Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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BERRY: I'm not sure. When I first started saying that it was important just to grow a garden, it seemed really risky stuff to me. You can defend farming on an aesthetic basis and say it's a great thing to go off into the country and breathe good air and lead a healthy life and grow your own vegetables. That's really nice, really lovely. But to get on from there and say that you can learn things of great practical, moral and spiritual importance from doing it — that's still going to take a while.

PLOWBOY: Why?

BERRY: It has to do with a breakdown of our language, the way we talk about farming. Our culture today is mainly embarrassed about country things. It no longer realizes or wants to realize that its life still must come from the ground. We can't speak to farmers anymore about their value to us. They no longer have a model or a place that they can look to outside themselves, and say, "Yes, there's a vision of the kind of person I'd like to become." Instead, they turn on the television and see a show like "Green Acres" which represents them as negligible and comical. Back in the works of some of the old writers like Homer and Hesiod and Virgil and Chaucer there's real knowledge of the worth of agriculture and it's combined with high art and theology and love and everything else. Farming's right in there. They didn't have to apologize for it.

PLOWBOY: That kind of respect was based in part on proximity . . . being physically close to the process of farming. Isolated in a technological society as many of us now are, however, it's not surprising that we often lose the ability to see the beauties of a life close to the land.

BERRY: I'd like to get people back in touch with the realities of a farming life. There's a great argument going on today about whether or not the family farm is going to survive or should survive. This argument is extremely important, but it seems to me that all the talk about productivity and markets and feeding the hungry is secondary. The primary concern has to be with the cultural relation between people and land.

We need to be talking about the family farmers who live on and care for small tracts of land out of the motivation that long association and deep knowledge can produce, people who know the difference between duty and love. We need to know what that kind of spirit means for a person as well as a place, and then we'll begin to understand the practical value of the family farm.

PLOWBOY: In terms of what you've called the "love that enforces care"?

BERRY: It's love that keeps you walking over a place and it's love that makes you imagine what can be done on it. More and more since Tanya and I have lived on this farm, our life has been taken up with imagining what would be possible. And we'll be involved in that until we die, or until our energy plays out. Our life here has developed in response to this place and the potential in it. By now we've realized some of it, but the most exciting thing is that we know we haven't realized very much of it.

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