By Isaiah Ritzmann
Published in September 2018
We concluded our Finding Our Place series at the beginning of August with a special visit from Mary Berry, director of the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky and daughter of Wendell Berry. The Berry Center understands its mission as “challenging today’s ruinous industrial agricultural system” with an aim to “revive farm economies, good land use, and vitality for rural America.” The programs of the Berry Center include an archive and library, a cultural center and book store, a local marketing co-operative and the Wendell Berry farming program which “provides future farmers with an education in agrarian thought and practice that is holistic and place-based.” Mary sees the mission of the Center to continue the legacy of her family – her father Wendell, but also grandfather John Berry Sr and uncle John Berry Jr – who have been working for over a century to advocate for farmers to help safeguard and protect rural farming communities. We were delighted to have her and learned much during her visit.
Mary was with us for a few days and spoke at our Fermented Thought evening on August 1st with almost seventy people in attendance. In her talk Mary focused on her work at the Berry Center, the economic and cultural issues facing rural farm communities and the role of citizens in urban areas to stand in solidarity with our farming neighbours. She shared with us her concern for the “middle class” of farmers who were between the small-scale, CSA, ‘entrepreneurial’ farmer and the large-scale industrial farmer. How were those who weren’t big enough to farm large tracts of land or who were too many to profit from the market niche of the CSA farmers to make ends meet? She taught us about the Burley Tobacco Program, a co-operative of Tobacco growers started by her grandfather John Berry Sr, the very type of program that provided the economic support necessary for “middle class” of farmers to prosper. The program ended in 2004 but remains the model for the kinds of association that are advocated for by the Berry Center.
Mary also addressed the paradoxes and complexity of growing tobacco in Kentucky. She stressed that she understands, fully acknowledges, and does not dispute the health dangers associated with tobacco. Yet she urged us to consider Tobacco, and the Burley Tobacco program, from the perspective of farmers and farming communities in her home state. The program gave farmers a degree of economic independence, and allowed them to maintain diversity on their farms. Perhaps most significantly this allowed family farms in Kentucky and surrounding areas to farm in a way appropriate to their places, and thus encouraged good land stewardship. The economic security brought by tobacco allowed farmers to take proximate care of their soils, watching out especially for the kind of erosion endemic to the hilly landscape on which they farm. With the end of tobacco nearly twenty years ago a new way of farming has begun to dominate the landscape, one neither economically secure nor fitting for good land use. Mary shared with us a poignant anecdote from several of her travels around Kentucky. On these trips she recounted how soil erosion was so bad in some places that a bulldozer had to come and remove it from the roads. Tobacco may be unhealthy, but the challenge of finding a kind of agriculture that is healthy for the farming communities and their land is equally worthy of our attention.
One of the most important things Mary challenged us with is her judgment that “the local food movement has failed because it has failed to deepen into a culture.” Good farming requires city folk to act in ways that support good farming. In order for city folks to act in ways that support good farming they need a certain level of understanding and respect for both the people and the complexity that is good farming. The local food movement has generated some awareness among city dwellers about food and farming issues but has not engendered adequate knowledge or action on a wide scale.
For city folk the deepening of the local food movement into a culture is going to take time and it is going to take work. Yet this is ultimately good work, serving the common good not only for rural communities but also for ourselves. For as Wendell Berry reminds us “no matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in the flesh.”
