During my summer at White Oak Pastures, I was part of the farm's production internship program. This program saw me rotate through four livestock departments, including cattle, hogs, sheep and goats, and poultry, as well as the organic-certified garden and zero-waste leather shop. My daily tasks were varied depending on the department I was rotating through. Typically, my daily tasks involved feeding animals, ensuring they had water, setting up and taking down fences, moving livestock to a fresh pasture, and providing first-aid care to livestock. Each of these tasks contributed to the broader mission of White Oak Pastures, which is to regenerate soils by growing healthy food in a healthy environment.

Although my internship was not strictly business-focused, and rather focused on the operational side of farming, I was able to develop many of the skills that I have learned during my MBA at Columbia Business School and apply these in the farm setting. While I did not primarily use these tools in my day-to-day work, I was able to better understand the business of White Oak Pastures by utilizing the concepts I learned at school. For example, Strategy Formulation helped me to uncover the sources of competitive advantage for White Oak Pastures, and to understand how the business's marketing efforts contribute to its price advantage. I engaged the director of marketing in a discussion about the company's direct-to-consumer marketing strategy, and used the concepts of market segmentation and customer lifetime value from Marketing to uncover valuable insights about the types of customers that shop at White Oak Pastures. Principles of cost accounting from Financial Accounting helped me to understand which departments within White Oak Pastures would be the most financially profitable. This knowledge will certainly inform my future investment decisions in farming businesses.

This internship pushed me outside of my comfort zone because I had never worked on a farm before, and I tended to feel useless at times while learning new skills. For example, on my first day I was tasked with rounding up about 100 hogs and then weighing them. I didn't know how to corral the hogs into the weighing pen, and a couple of them ran past me many times. Frustrated, I remember thinking that I would have felt far more comfortable doing an internship where I had to analyse financial information because that would have been within my circle of competence. Eventually, I picked up techniques to become more effective at these types of manual tasks. However, given the rotation style of the internship, I would only have 1-2 weeks to solidify my skills in a department before moving on to a different department and being thrust into learning a different skillset.

Learning about the financial aspects of this business forced me to sincerely re-evaluate my desire to have a career in regenerative farming. My goal going into this internship was to learn about what makes farms like White Oak Pastures profitable, so that I can help farmers who are starting out as regenerative farmers to do it successfully and sustainably. Early on in my internship, I learned that the most profitable part of White Oak Pastures happens to be the processing plant (slaughterhouse) where they operate a cooperative, slaughtering cattle produced on grass-fed farms in the area. Given my ethical concerns about killing animals, I was disappointed to realize that this was the growth engine of the business. This gave me pause to consider whether I would want to have a career investing in farming businesses without processing capabilities. After serious reckoning, I came to appreciate that while investing in a farming-only business would make me feel more comfortable about not contributing to the slaughter of animals, it would in fact be pushing those concerns out of sight and mind. I have therefore resolved that all parts of the value chain are important, and need to garner investment capital in order for regenerative farming to scale in the way that I hope to see.

Regenerative farming means different things to different people. I spoke with almost all the people I worked with (from interns to managers) about their reasons for working in regenerative farming, and I was surprised to learn that each person had a unique motivation for being at White Oak Pastures. Prior to the internship, I had believed that most people were interested in regenerative farming for the same reason as me — because of its ability to heal landscapes and rural communities, while serving human and animal health as a secondary benefit. However, I learned that others were committed to this cause for a variety of reasons, for example one of the other interns, Dalton, became interested in regenerative farming because of food quality and the potential for food to cure his auto-immune disease. Bridget, the sheep manager at White Oak Pastures with a degree in economics, has committed her life to farming because of its potential to financially revitalize rural communities.

Most importantly, the internship has helped me to confirm that I am on the right path for my career goal. My dream is to one day launch an investment fund that helps people who want to do regenerative farming get access to the capital they need to launch their own farm. In the future, I hope that every county in the United States could have a White Oak Pastures, and benefit from the vitality that good food, passionate people, and purpose brings to the community. This internship has motivated me to pursue this goal with vigour.