Wendell Berry has spent a lifetime promoting an agrarian vision in which people and animals live in harmony with the land. As we drive around in his ancient pickup truck near his farm in Point Royal, Kentucky, he describes the way a farmer, plowing with a team of horses, understands when they need to rest.
“There’s sympathy when he looks at his team and he knows he’s asked enough of them,” Berry tells me. “By the same sort of sympathy, a farmer farming on the right scale knows the needs of the land.”
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As we drive through Henry County, which includes Port Royal, Berry tells stories about the people who have lived here for generations. The winding country road rises and falls past small plots broken up by hollows and steep hillsides. Crumbling rock walls, more than a century old, line many of the fields. Nowadays, many of the people who live here are retirees or commute to jobs elsewhere.
Passing the writing house where he has written his many books, staring out at the Kentucky River, Berry stops by a farm established by friends of his family in 1944. The couple worked hard to drain the wetland, where crawfish built castles in the fields, and kept a small dairy herd, fed only by what they grew on their land. The farm is in disrepair now. Their grandchild has a job in town and goes in for expensive entertainment. “I’m defining a heartbreak,” Berry says.
Another neighbor went broke farming, after the costs of production overtook his earnings. His land was sold off at auction and the auctioneer, a neighbor, saw to it that he kept a little segment where he has his house. “In the old days, people lived together in these little farms, small farms all farmed by the people that owned them,” says Berry. A friend of his described how people used to sit around in the evenings playing cards or talking.
“They had everything but money,” Berry says, quoting his friend, and he adds, “They were free.”
The dominant story in our culture, he says, is about the success of the young person who leaves home to make something of himself: “Boy raised in log cabin gets to be a CEO or President of the United States.” The untold story is the desertion of the old people back home.
“And the old folks compound the sorrow in it by being proud of their absent children,” says Berry. People who grew up in rural America write him letters, nostalgic for a way of life they’ve lost. “My correspondence is full of grief—the grief of successful people,” he says.
In Berry’s view, contempt for farm work and rural people, and a culture that defines success as leaving those things behind, has left the rural landscape desolate. The people who are left “are living out an insult to themselves and do everything they can to get their kids into college—telling them, ‘Don’t work the way I did.’ ” Berry’s novels, poems, and essays elevate the dignity of farm work and a rural way of life that is rapidly going extinct.
"My correspondence is full of grief—the grief of successful people." —Wendell Berry
We pass the farm of some of Berry’s dearest friends. The wife was disowned by her family for marrying a poor farmer, but the local community embraced them, teaching them how to farm and make their home and pulling them into a warm, communal life. Their story is familiar from Berry’s short story A Jonquil for Mary Penn.
We pass a sign for a different farm, Memory Acres, and then stop at Berry’s son’s farm, passed down by his father. “This farm has been well cared for for eighty years,” he says. Tobacco used to grow here in small patches that were frequently rotated. In the middle of the farm, a stand of old growth ash trees is “like a dipstick to the ancient past,” he says.
Ben Aguilar/Berry Center
Wendell Berry
Berry’s father, John, was born in 1900. His life story has passed into legend in Henry County. Dubbed “Big John” by his grandchildren, he was determined to do something for small tobacco farmers, including his own father. A skilled orator, he caught the eye of the local Congressman, Virgil Chapman, who heard him giving a speech and offered him a job as his secretary in Washington, D.C. While working for the Congressman, handling all of his correspondence, he got his law degree at George Washington University.
He came back home and helped in the New Deal’s renewal of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative, which brought together tobacco farmers in the region, setting production limits and assuring them a fair price for their product. The tobacco program made it possible for small farmers to earn a decent living and sustained the local economy for the next sixty years.
A combination of factors did the program in, including the big companies and their Republican allies in government, young farmers who chafed at the production limits as industrial technologies made it possible to farm more land, and a surgeon general’s warning that shifted the way Americans viewed tobacco and ushered in filtered cigarettes, which devalued the premium tobacco produced by Burley growers. Suddenly, the Burley farmers were competing with two-dollars-a-day labor in Brazil.
Still, the principles of the Burley Tobacco Program live on. “My dad thought it ought to be possible for a young person with a reasonable acreage to make a reasonable living,” says Berry. “When this country was full of people living that way, it was just a wonderful thing. My dad remained sure that the tobacco program’s principle of price supported with production controls could be applied to all agricultural products.”
At the Berry Center, in a century-old white brick building in the small town of New Castle, Kentucky, Berry’s daughter, Mary, has, for the last ten years, been continuing her family’s work “by advocating for farmers, land conserving communities, and healthy regional economies,” according to the center’s mission statement.
“We can’t live the way we’ve energetically encouraged people to live. It’s not making people happy anyway, so let’s have done with it.” —Mary Berry
Oil paintings of her grandparents hang above the winding central staircase as you enter the old building. When she started the Berry Center, Mary says, her first idea was to make sure the history of the tobacco program was not lost. Then she started thinking, like her grandfather did, about what she could do to help the people in the place where she grew up, “who have been completely ignored by both political parties.”
Ethan Payne
Mary Berry
The Berry Center launched a new iteration of the Burley Tobacco Program, a farmers’ cooperative called Our Home Place Meat. It uses the principles of supply management and price control to help small cattle farms sell high-quality beef to restaurants in Louisville, Cincinnati, and Lexington.
“Our chance here is cattle,” says Mary. “This is marginal land, so you have to keep it covered all the time in grass. And cattle turn grass into this miraculous product.” Our Home Place Meat sells a product called rose veal—processing grass- and milk-fed calves when they reach their weaning weight of five hundred to six hundred pounds.
One of the farmers in the program is Curtis Combs, a third-generation dairy farmer who loves milking cows. Recently he got a letter from Dean Foods terminating his contract because the company was shifting its business to a giant Walmart bottling plant in Indiana that would buy only from big dairies. “I’ve seen some really depressed farmers, but I was worried about Curtis,” Mary says.
But since he got into the rose veal program, Combs is using his former dairy facility to feed his calves grain when they are not in the pasture. “It’s not a feedlot. And he’s still milking cows,” Mary says. The family also sells ice cream from the cows.
“Our chief product is not a product, but the farmers,” Mary says. Our Home Place Meat operates on the same principle that animated the Burley Tobacco Program. “Farmers get back the cost of production and make a fair profit,” and “we keep supply and demand carefully matched to maintain the price.”
Mary is on the board of the local bank, which has made loans to farmers in the area when bigger banks might not have taken the risk. “We’ve made some loans that have allowed us to hang onto something out here,” she says. “I think Port Royal would have gone under if not for those loans.”
“I grew up in the culture the tobacco program made possible,” says Mary. “I know we can do this again.”
Steve Smith, Mary’s husband, started the first community supported agriculture program in Kentucky in 1990, moving from tobacco farming to organic produce and earning enough money at it to pay for his farm even when interest rates were 13.5 percent. It was “a lifeboat,” he says.
Sitting at the dining room table in the couple’s hundred-year-old farmhouse, Steve talks about how lucky he was. “Now the market is saturated with industrial organic,” he says. “Demand is being soaked up by big organic.”
“If any of this is going to work—that we quit destroying our land and our people—we’ve got to talk about limits,” says Mary from the other side of the table. “We can’t live the way we’ve energetically encouraged people to live. It’s not making people happy anyway, so let’s have done with it.”
Mary calls the current agricultural economy a “Faustian bargain,” with its ever-increasing chemical inputs, depleted soil, rural depopulation, and local food chains that are vulnerable to disruption because they are dependent on far-flung suppliers. “This can’t go on forever,” she says. “It’s a fallacy that we, with our big brains, will figure our way out of this.”
As if to prove her point, during the pandemic meat processors shut down all over the country when workers got sick. Grocery store meat departments sat empty as farmers were forced to euthanize their animals and bury them because there was no way to get them to market. Our Home Place Meat, it turned out, was the only source of meat for West Louisville, and they gladly provided protein for residents to much local acclaim.
It was a graphic illustration of the vulnerability of the food chain and the need for local food suppliers. “If we begin to think that our urban places would be healthier if they were fed by our surrounding farmscapes, that’s a beginning,” says Mary.
But, she adds, “Has one Democrat from the state of Kentucky gotten in touch with me to ask how we took meat into West Louisville? No. I’m used to being disappointed by the Republicans. But I’m really disappointed by the Democrats. Biden—I don’t think he has any more idea than Trump did about small farms. Obama was terrible for our efforts.”
Michelle Obama’s famous White House garden “meant nothing,” says Mary, except to give people the impression that things were better for farmers, even as farm bankruptcies accelerated. What nobody is saying, Mary says, is that the economy itself is the problem.
“Urban places cannot continue to thrive on the backs of rural people. All our raw materials have been stolen.” The exceptions, she says, are the Burley Tobacco Program and Organic Valley—the organic dairy and vegetable cooperative founded in Viroqua, Wisconsin, in 1988 that now has 1,800 members nationwide.
The local food movement, which has been popular at least since 1970 when Alice Waters began championing seasonal, organic cuisine at her Berkeley, California, restaurant, Chez Panisse, has not stopped the decline of small farms. “A lot of people know what we’re talking about, but it hasn’t deepened,” says Mary. Farmers’ markets and high-end restaurants, she says, are not the end game.
“The end game is when you go to your grocery store, and what’s on the shelf to some degree is from farms around your city,” she says. Some cities can’t be fed by the desert around them, she adds, “but those cities should not be there.”
As for the “big ag” story about feeding the world and a “sustainable” agricultural model with thirty-six-thousand-cow farms, “I think they’re unimaginative liars,” says Mary. “We can’t continue this way. We can’t exhaust what we depend on to survive.”