Reflecting on Wendell

Over the course of just eight days, we lost three legends who make me want to be a better person — Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Steinem.

I have been listening to Dolly’s music (especially one song that we plan to cover at our upcoming Fall Harvest Show!), reading Wendell’s collection of essays called What Are People For?, and reflecting on Gloria’s feminist legacy. Additionally, Asa got his first book from Dolly’s Imagination Library last week.

Out of this influential trio, however, Wendell Berry has had the greatest impact on our farm. His significance is celebrated across all of my feeds and media channels, from farmer friends who share how he shaped their agrarian perspectives to my favorite author Barabara Kingsolver’s remembrance of him in the NY Times. Looks like I am in good company as a Berry fangirl.

In 2019 I was living in Minneapolis and feeling an emotional tug to move home. I missed the everyday moments that the rest of my family shared without me. A desire to farm had been growing in me for several years, from an internship at Moonstone Farm after sophomore year to a non-profit job working with youth on urban farms to a summer job working on a fruit farm.

I ordered a copy of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. As I read that book, the ember that was already smoldering in me to return home and try my hand at farming was coaxed into a proper flame. Here are some of his words that stuck with me.

• “There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.”

When I left Minnesota, I was 25 and had been enjoying post-college years of living in a city with no strings attached. I had graduated from a college with students from around the world and a curriculum that emphasized becoming a “global citizen.” I will always be grateful for how those years exposed me to many cultures, religions, and traditions. But after years of studying the most wicked problems facing the planet and carrying the burden of being the next generation to fix them, there was something very appealing about returning to my roots and focusing on the hyper-local. I cannot singlehandedly change the US food system, I thought, but I can raise food in a way that improves a bit of soil and sequesters a bit of carbon.

I wanted to stay in place and experience the rituals and rhythms of living on the same piece of land year after year. This continues to delight me — knowing where the fire pink wildflower comes up each spring, checking the same log each summer for chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms, visiting the ramp patch annually, and observing how the creek shifts after big rains.

Berry reminded me that farming isn’t just about impacting the land, but having it impact you. He writes…

• “We have given up the understanding -- dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought -- that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land…”

This relationship with “the land” has been deepended by building a farm business where we are literally sustained by the fruits of our labor. We produce food from the land, which passes through us, and we will eventually return to the land, passing through it. We have a small family graveyard up on the ridge that began as an unmowed strip of woods to sprinkle the ashes of our dogs and place simple wooden name markers. It has gradually grown to include the ashes of a family friend and grandma. If we’re lucky, we’ll end up there too. CJ and I both hope that our nutrients can return to the land when we die, not to be trapped in a metal coffin but integrated back into the soil which fed us for so long.

Finally, while I first read Berry’s words about marriage as a single person, they have taken on new meaning as CJ and I have built a life together. Berry explains how the transition from family farming to men working outside of the home changed the nature of marriage and replaced the skill of homesteading with the act of making and spending money.

• “Without the household—not just as a unifying ideal, but as a practical circumstance of mutual dependence and obligation, requiring skill, moral discipline, and work—husband and wife find it less and less possible to imagine and enact their marriage. Without much in particular that they can do for each other, they have a scarcity of practical reasons to be together…”

While there are unique challenges to running a business with your spouse (no talking about business in bed!), there is also great satisfaction derived from co-creating a farm, business, garden, and home together. Berry comes to mind when we are working together, bringing meaning to the practical utility of our partnership. We are both needed to sort and load the cattle. We are both needed to complete all the farm chores, care for the baby, and get dinner on the table. This summer, CJ grew the sweet corn and I froze it all. Our partnership is not just a romance, but a mutual dependence. Or as it said on the framed needlepoint that hung at CJ’s grandma’s house, “kissin wears out, cookin don’t.”