Good Work For The New Year

I will remember 2015 as the year that our efforts at The Berry Center to rebuild an economy that will support a diversified land conserving agriculture took a manageable shape. We have worked hard for the last four years laying a framework. There was plenty I didn’t...

Problem Solvers

By Mary Berry After something like forty years of going to farm meetings I think I can speak with some authority about the quality the meetings I attend. The first meetings I remember attending were with my father and grandfather. Why they took a determined to be...

Hope For A New Place

By Katherine (Katie) Ellis It is a privilege to write to you today from The Berry Center.  I am grateful to be a part of this important work in culture and agriculture and to be doing so alongside such wonderful people.  The work of The Berry Center is deeply personal...

Good Economic Sense

By Mary Berry Thinking about economics is part of everything we are doing at The Berry Center. That is clear, I hope, in our work to improve our local agricultural economy and with our work to use the Burley Tobacco Program as a model for agricultural policy that...

Farm to Table, Pay to Play

By Sarah Fritschner Many people believe that getting local food into a city is a simple, straight line like this: A  ————–> Z, where A is the farm and Z is the table. Unfortunately, the market doesn’t work in a straight line. Far from...

Cooperation Not Competition

By Marry Berry Michele Guthrie, The Berry Center’s Archivist, recently found this quotation from my grandfather John Berry, Sr., “We agree to differ, we resolve to love, and we may cooperate to serve.” This was handwritten on the top of a church bulletin dated 1949....

Berry Farming Program Endures

We are deeply saddened by the announcement of the pending closure of St. Catharine College, a school located in the heart of the state and at the heart of the Washington County, Kentucky community.  Though St. Catharine College is closing the Berry Farming and...

City or Country?

Today a visitor to the Berry Center asked an intriguing question: “Is there a book of Wendell Berry’s that would help one decide whether it would be better to live in the country or in a city?” Well, there is, no doubt, a book Mr. Berry has written that would help...

Strategic Long Term Plan for Kentucky Agriculture

John M. Berry, Jr. of Henry County, Kentucky has worked his entire life on behalf of farm families, during a distinguished career as a lawyer in New Castle, Kentucky and as a state senator representing the 26th senatorial district in Kentucky from 1973 – 1982. From...

Hope in the New Marketplace

Recently I re-read Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture of the National Endowment for the Humanities and I came across what I find so often in his writing – reasons to be hopeful. Here is the excerpt that inspired me:   “The losses and damages...