Announcing Our Fall 2025 Partner Bookstore: (I) The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky!
Culture and agriculture
Scenes from last year’s All Fall Festival, where The Berry Center annually announces its Agrarian Literary League book pick, to be read by thousands in sixty book groups within and beyond Henry County, Kentucky
The writer Wendell Berry was always two things—a writer and a farmer—but the two were never wholly distinct (see the Book Post we published in 2019 about his decision to return to his native Kentucky in 1964). As a man of letters he has never been far from reflection on the human involvement with the earth—with farm life as a subject falling somewhere between a metaphor for and an embodiment of this fundamental condition—and as a farmer he has been deeply intellectually engaged with agriculture as an expression of human civilization and a tradition to be developed with deliberation. “Eating,” he writes, is an “enactment of our connection with the world,” and education “is an obscure process by which a person’s experience is brought into contact with his place and his history.” “Like a good farmer, a good teacher is the trustee of a vital and delicate organism: the life of the mind in his community. The standard of his discipline is his community’s health and intelligence and coherence and endurance.” “Learning correct and complete disciplines—the disciplines that take account of death as well as life, decay as well as growth, return as well as production—is an indispensable form of cultural generosity.” Knowledge comes from the “power of attentiveness, of permanence of interest.” Form, in art and in life, “permits us to live and work gracefully within our limits” and arises from “subordinating one’s life to the whole of which it is a part.” “The proper university product is … not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns.”
As he wrote in his landmark 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, as long as we are estranged from the origins of the food that keeps us alive, we are not living in an honest relationship with the earth and are destined to plunder and despoil it. When practiced respectfully, farming is a closed system: it feeds waste back into regeneration, it draws on its surrounding materials. “The principle of return … requires responsibility, care.” But “the general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve.” This estrangement from the sources of life has been an intellectual failure of science and social thought and culture as much as a commercial exigency. As Bill McKibben wrote as far back as 1990, however quaint Wendell Berry’s commitment to small-scale farming practices and agrarian traditions might seem to establishment industrialized agriculture, science was already confirming that his predictions about fertility depletion and environmental collapse were bearing out.
In 2011 Wendell Berry’s daughter Mary, after raising her own three children on a family farm in her father’s native Henry County, founded the Berry Center in New Castle, in order to advance this entwined endeavor. As she wrote in a recent newsletter, “Farming and raising a family in a beloved and declining rural county … I knew that our problems were not simply agricultural but cultural.” The Berry Center consists of a few things: a bookstore—our fall partner!—just reopening after many months of labor to shore up the 230-year-old-cabin in which it lives, providing Wendell Berry’s own books as well as others that bear on rural life. The bookstore is run by Mary’s daughter Virginia Berry Aguilar and her husband Ben Aguilar; their young daughter is the tenth generation of Berrys to be raised in Henry County (Virginia told me she began looking for farmland in Henry County the minute she went to Louisville for college). The Center’s Agrarian Cultural Center, working out of the bookstore, holds an “Agrarian Voices” Lecture Series, an annual Kentucky Arts & Letters Day (this year on November 8), reading circles like next month’s in-person and virtual “Agrarian Voices Study,” and an Agrarian Literary League, which each year chooses a book to give away (in the thousands) and read with (currently) sixty book groups within and beyond the county. This year’s book will be announced at the Center’s annual All Fall Festival next Saturday, a version of the traditional country fair, with live music, locally grown food, ice cream, and a bake-off, in addition to the book giveaway.
The group read begins with an intimate brunch with its author and book group leaders at the Berry Center. (Last year’s book was The Round of a Country Year: A Farmer's Day Book by Amish farmer David Kline.) A Youth Agrarian Literary League includes a kids’ arts and letters day and a visit, built around a natural theme, to the center’s teaching farm. The English ecological writer Paul Kingsnorth will on October 9 present this year’s Wendell Berry Lecture and introduce his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity; Wendell Berry fan Nick Offerman—who read the audiobook of The Unsettling of America—will launch a book tour for his new children’s book on “tools and tomfoolery” at the center on October 11, staying for a “Beef Bash” with local growers that night. The Berrys hope to create a model for bringing humanities programs to rural communities that could be replicable elsewhere; a recent study of reading for pleasure found marked declines across all groups, with particularly pronounced gaps in non-metropolitan areas.
The Berry Center also sponsors a Farm and Forest Institute that offers hands-on farm and forestry training and public field days, along with a curriculum in place-based agrarian thought and practice, on its two-hundred-acre farm and forest. Courses include nature-based land use and low-impact forestry, agrarian literature and arts, agricultural history and stewardship, and cooperative economies and rural leadership. The Farm and Forest Institute replaces a prior degree-granting program, with the aim of serving a broader population of now nearly four hundred generational farm families, aspiring farmers, and the curious. (The Unsettling of America offers an unsparing indictment of corporate-sponsored, industrialization-friendly university agriculture, which, Wendell Berry argues, has long ceased serving the family farm and farmers’ aspirations). The Institute also collects oral histories and transcribes intergenerational traditions and local practices.
Finally, the Berry Center sponsors Our Home Place Meat, a cooperative of ten Henry County farming families, that revives the work of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative that was organized in the thirties by Wendell Berry’s father and brother, both named John, to set fair prices and manage tobacco production and preserve liveable incomes for small farmers. As Farm and Forest Institute Director Leah Bayens described in last year’s inaugural Wendell Berry Lecture, the Burley Cooperative “made farming viable and as a result there were things like hardware stores and restaurants and banks and grocery stores in towns that now have boarded up storefronts.” “When the producers program ended in 2004,” she continues, “thousands of farms were lost and Kentucky lost about eight hundred thousand acres of farmland, more than any other state in the country. However Kentucky and the other states that were part of the program still have more small and midsize farms as compared to other regions of the country.” Our Home Place Meat is part of the Berry Center’s effort to help Kentucky farmers develop an alternative to once-dominant tobacco. The Center’s Berry Archive holds the papers of the Berry family for study, in order to maintain successful farm practices of the past toward their mission of advocating for small farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies.
There are notes sounded in Wendell Berry’s work that give one pause: the distrust of science and specialization, the scorn for “rootlessness,” the traditional views on marriage, the elevation of the local. We’ve had occasion to discuss here, for example on the issue of library censorship, how America’s federal defense of equality under the law has been a necessary counter to local bigotry, often under the persistent shadow of the Confederacy. Currently small farmers are among the supporters of the “Make American Healthy Again” movement elevating the anti-science career of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Back-to-the-land, anti-corporatist values that used to characterize the political left are now emergent across the political spectrum, as conservative mothers join farming cooperatives and Marxists and others embrace “degrowth” (akin to what Wendell Berry describes as the “complex cultural changes” needed for “restraint of consumption and competent care of the earth” in the face of consumerist “refusal to consider survival except as ‘continued affluence’ that has brought our survival into doubt”). “Post liberal” conservatives like Catholic thinker Patrick Deneen, who argues that liberals’ quest for liberty and equality has destroyed community in America, cite Wendell Berry as an influence.
Ezra Klein entitled a recent podcast with David Wallace-Wells and physician Rachael Bedard on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s policies, “MAHA is a bad answer to a good question.” The participants reflected that they might find Kennedy more congenial as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, because a lot of his Berry-aligned concerns about pollution and the health of the food supply are well placed and broadly popular. Though Ezra Klein’s own recent book Abundance advocates curtailing environmental and labor protections to accelerate growth, he has expressed admiration for Wendell Berry and sympathy with his skepticism toward the infinite-growth premise driving the consumerist economy’s construction of desire. The synchrony of these different ideologies may reflect not so much a hypothetical “horseshoe” phenomenon of extremes converging as a real-world malaise that is worsening, calling forth an eclectic but consonant response. Wendell Berry wrote in a 1995 afterword to The Unsettling of America, “It does worry me … that the people working in various ways to protect places and communities and ways of life now make up a sizable constituency that is virtually unclaimed and unrepresented. The dangers in this are obvious enough to anybody willing to look.” The extent to which some of Wendell Berry’s work calls up uncomfortable associations is the extent to which we have failed to reckon with these forces …
Read Part Two of this post here.
Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, the latest in Wendell Berry’s Port William series, which includes eight previous novels and a number of short stories, will be published this October.
Become a member of The Berry Center to support its work.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read her Notebooks on books and the reading life here.
Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Some Book Post writers: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Jackson, John Banville, Marina Warner, Álvaro Enrigue, Nicholson Baker, Kim Ghattis, Michael Robbins, more.
The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, is Book Post’s Fall 2025 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostus
