Nathalie, Va.–Dr. Brenda Waller was the last of her five siblings to help her father on the farm. They raised corn, peanuts and tobacco, then a dependable cash crop. She doesn’t recall how much money they made but does remember plowing with a mule. It was subsistence income. Few Black farmers in her rural area of Southside Virginia owned land then. As sharecroppers, they had to split their profits with the landowner, even though her father did much of the work.
Waller left the area to pursue education and employment as the tobacco economy crashed even though she enjoyed the farm life. It was not then fertile ground for Black farmers, much less Black women farmers. She returned in 1996 to rural Nathalie after her mother died. Her father had passed in 1991.
Waller then realized her desire “to be on my homeplace.” And in a revolutionary move, that bored through generations of discrimination, she bought the 50 acres where her father farmed. She’s been adding acres ever since for a total of 180, plus a Bed and Breakfast.
She commutes to a private practice an hour away in Lynchburg and lives on the farm. with her husband “I think it is a wonderful way of life. The land is something secure,” she says,
On this Saturday, Waller offers to drive me around in her Kawasaki Mule utility vehicle to survey a hemp field, which looks neatly trimmed after harvest, with the tough gray hemp stalks scattered flat on the ground. Casually stylish, her red-trimmed leather gloves gripping the wheel, she points out a pretty small pond lined with pine trees, at the foot of the field. Then we drive back across the road to tour Bradley House, a handsome 100-year-old home that she bought as part of a land deal. She has equipped it with well-appointed bathrooms and a gourmet kitchen as a B&B to attract city-dwellers to the country.
Bradley House, which Waller renovated, has nine rooms, two big porches and luxury bathrooms.
While the land looks bare now, the projects are bubbling up in her mind. She is looking at a place for a treehouse here, and further down a hill, she considers the renovation of a crumbling historic log house.
This 200-year-old loghouse may have been home to chickens. Waller is thinking of renovating it by removing the front layer of timbers.
Hemp is now the foundation of the farm, just as tobacco once was. It is sorting out the markets, licenses, regulations and methods of planting that is challenging even for the initiated. Opportunities boom and fade away quickly in this agricultural wild west. Waller has the background, savvy and enough acreage to start with. So she is good to go.
An aerial view of Waller’s hemp crop, formerly tobacco country in Halifax County
A lot of tobacco farmers who had hoped for a new money crop, got burned, lost money and gave up growing the crop.
“I”m a professional. CBD has a lot of medicinal qualities. When the window opened with the (federal) farm bill, in 2018, allowing farmers to grow hemp, people were promised a lot of profit and it didn’t happen,” Waller says.
Not discouraged by the ups and downs of the market, which can be skewed against small farmers, especially people of color, Waller is leading a co-op called the Farmers Cooperative to expand fair and equitable practices for black and socially disadvantaged farmers nationwide. In the U.S. there are currently 49,000 farms owned by Blacks, compared to 1 million farms in the early 1900s. “We are stronger in all areas of life when we work together with like minds,” she says. (Read more here.)
For now, the most lucrative market is for recreational marijuana, which has high levels of THC, the ingredient that causes a person to get high.
Without the appropriate legalization in Virginia, that business is closed to Virginia farmers. (Currently Virginians can plant marijuana for personal use only. )
As Waller explains, marijuana and hemp are different species in the same family.
Hemp, which does not have the psychoactive features of marijuana, is being raised for a wide range of products, from vodka to rope in Virginia and around the country. Iindustrial hemp which is approved in Virginia, contains just .3 percent THC. but has CBD, which is sold for its healing effects for pain, among other assets. (For more information about the differences, check out the Centers for Disease Control answers to frequent questions about marijuana here.)
On the plot of land where her father raised tobacco, Waller, with the required licenses, grows hemp for CBD products that range from joint cream to grapefruit facial wash. The list of customers–online and local family and friends–is growing.
She has seen how CBD offers relief for her patients who suffer from neuro- degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s.”The CBD is doing wonderful things for people with pain, and for people with glaucoma. There’s always the risk of overuse.”
On another 50 acres, she is planting industrial hemp that will be made into tough textiles or building supplies. She has a guaranteed contract through Biophil, an exciting new $10 million venture based in Lumberton, North Carolina, which is producing sustainable, hemp-based alternatives to replace petroleum plastics and tree wood.
Regardless of drought or accidents, the company pays her $500 an acre this year. Biophyl provides the seeds, which come from China, and picks up the harvested product from her farm. She is hoping the profits will go up, in line with the rising retail price of industrial hemp.
Industrial hemp, which cannot by law have a THC level above .3 percent, is good environmentally. With its chemical free, waste free production, Biophyl promises on its website “chemical free, waste free production,” that “will help turn the tide on climate change.” By using hemp products for construction, paper and building supplies, trees will be saved. The plants, which are organic, are good for the soil, too, points out Waller. Hemp is “a fabulous carbon sequesterer.”
The roots run deep so irrigation is not needed. Neither are pesticides used.
Even for medical and industrial hemp, growing is carefully regulated. Farmers must get a license and submit to a FBI criminal review to root out anyone convicted of a felony. Before harvest, a trained sampling agent comes on site to test THC levels. If the THC exceeds .3 percent, the so-called “hot” crop must be destroyed. (Recreational marijuana has up to 15 percent THC.)
While acknowledging concerns, Waller dismisses the dangers of marijuana: “Those vape cigarettes are probably more harmful.” She doesn’t want to get into the politics of the issue.
With her background in tobacco and general farming, Waller works with a team that includes her husband David Graham, cousin Lacy Tune and Stanley Morton, to come up with creative ways to work on the crop. “We had to cut it with a sickle mower and then rake with a straight rake .. People don’t use sickle mowers any more, but it worked to cut the 12-15 foot tall plants,” Waller explains. “We spent a couple thousand dollars on package deals for used equipment to work on this crop.”
Hemp has been thriving at Waller’s farm. Like tobacco, hemp thrives in the hot days and cool nights of southern Virginia. It has a similar growing cycle and requires similar machinery. Marijuana plants would be the same. If the market for recreational marijuana opens up, Waller will be ready to try it. But for now, she has plenty of work to do. She goes back to the lessons of farming she learned from her father: “You knew if you worked hard, at the end of the day, you would get something for your effort.”
Waller just before hemp harvest last year. The plants are tall and tough–perfect for textiles and rope as well as construction materials.
Note I asked my students to go out and find stories on farming in the Baltimore area. Ayotomi AkinlosotuWilliams, who took most of these photos unless otherwise designated, discovered this farm in the heart of a Baltimore City food desert in the fall. I visited this week. It is changing the way children eat, cook and farm.
As you enter the alley from around the corner, you hear the soft clucking of chickens which first indicate the presence of the farm. Occasionally in the mornings, a rooster crows. The brown and gray hues of the city slowly yield to the bright greens of foliage, and you are suddenly on a working farm in the middle of Baltimore city, Plantation Park Heights, established almost 10 years ago, has remained an iconic staple in the neighborhood.
Townhomes overlook the garden, here in October
Entrance to the farm from the street leading to garden boxes, pictured here this month.
The farm brings together people of all backgrounds and ages, from its school-age volunteers to Wes Moore, who visited the farm as he was running for governor this election season.
“I’ll be sitting around a table with someone who’s a professor, someone who’s an immigrant from the Caribbean or something, and a 9 year old who’s lived in Baltimore his whole life,” said Scott, a volunteer at the farm since last September. He and the other volunteers sat in a circle inside the greenhouse, enjoying conversation as they waited for their boss to arrive.
Scott described the farm as a “melting pot”, and compared it to his understanding of Martin Luther King’s dream. “We can all sit together, no one’s considering skin color or where someone’s from,” he said.
The harvesting season begins early spring. Seedlings are placed in black trays in the greenhouse. Lettuce, kale, and other plants that thrive in cold weather are planted in black trays in the greenhouse as tiny seedlings. They remain there all throughout spring and summer, until they are ready to be transported outside and into the ground. There is no cold storage on the farm, so once grown, the crops are harvested and cleaned for farmer’s markets to pick up and sell before each plant’s individual market begins. This process is different from that of a larger, more industrialized farm that would harvest everything atone point.
This farm in particular takes pride in variety, from indigo flowers and bananas to crops like okra and kale.
Banana tree and other exotic plants thrive next to staples like kale and potatoes.
One volunteer joked, “If it could be grown in Baltimore, Chippy’s probably tried it,” referring to the founder and director of the farm. “If it can’t be grown in Baltimore, he’s probably still tried it.”
Farmer Chippy is the leader of the farm (Photo by Lavinia Edmunds)
Richard Francis, better known as Farmer Chippy provides the inspiration for the grassroots efforts. “As a biomedical field service engineer my travels took me to amazing places with fun people and great food but the daily experience in hospitals, clinics and urgent care facilities continued to be disturbing,. . . . I had a burning desire to explore options that promoted a healthier quality of life for our youngest citizens,” said Farmer Chippy.
“I hope to be the engineer/farmer that popularizes the benefits of conventional medicine while exploring potential new research that brings cleaner, greener food close to less fortunate communities in Baltimore.”
On a visit in January, Farmer Chippy was checking in at the farm which even in the stark winter had la ot going on. Winter is the farmers spring, after all. The farm is adding 55 more boxes for growing more flowers and vegetables. A cluster of men were working on fixing a motor, while volunteers were handing out fresh food boxes; about 50 neighborhood residents in need of food lined up for a fresh vegetable drive-through that occurs each Thursday. Each box contains beets, potatos, apple ,cabbage and greens, all fresh and organic.
Farmer Chippy has carved out his own niche in the farming community. He just returned from a farmers’ organizational meeting in Puerto Rico where he brought seven student farmers to represent the only urban garden at the nationwide meeting of farmers. He says his farm can be a model for other urban communities in need of access to fresh food and nutrition. They make money selling produce in the spring, summer and fall, at three city farmers markets.
The farm’s next venture may be cannabis once legalization takes place. “It’s a gray area right now, but we’re trying to get things in place so that when recreational stuff is all legal we can hit the ground running,” Scott said
Besides growing crops, the farm seeks to educate city folk on expanding their palates for healthy food.
Tiara Matthews , a volunteer who has been working at the farm for eight years, sets up the food demos. Students learn how to make dinner through the demo, then they get the ingredients fresh from the farm and the recipe to take home and make the meal with their parents or grandparents. Today’s dish featured collards, eggs, potatoes and lavender.
To make the farm work, you have to have dedicated people and have to have funding and support, said Matthews. “We have a lot of youth support. Everyone lives around here. And they like to hang out here,” she added.
Tiara Matthews has been volunteering at the farm for 8 years (by Lavinia Edmunds
Farmer Chippy is not into corporate sponsorship but has received grants from sources as diverse as Rite-Aid and the Baltimore Community Fund. “We have our own capacity. We move around on our own dime,” he commented. Most of the money comes from sales to farmers markets.
Recently the farm received a grant to support agriculture curriculum in five city schools. Students will learn how to grow, harvest and market nutrient-dense food. Farmer Chippy points out the farm is one of ten selected by the American Farmers Bureau Federation as the one of the top ten innovative farms in the country.
I was strolling around my neighborhood along Falls Road, when I came upon a treasure trove of drinks at Whitehall Mill market, a sprawling 1798 renovated mill. Ariel Hess was stirring up this magical concoction called Butterfly Glitter Lemonade. It started out a beautiful blue; when she poured in lemon, it became brilliant purple with bits of glitter swirling around in it, like stars in a fantasy sky. A winter’s festive lemonade. (The glitter is edible and all for show. It has little taste.)
In this season when so much alcohol is passed around, it is great to find exciting nonalcoholic drinks that satisfy.
A few of the teas have a bit of caffeine kick.
Ariel Hess makes the festive lemonade at Wight Tea
This was just the introduction to Wight Tea, the enterprise of tea wizards –brother and sister– Brittany and Joey Wight. I went back today to see what other imaginative drinks they have created. While the lemonade is very tasty, made with edible blue flowers from Thailand, it’s like a whim attached to the substantial, unusual offerings of Wight Tea, from lavendar Earl Gray, a fragrant smokey elixir, to the Shenandoah which one patron compared to the taste of a campfire.
Brittany was there at the little shop carefully measuring, setting up and brewing tea leaves with an assortment of spices and herbs for a steady stream of regular customers. All the tea is organic from growers they verify for growing healthy, excellent plants.
Brittany works in the shop at Whitehall Millin Baltimore
“Me and my brother always loved to drink tea. We drank with my grandmother in her kitchen,” says Brittany between brews. Her grandmother did not offer them fancy British or Indian teas: we are “Russian Polish Jews,” the tea came from basic tea bags, she says. But the memory of that tea time bringst back cozy peaceful feelings. Later in life, Brittany began to experiment with different blends and leaves. She absorbed the basics of the tea business as a worker at a tea shop in Columbia and persuaded her brother to work there. They’d get together at their parents’ kitchen table and share tea tastes.
They planned a tea shop at Whitehall that unfortunately was opened in the middle of the Pandemic without many customers. But they built a business as a supplier to restaurants, shops and online customer. “Our vision then, and still today was to create interesting loose leaf tea blends.”
For anyone who dismisses tea as boring, you have to visit their shop. “We’re switching it up,” says Brittany.
One of her favorites is the blueberry basil rooiebos. “We try flavors we enjoy together, like fruit we like and basil, but blueberries and basil are not commonly used together,” Brittany explains.
Another unique brew is the cookie butter late. Or matcha in a variety of forms, from latte to lemonade.
Coffee lovers, you might just find the matcha gives you a gentler buzz than your caffeine brew. The powder is made from specially grown green tea leaves, traditionally consumed in East Asia. In Japan, matcha is used in tea ceremonies that incorporate a meditative aspect.
“I love the flavor” says Hannah, who is watching Brittany beat the bright green powder and water with a bamboo whisk for her drink. “It’s got caffeine but it doesn’t shock my system or give me anxiety like coffee.”
The day’s tea menu changes everyday as specials sell out. Wight Tea also serves a limited number of snacks such as avocado salad or biscotti. You can order online and pick up at the shop.
It was a snowy day, not the best weather for a festival but from the first sign on Main Street in New Castle, I knew the Kentucky Arts and Letters festival would not be exactly what I expected. The Longshot Lobsta Food Truck, parked outside in the snowy street for lunch, seemed out of character for inland Kentucky. (The lobster rolls reportedly were delicious.) Being that everything is local as can be in Wendell Berry’s world, I kind of expected BBQ or beef from the Berry Center. As Wendell’s famous quote goes, “Eating is an agricultural act.”
But never mind the snow and food offerings; the big draw for my friend Cynnie, me and others was Wendell Berry reading.
In the small town of Newcastle (population c.900) at the Berry Center, the spirit of Wendell infuses the place like wine in a long-brewing beef stew. While you can see the romantic intellectual side of Berry through all his 50 books collected in the log cabin bookstore down the street, you get the hard-working, practical side, at Our Homeplace Meat, a shop which sells meat and local produce from the Berry project that supports small farmers a block down from the bookstore.
True to Wendell’s aversion to the over commercialization of our world, no neon or big billboards blight the townscape. The town itself looks kind of depressed, if not for the Berry buildings freshly renovated and inviting us in. I counted five Berry buildings on Main Street, including the Berry Center in a fine 1820s home, the meat shop, the bookstore, the Heritage House and the Locker, a small auditorium-like space where the readings took place.
The bookstore is cozy and well-supplied with the books of Berry and other Kentucky writers. Located in a double log cabin beautifully renovated, the Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore features all Berry’s work including the most recent two: The Need to be Whole; where he delves into the need to face the consequences of our exploitation of Native peoples, African Americans and many others, and How it Went, more fictional stories based on his Kentucky farm life. He published these two books this year at age 88.
There are some lovely little hand-crafted books with beautiful paper imprinted with woodcut pictures, published by Larkspur Press, along with collections of poetry, essays and short stories. I had a hard time deciding what volume to buy and settled on This Day, recommended by Cynnie for meditation, a thick book full of short poems. He wrote the poems on Sunday, the Sabbath, when he takes his worship into the woods and fields of Henry County. I also bought The Unsettling of America. Culture and Agriculture, published in 1977. His words ring truer than ever:
“And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided than we are—both against each other and within ourselves.”
This quote at the end of chapter one in Unsettling sums it up for me “the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.”
For the festival reading, I was expecting some observations on nature or the continued divide, with political animosities still raging. Berry does not endorse one political candidate over another, even though his learnings are decidedly progressive, pro-environment and pro-small farm. His reading was nonpolitical, hilarious and refreshing—memories of his friend and former Merry Prankster-the late Ed McClanahan, author of the memoir,Famous People I have Known. I didn’t realize that Berry, as well as Mcclanahan were friends with counter-culture icon Ken Kesey as well as writers Larry McMurty, Robert Stone and Ernest Gaines — all together in the Creative Writing seminars at Stanford University in 1958.
As related in his talk, Berry got some grief from members of his literary circle, based in New York and Palo Alto, for retreating back to his home-farm in Kentucky after he received fellowships at Stanford, an agent and a job teaching writing in New York.
To try to explain his decision to his skeptical friends, he detailed milking a cow and the wonders of that to which McClanahan countered that he got the same pleasure from cocktail hour. (This doesn’t sound half as funny as when Berry told it in his soft, deadpan drawl.)
After Stanford, McClanahan and Berry continued a close relationship, farming, writing and talking together. As Berry remarked when McClanahan died in November of last year:”Ed and I started talking in the spring of 1957 and we haven’t stopped til now.”
Kentucky writers
Berry was clearly the most anticipated, applauded writer of the group, but the others, mostly steeped in the rural culture and oral tradition of storytelling like Berry, were a joy to listen to. All low-key, each writer simply approached the microphone on a tiny stage and read from his or her work. Cynnie and I just sat and listened and were entertained. Bobbie Ann Mason, whose short stories I love, read excerpts from Feathers about a country woman over-pregnant which had us laughing out loud.
Eric Reece, whose Lost Mountain won the Sierra Club award for environmental writing, was intense as he read “Gethsemane,” inspired by his relationship with Thomas Merton, once a Kentucky resident. Morris Manning’s Railsplitter is written in the voice of Abe Lincoln; he entertained with music played on a dulcimer made of a cigar box and stick.
Bobbie Ann Mason reads from her novel Feathers
All had some relationship to Wendell, through writing, farming and Kentucky, of course.
It all comes back to Wendell, as one writer commented. Or, as Berry has written, “It all turns on affection.”
Ed McClanahan, the late writer, was a legend in the sixties counterculture. Says Berry, “He had a very large sense of humor and it came to rest on his language.”
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.
The Berry Center occupies a prime location in New Castle. Further down the street is Our Homeplace Meat, and on the other side is the bookstore, full of all of Berry’s works and keepsake editions.
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,
Photos by the late James Hall, given to the Berry Center by his wife poet Mary Ann Taylor-Hall
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.”
This explanation of the Tobacco Price Support program is displayed at the Berry Center which promotes key elements of the program as a model to provide small farmers with a decent wage and stability.
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.
Dining in the horse stalls at Barn8, in Goshen, Kentuckywith Cynnie in back
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.
