Foraging Ahead: Remembering Wendell Berry

Everyone at the FACE Ag Network was deeply saddened by the news of Wendell Berry’s passing. In my notes where I keep ideas for future articles under the “Good People” heading, he was already at the top of the list. When FACE launched last February, staff from the Berry Center shared a video message encouraging and emphasizing the value of our work. I can think of no better farmer (poet, philosopher, pastoralist, visionary) to ground and inspire us as we envision a more resilient and just farming future. 

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“I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.” (What Are People For?)

These two simple sentences embody everything we do. Thank you Mr. Berry and thank you to all the farmers and ranchers that work so hard to bring Berry’s vision to life.

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Here is a 2013 Wendell Berry interview with Bill Moyers.

Here is Robert McFadden’s obituary for Berry that ran in the  NY Times. 

Rather than write an obituary, I offer a tribute and hope for the future in Wendell Berry’s vision for agriculture.

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As Isaac Newton wrote to his rival Robert Hooke, 

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

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Wendell Berry’s decades of work and writings touch on all of sustainable and regenerative agriculture. When federal policy encouraged farmers to specialize and scale-up commodity row crops or industrial livestock production, Berry argued for diverse, resilient, integrated food and livestock farms that worked on a human scale. Diverse farms - raising multiple crops and livestock species - are labor, skill, and knowledge intensive and limited in scale. Limited scale means opportunities for more farms, farmers and farm employees. Berry extolled the benefits of farmers exchanging labor and working together to make hay, harvest crops, and process livestock. These mutual efforts knit together the fabric of a community, pass on intergenerational knowledge and connect people to the land and environment around them. In turn these farms support and are supported by interdependent hamlets and towns.  

As farm policy rewarded “bigness” and “efficiency”, Wendell Berry warned of the devastating effect consolidation, centralization, and commodification would have on rural communities, economies, and environments. He foretold the closing of mainstreet businesses as chickens, pigs, and cows that dotted pastures across the country moved to distant feedlots and sunless cages in livestock factories. 

Specialized industrial row-crop and factory livestock farms became much simpler and much more capital intensive. Farmers’ relationships with their banker suddenly became more important than their relationships with neighbors. Earl Butz’s admonition to “Get big or get out!” put farmers in competition with one another, breaking the positive sum nature of mutual benefit into a zero sum game.

Expensive equipment replaced skilled labor. Farmers’ deep knowledge and broad-based skills gave way to expert advisors - seed company agronomists, crop protection specialists, and “company” veterinarians from the livestock integrators and feedlot operators. Homegrown feed and pastures became Total Mix Rations scientifically formulated in a distant lab. Hybrid seeds brought massive yield increases but induced dependency on synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Meat companies built giant, centralized processing plants to take in thousands of animals trucked from factory farms each day. 

The symbiotic relationship between plants, animals and people was broken. The holistic system of animals and crops providing each other’s needs in a beautiful, multi-year dance became industries with two massive problems. Too much manure in too small of a place, and too many chemicals and degraded soil running off our lands creating ecological disasters and future disasters waiting to happen.  

Community ties were also broken. Drive through any struggling rural community and you will see relics of butcher shops, corner grocers, implement dealers, hardware stores, diners and feedmills. They’ve been replaced by Wal-Mart, Dollar General and McDonalds - with their profits fleeing to Bentonville, Goodletsville, and Chicago. Livestock got trucked to distant plants while local butchers closed. Their employees moved away and into different jobs because the distant plants didn’t need them. Their skills honed over years and decades had been replaced with automation. Local grocers no longer had local farmers supplying them with fruit, vegetable, eggs, flour, dairy and other products, nor could they compete with the big box supermarkets who sourced cheap homogenous goods from low-cost industrial suppliers. Many of the small businesses that supplied and were supported by interdependent farming communities shut down as well.

In mid-February each year, the American Farm Bureau celebrates Food Check Out Week. This heralds that a median income household has earned enough money by this date to buy their food for the year. At this time, Farm Bureau lauds farmers and ranchers for producing a cheap and abundant food supply. They mark the occasion by collecting food and money to support food banks for those who earn too little to keep their larder stocked and bellies full. There is no mention of the economic distress of rural communities throughout farm and ranch country. 

Wendell Berry had a different vision. His philosophy was grounded in the concept of the “home place”, where farms are multi-generational endeavors with a century-long perspective that is woven deeply into the community. Long before corporations co-opted the terms “organic,” “sustainable”, and “regenerative” to pad their margins and goose quarterly reports, he preached agrarianism, “the law of return” and “good farming.” What is taken from the soil must be returned. My favorite Wendell Berry story is of his years-long project to restore a scarred and deeply eroded hillside on his farm that was woefully degraded by short-term thinking and bad farming practices. Berry planted cover crops, grazed them with animals, and let the area rest.Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Sow more seeds. Graze. Rest. Slowly, deep rooted grasses knitted the soil together, increased water infiltration and slowed erosion, all while building soil fertility and organic matter.

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"But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken 17 years. It can be better than it is now, but that will take longer. For it to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years." 

From a Christian Century article.

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Diverse farms that encourage and nurture symbiotic relationships between plants, animals and humans and work in community with other farmers and nearby hamlets and towns is the best way to restore ecological balance and health to our agrarian landscapes.

When our work on the farm bill with the FACE Ag Network feels overwhelmingly and critically urgent, I look to Berry’s idea of generational stewardship for hope and inspiration. Undoing decades of short-sighted, extractive farm policy and recovering from the harm it has caused our communities, environments, and agro-ecostystems is a long process, but it has to be done. We only have one earth. We’re doing it. As I help build this network, I’m thinking far beyond the next farm.

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Sow seeds.

Graze plants.

Rest. 

Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. 

We’re gonna get there.

Thanks, Mr. Berry. I wish I could have met you.