[1][2] The farm grows vegetables and raises a variety animals species of which include goats, hogs, chickens, sheep, and ducks.

[7][1][4] In the 1990s, Will Harris began to pay more attention to the less-than-ideal treatment and general poor health of cattle being grown and processed by conventional methods.

For example, cattle raised at White Oak Pastures would need to be shipped elsewhere for processing, which often involved spending "30 hours on [a] truck, with the ones on the bottom getting covered in feces and urine".

[2] In 2021, White Oak Pastures settled a class action lawsuit (for $100,000 in wages), to resolve allegations from workers who claimed they were shorted on overtime pay.

[11] This study has received criticism for distorting data to downplay the environmental impact of grass-fed beef - including by not directly measuring soil carbon over a 20 year period, not acknowledging that soil carbon sequestration tends to decrease over time and tends to be lower on existing grassland than recently converted degraded cropland, failing to account for the nutrients brought onto the farm via cereals which were fed to the chickens and pigs, failing to account for the land used to grow this off-farm animal feed, downplaying the global warming impact of methane, and understating the land use of the grass-fed cattle on-farm significantly, which "should be considered as using 5-6x the land of conventional cattle meat, while the pigs and poultry birds are allotted the off-farm land actually used to grow their feed".