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.

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.

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.