Agrarian Voices Study Winter/Spring 2025

Writing for the Farm: Advocacy and Leadership

This Agrarian Voices Study explores how The Berry Center puts Wendell Berry’s writing to work to advocate for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies. Participants consider how “writing for the farm” helps answer critical questions:

What will it take for farmers to be able to afford to farm well?

How do we become a culture that supports good farming and land use?

In addition to studying essays, fiction, and poetry by Wendell Berry, participants also read and ruminate on great agrarian writers such as bell hooks, Aldo Leopold, Crystal Wilkinson, Grace Olmstead, and Jason Peters. Through carefully curated materials, the course covers themes of community membership, valuing and preserving local knowledge, and keeping farmers on the land–all topics introduced in The Berry Center’s Agrarian Voices Distinguished Lecture Series.

Participants complete the majority of the self-paced coursework at home, on their own time. They expand their learning through opportunities for group discussions, online response posts, public lectures, and a humanities field day at The Berry Center Farm in Henry County, Kentucky.

Most readings and materials are relatively short–an essay, a poem, a book chapter, a podcast episode, or the like.

Electronic copies and links for readings and resources are provided; participants may print at home as they like.

The Berry Center’s Tanya Amyx Berry Agrarian Library also contains hard copies of many of these texts, which course participants are welcome to read at the Center. For those who wish to purchase full texts from which excerpts are taken, please consider purchasing from The Bookstore at The Berry Center or TBC’s Bookshop.org account.

All of this is designed to determine how, as Wendell Berry puts it, to be a person “capable of seeing what is the right thing to do, and of doing it” (“The Presence of Nature in the Natural World” 126).

Schedule of Participation Opportunities

Attend as you are able! If you cannot participate in a session, then you may view recordings of discussion sessions and Agrarian Voices Lectures. The Humanities Field Day session is in-person only, but four online response post opportunities will be available.