An Education in Homecoming.
The Berry Center's Farm and Forest Institute supports agriculture that is biologically based, economically viable, and rooted in place. The Institute's community education courses, field days, and workshops in Henry County, Kentucky are designed for:
early career and experienced farmers
woodland owners and forestry professionals
rural leaders
residents who support the cultures of agriculture
Our “education in homecoming” uses the work of Wendell Berry and a lineage of agrarians to help people live well with and from their home places. The curriculum draws together The Berry Center’s programs to help keep farmers on the land by working with nature and neighbor.
Our Home Place Meat, The Agrarian Library and Archive, and the Agrarian Culture Center provide content that bolster the three legs of The Institute's permanent agriculture stool: livestock on grass production; low-impact forestry; and cooperative economics, thought, and rural leadership.
This agrarian education addresses the difficult realities of our present economy by using what is affordable, appropriate, and ready at hand. We bring to life Wendell Berry’s edict that “the finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer.”
Participants will learn to:
conduct production planning and budgeting
implement livestock production that connects soil, water, plants, and animals
use practical, safe, and low-cost forestry skills
select appropriate production scale
locate and evaluate resources
take an inventory of assets (personal, natural, economic, and community)
describe their role in agricultural history
Join us in preserving this legacy through these immersive learning experiences!
Farming with Nature.
Our agricultural education combines nature and culture, the land and the people. Through studying how to work with nature’s cycles, we equip people with practical skills to make informed economic decisions about land use. Healthy, functioning farms and forests make it possible for farmers to afford to farm well now and in the days ahead. Ultimately, the goal is to live from the land by working with it.
“Work Song, Part II: A Vision”
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows.The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, bird song like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stalk bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields
In their voices they will hear a music
Risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
Whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.
—Wendell Berry
New and Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2013
