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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.