting in 1995, learning and improving along the way. And he brings younger leaders like Jess along to make it even better—and better yet, to sustain the regeneration.

He points out a massive cube of a wastewater receptacle that gets microbially treated and recycled in irrigation systems and another that gathers all the blood and bone bits from slaughter to spray back on the fields (“like liquid compost,” Jess says). We look at what seem to be miles of compost piles, about the only place on the farm with a foul odor that makes my nose wrinkle, laden with rotting, bloated ruminant corpses and eviscerate that eventually re-feed the soil. A local woman comes every few days to turn the piles. For months, the wall of rot met her face unencumbered by any glass shield as the front window of her tractor was being replaced.

We see the dehydration house that turns what would otherwise be cast off as waste into dog treats. Wells sit in the fields that workers test every few days to manage the amount of nutrients in the ground. Will, a Savory Institute-trained farmer, has marked off a field for Ecological Outcome Verification to keep an eye on his practice’s soil health and biodiversity outcomes.

The soils, grasses, and animals are not alone in their thriving. The farm welcomes diversity in people, too, including PhDs, several women and people of color in leadership roles, and people from all over looking for a different way to live and raise food, and we nod and raise our hands to them as we pass.

Life surrounds us. Unlike industrial farms with pork-stuffed confinements and stall-jailed cows, hogs here live in small herds that roam pastures spanning mud pits to forests. Cattle meander through rich pastures before moving to another each day during the productive season to enrich rather than harm the soil below. The White Oaks team has thinned out the pine forests to create silvopasture environments, an integrated grazing practice common in agroforestry. (“It’s like an oasis for them,” Jess says.) They have built the cows feeding stations with individual minerals, giving them the autonomy to eat what they need, when they need it.

Even the animals’ end of life is considered with care, in line with how Jess prefers to catch her poultry. We drive by the two onsite slaughterhouses that keep White Oak Pastures’ animals on the farm and out of long, stressful trailer hauls. A USDA inspector stands on duty every day of its operation. Will hired Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist who has advocated for humane livestock slaughter, to design the cow and hog facility.

“I met her before she was …”

“Famous,” Jess offers.

“Yeah, yeah,” Will says.

He pauses his Jeep on the side of the road. To the left sits a 200-acre field owned by a conventional farmer who tills and grows monoculture crops, and to the right, about 2,000 acres of White Oak Pastures fields used for grazing. Water from a recent downpour washed out valuable topsoil from the small conventional field, gushing runoff the color of Yoohoo chocolate drink into the ditch that will eventually make its way—chemicals, sediments, and all—to the Gulf of Mexico. White Oak Pastures’ fields, though, suffered just a trickle of water seepage. And what water did dash away from their fields was clear enough to imagine drinking.

“When you manage for the benefit of a species,” Will explains, “you do so at the expense of all other species. Our goal is to keep everything living and thriving.”