When my friend Cynnie Keller Davis offered me a ticket to the Kentucky Arts and Writers Festival, I jumped at the opportunity, At 88, Wendell Berry was going to read, and he had just completed two new books: The Need to Be Whole and How It Went. http://www.berrycenterbookstore.orgWe hit the road to New Castle, Kentucky, for the weekend.
As an antidote to the terrible divisions in America, I keep reading more about his life, his environmental activism and his railing against unjust causes from the Vietnam War to strip mining, all the while living a good life, rooted in the land and family. His searing analysis of the perils of agribusiness in The Unsettling of America in 1977 rings true today. Berry is a champion of sustainable farming and poet of the farming life. “The soul of the local food movement,” food writer Mark Bittman calls him.
Cynnie is a Berry fan as well, drawing inspiration from Berry’s beautiful Sabbath poems, published in a thick volume, called This Day, among other works. As owner of Bellair Farm in Charlottesville (profiled last month), she is exploring ways to keep the farm in the black. So before seeing Wendell on Saturday at the festival, she arranged an interview Friday with Mary Berry, Wendell’s daughter and executive director of the Berry Center, to find out about a promising program they have developed to help local farmers develop sustainable crops that can yield stable incomes.
We drove out on a drizzly Friday afternoon from Louisville, a clean, prosperous city made wealthy from bourbon, horses and other industries. We followed the highway for 38 miles along the Kentucky River out to the farmlands that are home to Berry’s family and literary legacy. The well-clipped fields are hilly and green, dotted with cattle and simple, often faded, red and blue tobacco barns that reminded me of my home-county Halifax, Virginia.
Arriving on Main Street in the town of New Castle, (population c.900), we could see the influence of the Berrys, in the bookstore housed in a renovated double log cabin, in the My Homeplace Meat shop and at the Berry Center, located in the gracious historic house, where we met Mary Berry,
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“We don’t have an agricultural problem. We have a culture problem,” begins Mary who often invokes her father in her soft but commanding southern accent. “We have to have a culture that supports small to midsize farmers and good land use.” We sat around a long oval wood table in the conference room, surrounded by wonderful photographs of Wendell on the farm when he was working with draft horses and writing his iconic nature poems,
Steeped in the heritage of her father and grandfather, Mary grew up on the farm (at times without running water or electricity) with parents Wendell and Tanya. Her grandfather, a lawyer who worked in Washington, D.C, developed the tobacco price support program, which she has researched at the center’s own archives. As an adult, she farmed burley tobacco. She and her husband at one point ran a successful CSA–all in the family tradition that goes back at least five generations in Henry County.
Their love and care for the land informs so much of what they do.
Tobacco Price-Support is a model
Surprising to me, the basis for their innovative idea is the federal Tobacco Price-Support program, developed in the 1930s, along with other commodity support programs. Using a tobacco coop to buy up excess tobacco, the program did not cost the government anything (see How the Tobacco Support System works for details, below.)
The central idea of the Tobacco Price-Support program was to stabilize prices for farmers through quotas limiting what each farmer could sell and guaranteeing minimum prices. “We are using the idea that you can control production and have a parity price. We can’t replicate the program my grandfather developed but what we can do is use its principles to give farmers decent pay and take them out of a boom and bust economy.”
For many good reasons, tobacco is not popular these days, even though I recall when it was king in Halifax County and many people including my uncles and grandfather, thrived in the business. Now the area is depressed, in need of a new staple of new infusion of income, or a different crop. Burley tobacco, used in cigarettes, reigned here in Kentucky as the top crop before the federal government eliminated the crucial support in 2004. In the transition from tobacco, Kentucky, which had once raised the most burley tobacco in the U.S., lost 10,000 farms. “We are going to have to do it without the government,” added Mary, who critiques policy from Washington which supports industrial agriculture to the detriment of small farms.
Mary said the local food movement has failed to reverse the decline.
Beginning in 2017, Mary gathered 12 small farmers from the area; some were picked by Wendell from his long-time associations as a fellow farmer, to work on ways to build up sustainable small farms with good practices.
All but one of the participants had farmed tobacco in the past and were searching for a way to find more sustainable ways to farm after tobacco.
Our Homeplace Meat: A local shop for local meat
To address the need for agricultural support, the Berry Center has developed four programs: the Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore; The Archives where the historic documents about tobacco are stored; the Wendell Berry Farming program; and Our Homeplace Meat, all supported by a nonprofit 501-C funded by grants and donations. For Our Homeplace Meat, the Berry Center provides farmers with contracts that guarantee a higher price per pound than the standard market. “We started by figuring out the parity price per pound for cattle farmers,” explained Mary.
Each farmer raises more cattle than required in the contract. The emphasis is on pasture-raised quality—no GMOs, antibiotics, or steroids. What doesn’t make the grade at Homeplace Meat goes into the regular meat program and ends up in supermarkets. They send the grass-fed, finished cows for processing at Trackside Butcher Shoppe, a flourishing business located a few miles down the road.
Farmers don’t have to do processing or marketing. Creation Gardens, a food distribution company, has worked out a deal with Our Homeplace Meat to sell the beef to regional markets, including high-end restaurants eager for “local” produce, in Louisville, Cincinnati and elsewhere. Online sales feature cleverly designed packs.
We stopped by Our Homeplace Meat Shop, in a cozy wood frame house which has been converted to a store where you can buy fresh and frozen cuts from one quarter of a cow to one pound of burger meat. One customer was buying the popular Rose Veal, milk fed and grass fed, according to humanitarian standards. “Very tender and better than any other veal, he said. Prices are reasonable because the cost of transportation and advertising and even packaging are eliminated. “And the very cool thing is the farmers are all local,” says Sandy Canon, ringing up sales at the shop.
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The model for Our Home Place Meat could be used for anything farmers produce, Mary maintains. It’s working now for the Henry County farmers making $400-450 more per head of cattle, she says. Production is up 200 percent.
She admits for now the model depends on support from nonprofits. Eventually, though, with more parts falling into place, it could become a self-sufficient coop.
Amidst the dismal reports on the demise of the American farm, it is refreshing to see the positive programs coming from the Berry Center. They are adding to the farmer population, too, through the Wendell Berry Farming Program, which provides 12 students tuition-free education offering a BA degree in sustainable farming practices, in collaboration with Sterling College in Vermont.
While we didn’t see Berry that day, his presence is felt everywhere, whether in quotes on Berry Beef packages or on literature promoting the Berry Center programs. “What is important to me about the Berry Center and what I am learning from it, is its willingness to go to work at home on a small scale, to improve the economy of local farmers and, therefore, the health of the local land. This is radical now when public attention is all on global solutions to global problems. But what works here is likely to work elsewhere, whereas a global solution that won’t work locally is a waste of time,” says Berry. We would hear him and other Kentucky writers in person tomorrow (Saturday).
After the meeting with Mary, we drove out to the Berry Center farm, where the students work, located on 50 wooded acres in the Port Royal area where Berry has spent his most of his life. It’s quiet, sheep are gathered in a field just beyond a simple brick house. The sunset broke the sky up in bright pink, and everything seemed peaceful, in its right place, in this age-old rural landscape. This is local.
Dinner in a stall
We drove back to Louisville in blackness and turned off for dinner at Bar8 restaurant at Heritage farm in Goshen, 20 miles northeast of Louisville. It’s a beautiful horse farm, home to past Kentucky Derby winners and many other “local” attractions, as glitzy as Berry Center is noncommercial. It has converted the stable into a fancy farm to table restaurant that features food from its gardens and two pages of bourbon selections at its bar.
The place was hopping. Diners were paying high prices for the farm ambience and local food. We ate delicious trout and crispy Brussel sprouts between the stalls.
No question, there is a market for local, for what is good, authentic, and delicious. Whatever form it takes, we just have to make sure the farmers get their share.
Next up: Berry at the Writers’ Festival