Join Dr. Leah Bayens in an extended study of Wendell Berry’s iconic book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Retrace the story of this land’s unsettling and the resulting agricultural, ecological, and social calamities. Join with friends and neighbors, near and far, to consider the roots of current challenges and the threads of the past that help make it possible to farm in full health through land-settling cultures, parity-based economies, and kindly-use communities. Along the way, explore how The Berry Center translates this book’s lessons into its own guiding principles.

This Agrarian Voices Study explores how The Berry Center puts Wendell Berry’s writing to work to advocate for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies. Participants consider how “writing for the farm” helps answer critical questions:  What will it take for farmers to be able to afford to farm well? and How do we become a culture that supports good farming and land use? In addition to studying essays, fiction, and poetry by Wendell Berry, participants also read and ruminate on great agrarian writers such as bell hooks, Aldo Leopold, Crystal Wilkinson, Grace Olmstead, and Jason Peters.

Session full; waitlist option

In this course, we will read a sampling of agricultural writing across time and cultures that reflects, as Wendell Berry writes, a “continually recurring affirmation of nature as the final judge, law-giver, and pattern-maker of and for the human use of the earth” (“The Whole Horse”). Using Berry’s essay “The Presence of Nature in the Natural World” as a touchstone, we will trace an ecological agrarian literary lineage and determine where we fit and how we continue this line.

From livestock handling facilities to equipment storage, from feed mixing to winter feeding and manure composting, learn how The Berry Center Farm is using hoop barns. In this half-day, field-based workshop, you’ll consider how and whether these affordable, flexible-use buildings might be an appropriate choice for your own farm, woodland, or land management needs.

In our Reading in Place studies, participants will receive a reading guide filled with discussion questions, supplemental resources (maps, articles, images, et al.), and hands-on exercises–to be used while reading at home and while at The Berry Center Farm, exploring the landscapes captured in the novel.

In our Reading in Place studies, participants will receive a reading guide filled with discussion questions, supplemental resources (maps, articles, images, et al.), and hands-on exercises–to be used while reading at home and while at The Berry Center Farm, exploring the landscapes captured in the novel.

In our Reading in Place studies, participants will receive a reading guide filled with discussion questions, supplemental resources (maps, articles, images, et al.), and hands-on exercises–to be used while reading at home and while at The Berry Center Farm, exploring the landscapes captured in the novel.

This hands-on course will provide students with the knowledge and practical skills necessary to effectively use a modern European-style scythe for mowing grass and harvesting hay. We will delve into the historical context and ecological benefits of scythe-based mowing contrasting it with contemporary mechanical methods.

In this two-part, six-hour workshop, participants look at what a picture book is and how it works. An expansive genre, picture books extend from lap-sitters and independent readers and include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and biography.

This 2-day workshop is designed for those who are beginning to collect and write their personal stories of family and rural places. Georgia Green Stamper has led these sessions at The Berry Center’s Agrarian Cultural Center.

This immersive, hands-on workshop is designed to help you think through a variety of ideas to manage your farm woodlands, not just for timber, but as a thriving, healthy ecological system.

This day-long workshop is designed for participants with no prior experience in using a power chainsaw.

This two-day workshop is ideal for anyone interested in working in the woods with traditional forestry hand tools.

This intensive two-day training is appropriate for any woodland owner or farm worker operating a power chainsaw.

This intensive two-day training is appropriate for farm woodland owners and farm workers interested in advancing their power chainsaw use to include felling difficult trees, bucking stems to maximize value, extraction of logs with a farm tractor and forestry winch, and removal of storm damaged-and-downed trees.

This one-day workshop is designed for individuals interested in learning how to utilize a farm tractor forestry winch to haul timber from the woods and to operate a portable sawmill to turn logs into lumber.

Our first green woodworking series launches with a day of greenwood spoon carving from a freshly felled tree.

This half-day workshop is for individuals looking to enhance wildlife habitat on their woodlands through effective management techniques.

In our Reading in Place studies, participants will receive a reading guide filled with discussion questions, supplemental resources (maps, articles, images, et al.), and hands-on exercises–to be used while reading at home and while at The Berry Center Farm, exploring the landscapes captured in the book selection.

In our Reading in Place studies, participants will receive a reading guide filled with discussion questions, supplemental resources (maps, articles, images, et al.), and hands-on exercises–to be used while reading at home and while at The Berry Center Farm, exploring the landscapes captured in the book selection.