An Education in Homecoming.
The Berry Center's Farm and Forest Institute provides agricultural education that is biologically based, economically viable, and rooted in place. Agricultural education was one of The Center’s first projects because we must have more farmers. This starts with keeping farmers on the land through parity, or a living wage. It starts with providing experiences that teach how to work with nature rather than against it, by prioritizing the health of soil, air, water, and community. When farmers can do this and also make a living, then it is possible for more people to farm.
This vision requires a land-based culture that prioritizes health, frugality, neighborliness, local knowledge, history, and an economics of cooperation between land and people. It requires people to be homecomers, as Wendell Berry and his lifelong friend Wes Jackson put it. People need to know how to dig in and make a home, how to make our lives fit the land without destroying it. All of this takes education. At its core is a mantra we teach people to repeat at every turn: What has happened here? What should have happened here? What do we have to work with?
Beginning as an undergraduate education approach, the program has evolved over more than a decade to become a continuing and community education initiative based in Henry County, Kentucky. The Institute includes 3 educational components:
(1) 50-Year Farm Project: The Berry Center’s 200-acre working livestock farm is a research and site for its farmer cooperation project: the Our Home Place Meat (OHPM) program.
(2) Agrarian Education Courses: These affordable workshops, short courses, and field days address the difficult realities of our present economy by using what is affordable, appropriate, and ready at hand. We bring to life Wendell Berry’s edict that “the finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer.”
The curriculum draws together The Berry Center’s programs to help keep farmers on the land. Our Home Place Meat, The Agrarian Library and Archive, and the Agrarian Culture Center provide content that bolster the three legs of The Institute's permanent agriculture stool:
(3) Agrarian Education Consortium: On request, we provide to schools, organizations, or other groups a menu of subjects on which, as time permits, FFI faculty can provide instruction at The Berry Center. This ranges from group instruction in farm woodland management to guided conversations about Wendell Berry’s writing. The sessions, which can vary in length (typically half or full day), are designed to build competencies as well as to enhance understanding of and contributions to The Berry Center’s mission. Groups can use the standard fee schedule to estimate expenses.
Farming with Nature.
Our agricultural education combines nature and culture, the land and the people. Through studying how to work with nature’s cycles, we equip people with practical skills to make informed economic decisions about land use. Healthy, functioning farms and forests make it possible for farmers to afford to farm well now and in the days ahead. Ultimately, the goal is to live from the land by working with it.
“Work Song, Part II: A Vision”
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows.The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, bird song like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stalk bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields
In their voices they will hear a music
Risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
Whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.
—Wendell Berry
New and Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2013
Click here to hear the poem read by Nick Offerman
