Leopold Center - An April evening in Ames with Wendell Berry attracts many fans

Berry: I am probably the most marginal farmer imaginable. My wife and I have for 42 years worked the hills and river valleys and it has been nothing but problems. We have a small flock of sheep and we deal all the time keeping them in the pastures and alive. I don't have a single animal on my farm who believes anything I say. Our best crop from an agricultural point of view is our children and now our grandchildren … There are no final solutions to any of the problems I have in farming and that's probably a good thing.

Berry Smith: Our farm is in Henry County about eight miles away. We bought our farm 10 months after we got married in 1981. Even though many told us we were crazy, like my father and his father, we went ahead because we had no idea you could have any trouble farming … We farmed conventionally for five or six years, through serious droughts, serious times when tobacco prices fell 50 cents a pound. We had some pretty hard times that were harder than we thought they would be but we were where we wanted to be and surrounded by people we love so it was all right … We not only were not making any headway at all on paying off our debt but we were wearing out the farm. So we began the change that continues… and has led to interesting things. We've involved our children in things that we never would have, like pastured poultry, had we stayed with what we started out to do … What we're doing now is we're making a place for our children, we're keeping it together for them, like it was kept for us and how it was kept for my father. That's what gives us hope and things are going all right.

Krouse: [When I was in Florida] I heard about the farm crisis that was beginning in the Midwest, so I decided to buy a small farm … I take a great amount of enjoyment to produce food that kids can eat on the way home, that doesn't need a lot of processing to make into something they like.

Thicke: On our farm we try to make the pieces work together… We have a grazing farm with 60 paddocks so after each milking the cows go to a fresh piece of grass … I think we can actually farm and have animals on the farm that can improve the environment, improve the soil quality ... But it is a learning process, every year we learn or re-learn something.

Berry: I think the problem everywhere is to keep the ground covered. In Iowa you have these long rows and as I understand it, that's an enormous problem because the water washes right down the rows. At home, our land may erode more quickly but in Iowa erosion can be pretty hair-raising … Several years ago we were with a man who showed us a 47-inch barbed wire fence [with little of it showing above the soil] and there was another one just like it underneath. That's not supposed to be happening.

Krouse: I've been a soil commissioner for a long time. The water isn't any cleaner and it's very sad. When farms change hands, they almost always go to larger equipment and the beautiful terraces and contours just go away … it's very discouraging.

Thicke: In Iowa we have many acres of annual crops so from late summer and early fall the ground is bare for so many months. This is inherently unsustainable. We're living on a binge here, we're drunk on ethanol in Iowa.

Berry: We have a little land in western Kentucky that is suitable for Iowa-type agriculture so the ethanol bug has bit us, too. It reveals how frivolous our agriculture policy is. It wasn't too long ago that the great drama of agriculture was to grow food and feed the world. And now suddenly we've changed to the drama of fuel. Weren't we serious all those years about feeding the world? And how serious are we willing to be about our cars? I've heard a lot about "green patriotism," that only six percent of our land would be given to fuel. But suppose you lose some of your corn crop. Are people going to have to choose between fuel and food?

Krouse: We're seeing CRP [Conservation Reserve Program] land being dug up, headlands and waterways destroyed, which I am presuming is for more corn. But I don't think farmers really believe that it's really that great of a deal, either, and the ones I see are being cautious.

Thicke: I read somewhere that if we could increase our passenger car mile efficiency from 25 to 26 miles per gallon that we could save more fuel than all the ethanol we're producing today. That seems astounding…And to increase it to 32 miles per gallon we could exceed President Bush's goal to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol just in what we conserve.

Berry Smith: I can tell you what we did in Kentucky. We stepped out of another person's marketplace and formed our own market where we had some control over the price we got for our product. We sold organic vegetables, pastured poultry and we're now selling wine. We have no interest in the global marketplace; we are interested in people coming to our place or somewhere near it to get our products. That's how we've managed to stay where we are.

Berry: I was visited once by a family from Indiana and it has been a story I've now often repeated. This man was in the hog business and the hog economy had crashed. He went to the grocery store around Thanksgiving or Christmas and realized that he couldn't afford to buy a ham. It made him cry. It also made him think that he was in an economy that he didn't control any part of. He started selling hogs to local customers and processing them in a small meat processing plant. Eventually the little processing plant came up for sale so he bought it. He couldn't meet all the demand for his meat so he began marketing meat for his neighbors. By the time he visited me he was employing his family, his neighbors were prosperous and he employed 10 of his neighbors in his meat processing plant. The only way you can do it is through the local economy. That's why we fought the revolution.

Krouse: We're unique to be willing and able to do that. … It's the midsize farmers we should be concerned about, those with 500 and 800 acres … almost everyone in those families depends on their farm income and for their health insurance.

Krouse: I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing; it has possibilities for some good applications in some cases. I don't like the idea of genetically engineered genes turned lose in the environment with very little environmental and agroecological research. … If you can engineer a bacteria to be human insulin that's cheap and pure and dependable, I think that might be a good application of that technology. … Certainly the possibility for the contamination of important genetic resources with roving genes is an absolutely huge and very real issue that is incredibly important. Keep those genes indoors.

Thicke: A friend of mine said that rather than a silver bullet for energy or ethanol, you need something like silver buckshot. You need to make a lot of little things work together, and then maybe you can solve a problem. But to have one single bullet like corn ethanol or genetic engineering, then we're going to get in trouble ecologically.

Berry: You can't have a local food economy unless you have urban agrarians who are willing to buy it. … What we're talking about is local adaptation. I don't know how local adaptation got to be removed as a requirement for humans. Modern biology is based on adaptation, but somehow we've worked to be excused from that obligation. We have all these un-adapted people; not only do they not belong where they are, they don't belong anywhere. To belong together in a place is some knowledge we've lost, and we've got to get it back.

The drama that I see now is whether our lives will be run by a few minds or by many... The possibility inherent in local food economy is the possibility for local adaptation, real communities, real multi-culturalism, and a human cultural pattern that would correspond in some meaningful way to the ecological mosaic.

Thicke: My advice is for young people to look for ways to make it sustainable from the start.

Berry: You can't have a sustainable agriculture unless you have young people to start into it. Sooner or later, we're going to have to get serious about helping young people finance an operation …and about some kind of mentoring, that's a very large project.

Berry Smith: [Policies] don't necessarily have to help but if they just did not hurt us .. We just had a big fight with the legislature last year about wine distributing. My husband five years ago planted grapes because we wanted to make wine and sell it on our place. Because it was a 'dry' county my husband worked to pass farm winery legislation that would allow people like us to sell wine …Everything was fine until .. the big distributors saw us as a problem … For awhile they told us that between our barn and our tasting room, which is 60 feet, we would have to pay a distributor to move the wine. This required months and months of backbreaking, frustrating work And we lost. The compromise is that now our 22-year old daughter and her 25-year-old sister have formed a distributing company and they distribute Smith-Berry wine for us.

Berry: I have a little problem going on in my mind. You go around the country and all these little groups here and there are trying to preserve something that's worthy and good, they represent millions. All these little organizations, what a powerful thing! These people are finding good local solutions without government advice, government help, government knowledge, government permission. Maybe the solution is keeping the government from finding out about it.

Krouse: It seems like urban people are our biggest allies. When they find out what's going on they are excited and want to do something and are willing to spend money to make what they want happen.

Berry: We need to work on urban agrarians -- it's a real thing. We need to urge them to garden. Because every time they grow something, even a tomato plant in a flower pot, they learn something and they learn the difference between good policy and bad policy. We need people like this to govern our country.

Berry Smith: We have survived because of the loyalty of the customers that we invited to our farm. People who come to our place feel that they're in this with us. It's hard for me and my husband to open our place, to have people in and out all the time. But I think it's necessary. We can do it and people need to see it being done.

[Berry outlined the need for healing America's environmental wounds by rebuilding agriculture and rural communities]

Berry: That book was written, as all interesting books are, with a lot of love and also quite a lot of fear. I learned a lot from that book. I thought that this was going to be my way to take part in the public dialogue about agriculture. I couldn't have been more wrong. That book had readers from the start but it's still a marginal book and it's part of an effort that is still difficult to describe.

Wendell Berry’s visit to Ames was funded in part by an endowment to the Iowa State University Foundation from the family of L.C. (John) Shivvers, who farmed near Knoxville, Iowa. The annual Shivvers Lecture is designed to focus on:

Fred Kirschenmann, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow who has worked with the Shivvers family to schedule the event, said they are interested in inviting suggestions from the public for topics and potential speakers for future lectures. They also would like to involve more Iowa farmers in future lectures and discussions. Send ideas to him at: leopold1@iastate.edu, or call the Center, (515) 294-3711.