Where the cattle graze and the bobwhite whistles
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
By James DeLo
Imagine, if you will, a young man rising with the morning sun, his boots darkened by dew and the inevitable patch of cow dung. He crosses an open pasture with cattle grazing ahead of him, birds moving effortlessly along the tree line, with insects and microorganisms working diligently beneath his feet. There is only land, livestock and the steady work of a man trying to improve both. Come evening, he leaves the cattle to their grass and returns home to a town of just 503 people, including his lady and a pair of mighty English springers, knowing the same work greets him again at first light.
A yeoman in the making
One might think the man is an 18th-century Carolina yeoman, living off the land and answering only to the demands of the farm and weather. He is not. This is the life of Hase Cooper, a 25-year-old building a cattle operation of his own through old, regenerative agricultural methods.
Hase is a true Carolinian — with roots running deep in both Carolinas. His family has deep ties to the Midlands, and he grew up on Sullivan’s Island before attending Christ School in North Carolina and later heading west to earn his undergraduate degree from Montana State University. He finds little appeal in a life of fluorescent lights, office walls and watching the hands of a clock. Instead, he returned to South Carolina and started a cattle operation near family hunting land in Clarendon County. He is a tall fellow, made larger still by a great ginger beard, with the easy humor and quick wit long associated with the South. I have had the good fortune to call him a friend for years. Alongside him is his girlfriend, Ava Glass, who lends a hand on the farm and uses her photography and video-editing skills to help market the operation.
“As a kid, I wanted to figure out a way that I could make a living on the land,” Hase reflects. “Whether that was being a hunting or fishing guide, farming, ranching, it didn’t matter. I got to work on some cow-calf operations in Montana, and loved working with livestock … I essentially got to play cowboy around some great folks, and they were super informative. You’ve never had more fun or seen so many people work so hard with a smile on their faces,” he remarks. “I started helping them with preg-checking cows, branding or fixing cattle, anything I could do to get experience and time with the livestock.”
During those years, Hase soon learned a style of agriculture that differs from the large cattle operations in the West. That method is regenerative farming. In contrast, monoculture, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and other chemical inputs became popular after World War II, promising farmers greater yields with less labor. But those methods also leave farms dependent on costly outside products, and in many places, soil quality has declined, native grasses have disappeared and birds once common have become harder to find.
Learning to follow nature’s lead
His interest in regenerative agriculture deepened after reading a book by Will Harris, owner and operator of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga. Intrigued, Hase went to see the farm firsthand. “I drove down there with my internship application and my résumé. I wanted to see if everything in the book was real,” he says. “Were they actually revitalizing the town with their farm? And when I got down there, it all checked out.”
What Hase found is more than a cattle farm. White Oak Pastures raises several types of livestock, processes animals and reuses much of what formerly would be treated as waste. “They did everything on site. They had a massive composting program, which I was interested in as well. Everything that came out of their abattoir got composted and went back into the dirt,” Hase explains.
The lesson was simple: a farm works best when its different parts support one another. The cattle feed on the grass, their manure improves the soil, insects break it down and the birds return to feed on the insects. The farmer does not control every part of the process. He just tries not to hinder natural processes.
“The word regenerative can get muddled, but the basic idea is you are working with Mother Nature, not trying to fight it,” Hase explains. “You’re working with nature and the cycles of nature and trying your best to manage the things you can, and if you can’t, you find workarounds. It’s all about maximizing free things: sunshine, rain and composted soil.”
The next morning, Hase showed me how these ideas manifest on his farm, officially christened as Cooper Family Farms. We rose around 6 a.m., drank black coffee and headed toward the pasture. The sun was beginning to rise over the flat Clarendon County land, with fields and crops stretching all around us. It is unusually cool — convenient for your redheaded writer — with a light drizzle, which Hase tells me is one of the first rainfalls of the summer. Mind you, it was late July at that point.
As we reached the pasture, a small herd of South Poll cattle stood grazing in the early light. White cattle egrets sat on their backs or walked beside them, eating insects stirred up by the herd. It is a scene I have never seen before but would have been familiar to South Carolinians a century ago.
Do not take me for a macaroni, but the sight moved me irrevocably. It is quiet, simple and useful. There are no parking lots, no subdivisions and no large Food Lion with a liquor store and Chinese takeout.
My first thought was simple: Why don’t more people do this?
Hase belongs to an increasingly uncommon group — young people willing to build their lives around agriculture. Farmers now only make up two percent of the total working population, and nine percent of agricultural workers are under 35.
When the bobwhite whistles once again
“We’ve got 35 South Polls right now, all steers,” Hase tells me. “Their nickname is the Southern Mama breed. They’re developed specifically for the Southeast United States. These guys are bred to be a docile, small-framed or moderate-framed cows. They make great mamas, but not ours; they’re all steers.
“We’re not going to give them any grain or filler or anything like that,” he continues. “They are eating nothing but forage, including cover crops, native grasses, legumes or forbs.” In other words, what you see is what you get — not a bad modus operandi for a farm with nothing to hide.
Hase moves the cattle every day to give each section of pasture enough time to recover before the herd comes back in roughly 60 days for their next bite. He watches the grass, the weeds, the soil and the cattle to decide when they should move. Farming this way requires observation more than force.
The farm is managed for other uses too. Hase plants pollinator strips, preserves wildlife corridors and leaves parts of the property ungrazed so that rabbits, quail and deer can move through it. “We plant pollinator strips for the pollinators. That not only affects me, but everybody in a two-mile radius, where we’re getting better pollination rates,” he says. “We’re not just helping ourselves but also helping our neighbors pollinate their crops.”
Hase pays attention to those things because they tell him whether the land is improving. Success is not measured just by the weight of the cattle. It can be heard in the return of a bobwhite and seen in new grass where there was once bare dirt.
Recently, Hase saw some amazing changes on his land. “This year, I’m seeing Bahia and little bluestem I didn’t plant. I haven’t planted any native grasses or anything like that.” He continues, “We heard one bobwhite whistle in the first couple months we started working this ground, and now there are three males I know of.” The call of a bobwhite was once a common sound across S.C. farms and fields, but now it is few and far between.
“We’re seeing all this stuff we couldn’t see before because it looked like a parking lot out here,” Hase tells me. “There was nothing here. It was bare dirt.” Now it grows sunflowers, deer’s tongue, little bluestem and a very long list of others. The changes do not require a grand program. They come through moving cattle, resting pasture and allowing natural processes time to work.
Regenerative farming is not only an environmental idea. Hase believes it makes business sense. “Traditional business states that you should be maximizing your profit, and you can do that in different ways, either increasing your revenue or lowering your cost,” he says. “We try and do both at the same time.
“We don’t have a fertilizer bill. We don’t owe Monsanto a dime … we try and limit our costs to not get priced out of the market,” he says. “I want this to be accessible to everybody. Good, clean meat should be the standard, not the outlier.”
Hase is not arguing that farmers should reject every modern tool or return entirely to the past. He uses electric fences, vehicles and equipment when they are useful.
Likewise, his operation is still young, and farming offers no shortage of mishaps. Palmetto State weather rarely behaves as predicted. Rain falls on one side of the county and misses the other. Equipment breaks down when the temperature passes 95 degrees. Cattle may treat fences as polite recommendations. Hase knows there will be mistakes and setbacks.
But, in a state where open fields and pine woods disappear a little more each year, that effort deserves notice. Hase does not see the pasture merely as property waiting for its most profitable use; instead, he sees it as something that can be improved and passed down for those who come after him. Thus, he embraces regenerative agriculture, which older South Carolinians might have simply called good farming.
If you’re interested in purchasing Hase Cooper’s grass-fed, sandlapper beef of the highest quality, visit the farm’s website at https://www.cooperfamilyfarms.com. Pre-orders will be available in late August.
