FARM TO TABLEWENDELL BERRY

Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in

Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of more

than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching,

his home and family, and all that each involves

are extraordinarily integrated. He understands

his writing as an attempt to elucidate certain

connections, primarily the interrelationships and

interdependencies of man and the natural world.

To Berry, farming the land requires the same

discipline as writing a poem. John Ditsky calls

farming Berry’s “paradigm of art”. And Leon Driskell

says frankly that Berry “is the same person when

writing as when plowing”. Traditional farmers, like

artists, learn their art through a kind of cultural

process, the cyclic view of education, rather than

through training or programming, the linear view.

Berry explains that the best farming grows not only

out of factual knowledge but out of cultural tradition;

it is learned not only by precept but by example,

by apprenticeship; and it requires not merely a

competent knowledge of its facts and processes, but

also a complex set of attitudes, a certain culturally

evolved stance, in the face of the unexpected and

the unknown. That is to say, it requires style in the

highest and richest sense of that term.

ABOUT the author

COMPLETE WORKS

FICTION

Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992

Hannah Coulter, 2004

Jayber Crow, 2000

The Memory of Old Jack, 1974

Nathan Coulter, 1960

A Place on Earth, 1967

Remembering, 1988

That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004

Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the

Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife,

Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994

The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986

A World Lost, 1996

POETRY

The Broken Ground, 1964

Clearing, 1977

Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982

The Country of Marriage, 1973

Entries, 1994

Farming: A Hand Book, 1970

Given: New Poems, 2005

Openings, 1968

A Part, 1980

Sabbaths: Poems, 1987

Sayings and Doings, 1975

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999

A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998

The Wheel, 1982

ESSAYS

Another Turn of the Crank, 1996

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002

Citizenship Papers, 2003

A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1981

Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990

The Hidden Wound, 1970

Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987

Life Is a Miracle, 2000

The Long-Legged House, 2004

Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992

Standing by Words, 1983

The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977

What Are People For?, 1990

SELECTED WORKS

He ate hungrily the eggs, sausage, and biscuits that

she set in front of him, twice emptying the glass that

he replenished from a large pitcher of milk. She loved

to watch him eat-there was something curiously

delicate in the way he used his large hands-but this

morning she busied herself about the kitchen, not

looking at him, for she knew he was watching her.

She had not even set a place for herself.

“You’re not hungry?” he asked.

“Not very. I’ll eat something after while.”

He put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred

rapidly with the spoon. Now he lingered a little.

He did not indulge himself often, but this was one

of his moments of leisure. He gave himself to his

pleasures as concentratedly as to his work. He

was never partial about anything; he never felt two

ways at the same time. It was, she thought, a kind

of childishness in him. When he was happy, he was

entirely happy, and he could be as entirely sad or

angry. His glooms were the darkest she had ever

seen. He worked as a hungry dog ate, and yet he

could play at croquet or cards with the self-forgetful

exuberance of a little boy.

It was for his concentratedness, she supposed, if

such a thing could be supposed about, that she

loved him. That and her yen just to look at him, for it

was wonderful to her the way he was himself in his

slightest look or gesture.

She did not understand him in everything he did,

and yet she recognized him in everything he did. She

had not been prepared—she was hardly prepared

yet—for the assent she had given to him.

A JONQUIL FOR MARY PENN

RISE ATDAWN AND

PICK DEW WET RED

BERRIES IN A CUP

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to

farming, whose hands reach into the ground and

sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into

death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen

the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again

in the corn. His thought passes along the row ends

like a mole. What miraculous seed has he swallowed

that the unending sentence of his love flows out of

his mouth like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like

water descending in the dark?

THE MAN BORN TO FARMING

MAKE A

HOME

They were capable, unasking, generous, humorous

women, and sometimes, among themselves, they

were raucous and free, unlike the other women

she had known. On their way home from picking

blackberries one afternoon, they had to get through

a new barbed wire fence. Josie Tom held two wires

apart while the other four gathered their skirts,

leaned down, and straddled through. Josie Tom

handed their filled buckets over. And then Josie

Braymer held the wires apart, and Josie Tom,

stooping through, got the back of her dress hung on

the top wire.

When the next year came, they began at the

beginning, and though the times had not improved,

they improved themselves. They bought a few hens

and a rooster from Josie Braymer. They bought a

second cow. They put in a garden. They bought two

shoats to raise for meat. Mary learned to preserve

the food they would need for winter. When the cows

freshened, she learned to milk. She took a small

bucket of cream and a few eggs to Port William

every Saturday night and used the money she made

to buy groceries and to pay on their debts.

SOWING THE SEED,MY HAND IS ONE WITH THE EARTH.WANTING THE SEED TO GROW,MY MIND IS ONE WITH THE LIGHT.HOEING THE CROP,MY HANDS ARE ONE WITH THE RAIN.HAVING CARED FOR THE PLANTS,MY MIND IS ONE WITH THE AIR.HUNGRY AND TRUSTING, MY MIND IS ONE WITH THE EARTH.EATING THE FRUIT,MY BODY IS ONE WITH THE EARTH.

SOWING THE SEED,MY HAND IS ONE WITH THE EARTH.WANTING THE SEED TO GROW,MY MIND IS ONE WITH THE LIGHT.HOEING THE CROP,MY HANDS ARE ONE WITH THE RAIN.HAVING CARED FOR THE PLANTS,MY MIND IS ONE WITH THE AIR.HUNGRY AND TRUSTING, MY MIND IS ONE WITH THE EARTH.EATING THE FRUIT,MY BODY IS ONE WITH THE EARTH.

ENRICHING THE EARTHTo enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of

winter grains and of various legumes, their growth

to be plowed in to enrich the earth. I have stirred

into the ground the offal and the decay of the

growth of past seasons and so mended the earth

and made its yield increase. All this serves the

dark. I am slowly falling into the fund of things.

And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I

serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air,

and my days do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s

service, for when the will fails so do the hands and

one lives at the expense of life. After death, willing

or not, the body serves, entering the earth. And so

what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised

up into song.

SHE LOVED HER JARS OFVEGETABLES

SHE LOVED HER JARS OFVEGETABLES

She loved her jars of vegetables and preserves on

the cellar shelves, and the potato bin beneath, the

cured hams and shoulders and bacons hanging in

the smokehouse, the two hens already brooding

their clutches of marked eggs, the egg basket and

the cream bucket slowly filling, week after week. But

today these things seemed precious and far away,

as if remembered from another world or another life.

Her sickness made things seem arbitrary and awry.

Nothing had to be the way it was. As easily as she

could see the house as it was, she could imagine it

empty, windowless, the tin roof blowing away, the

chimneys crumbling, the cellar caved in, weeds in

the yard. She could imagine Elton and herself gone,

and the rest of them-Hardy, Hample, Cotman, and

Quail-gone too.

Insofar as the center is utterly dependent upon

the periphery, its ignorance of the periphery is not

natural or necessary, but is merely dangerous. The

danger is increased when this ignorance protects

itself by contempt for the people who know. If the

most intimate knowledge of the land from which

you live belongs to people whom you consider to be

provincials or field niggers or hillbillies or hicks or

rednecks, then you are not likely ever to learn

very much.

Furthermore, the danger increases as the periphery

is enlarged; the vulnerability of long supply lines is

well understood. To give the most obvious example,

the United States has chosen (if that is the right

word) to become an import-dependent society

rather than to live principally from its own land and

the work of its own people, as if dependence on

imported goods and labor can be consistent with

political independence and self- determination.

This inconsistency is making us, willy-nilly, an

imperial power, which perhaps increases “business

opportunities” for our government’s corporate

sponsors, but certainly increases our fragility and

our peril. The economic independence of families,

communities, and even regions has now been almost

completely destroyed.

Far from caring for our land and our rural people,

as we would do if we understood our dependence

on them, we have not, as a nation, given them so

much as a serious thought for half a century. I read,

I believe, my full share of commentary on politics

and economics by accredited experts, and I can

assure you that you will rarely find in any of them

even a passing reference to agriculture or forestry.

Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an

actual country lies out there beyond the places of

power, wealth, and knowledge. The ultimate official

word on agriculture seems to have been spoken by

Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra

Taft Benson, who told the farmers to “Get big or

get out.”

A predominantly urban population that is

contemptuous of the working people of the farms

and forests cannot know enough about the country

to exercise a proper responsibility for its good use.

And ignorance in the center promotes ignorance on

the periphery. Knowledge that is not properly valued

decreases in value, and so finally is lost. It is not

possible to uproot virtually the whole agricultural

population by economic adversity, replacing it

with machines and chemicals, and still keep local

knowledge of the land and land use at a high level

of competence. We still know how to make the land

produce, but only temporarily, for we are losing

the knowledge of how to keep it productive. Wes

Jackson has written and often said that when the

ratio of eyes to acres in agricultural landscapes

becomes too wide, when the number of caretakers

declines below a level that varies from place to

local knowledge in the age of information

place but is reckonable for everyplace, then good

husbandry of the land becomes impossible.

The general complacency about such matters seems

to rest on the assumption that science can serve

as a secure connection between land and people,

designing beneficent means and methods of land

use and assuring the quality and purity of our food.

But we cannot escape or ignore the evidence that

this assumption is false.

There is, to begin with, too great a gap between the

science and the practice of agriculture. This gap is

inherent in the present organization of intellectual

and academic life, and it formalizes the differences

between knowing and doing, the laboratory or

classroom and the world. It is generally true that

agricultural scientists are consumers rather than

producers of agricultural products. They eat with

the same freedom from farmwork, weather, and the

farm economy as other consumers, and perhaps

with the same naive confidence that a demand will

dependably call forth a supply.

Moreover, the official agriculture of science,

government, and agribusiness has been concerned

almost exclusively with the ability of the land to

produce food and fiber, and ultimately salaries,

grants, and profits. It has correspondingly neglected

its ecological and social responsibilities, and also,

in many ways, its agricultural ones. It has ignored

agriculture’s continuing obligations to be diverse,

conservative of its means, and respectful of its

natural supports.

The assumption that science can serve as an

adequate connector between people and land, and

thus can effectively replace the common knowledge

and culture of local farm communities, by now has

the status of an official program-though the aim of

science, more often than not, is to connect capital

with profit. The ascendancy of the expert involves

a withdrawal or relinquishment of confidence

in local intelligence-that is, in the knowledge,

experience, and mental competence of ordinary

people doing ordinary work. The result, naturally,

is that the competence of local intelligence has

declined. We are losing the use of local minds at

work on local problems. The right way to deal with

a problem, supposedly, is to summon an expert

from government, industry, or a university, who

will recommend the newest centrally-devised

mechanical or chemical solution. Thus capital

supposedly replaces intelligence as the basis of

work, just as information supposedly replaces land

as the basis of the economy.

the satisfactions of a mad farmer

the satisfactions of a mad farmerGROWING WEATHER; ENOUGH RAIN; THE COW’S UDDER TIGHT WITH MILK; THE PEACH TREE BENT WITH ITS YIELD; HONEY GOLDEN IN THE WHITE COMB-

Where the road came, no longer bearing men, but

briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape, the

house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils

rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic

and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the

tangle with white bloom. For a while in the years of

its wilderness a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to

the floor there in the cold nights. And then I came,

and set fire to the remnants of house and shed, and

let time hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all would

burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste like

a shawl. I knew those old ones departed then, and

I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me something

that would not bear my name-something that bears

us through the flame, and is lightened of us,

and is glad.

THE SUPPLANTING

the pastures deep in clover and grass,

enough, and more than enough;

the ground, new worked, moist

and yielding underfoot, the feet

comfortable in it as roots;

the early garden: potatoes, onions,

peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots,

radishes, marking their straight rows

with green, before the trees are leafed,’

raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,

currants shining in clusters amid their foliage,

strawberries red ripe with the white

flowers still on the vines-picked

with the dew on them, before breakfast·,

grape clusters heavy under broad leaves

powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness

- an ancient delight, delighting;

the bodies of children, joyful

without dread of their spending,

surprised at nightfall to be weary;

the bodies of women in loose cotton,

cool and closed in the evenings

of summer, like contented houses’,

the bodies of men, able in the heat

and sweat and weight and length

of the day’s work, eager in their spending,

attending to nightfall, the bodies of women;

sleep after love, dreaming

white lilies blooming

coolly out of the flesh;

THE SATISFACTIONS OF A MAD FARMER continued

WHITE CLOVER & WILD STRAWBERRIES

WHITE CLOVER & WILD STRAWBERRIES

the deer sprung from them, gone on;

live streams, live shiftings

of the sun in the summer woods;

the great hollow-trunked beech,

a landmark I loved to return to,

its leaves gold-lit on the silver

branches in the fall: blown down

after a hundred years of standing,

a footbridge over the stream;

the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the

voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver

wire;

a little clearing among cedars,

white clover and wild strawberries

beneath an opening to the sky

-heavenly, I thought it,

so perfect; had I foreseen it

I would have desired it

no less than it deserves;

fox tracks in snow, the impact

of lightness upon lightness,

unendingly silent.

What I know of spirit is astir

in the world. The god I have always expected to ap-

pear at the woods’ edge, beckoning,

I have always expected to be

a great relisher of this world, its good

grown immortal in his mind.

after sleep, enablement

to go on with work, morning a clear gift;

the maidenhood of the day,

cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass;

the work of feeding and clothing and housing, done

with more than enough knowledge

and with more than enough love,

by those who do not have to be told;

any building well built, the rafters

firm to the walls, the walls firm,

the joists without give,

the proportions clear,

the fitting exact, even unseen,

bolts and hinges that turn

home without a jiggle;

any work worthy ofthe day’s maidenhood;

any man whose words lead precisely to what exists,

who never stoops to persuasion;

the talk of friends, lightened and cleared by all that

can be assumed;

deer tracks in the wet path,

Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992

Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987

Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005

WORKS CITED

This book was created by Elizabeth Natoli in the

Communication Design Studio at Washington

University in St. Louis in the spring semester of

2012. The typefaces used are Whitney and Amatic.