“We have not settled America. We have colonized America. Now, we’ve got to figure out … how to actually live here. How are we going to move forward? Everybody needs to be an agrarian now.”
— Mary Berry
We live in a culture that pushes us to keep moving. Obsessed with upward mobility, we keep searching for something more. But this ‘problem of mobility’ robs us of the opportunity to belong to a place. To develop deep cultural ties with the land and each other. And Mary Berry contends that this disconnection and lack of community is the source of many of our problems here in the US.
Mary Berry is the Executive Director of The Berry Center, a nonprofit that advocates for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Mary joins Ross to explain how her family’s history as part of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative inspired her to build The Berry Center and describe how the Burley Tobacco program’s principles are at work in her team’s Our Home Place Meat initiative.
Mary offers insight around the value of belonging to a place we love, discussing what it means to be part of a community and why we need to initiate small solutions locally—rather than waiting for one big policy or program to save us. Listen in to understand Mary’s argument against our current economy and learn how The Berry Center’s work goes beyond agriculture to foster cultural change.
Resources
Call (502) 845-9200
Agrarian Culture Center & Bookstore
Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association
Wendell Berry Farming Program at Sterling College
Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
Wendell Berry’s Port William Novels
The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander
Organic Valley Dairy Cooperative
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Mary Berry, Executive Director of the Berry Center in Kentucky. Hi, Mary. Hi, Ross. Hey, thanks so much for being here with me. I have been following your work at the center. And Wendell Berry is a running joke. Not he himself, but how often he comes up on the show. I’ve told this story before, but we had a fan make a bingo card for the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
And one of the squares was just someone mentions Wendell Berry. I think it’s two thirds of the episodes or something absurd gets mentioned. So It was about time that we spoke and we highlighted your work and how you’re carrying on Wendell’s legacy. So thanks for being here. It’s my pleasure. Those are all very kind things that you said. Oh, well, it’s easy to say when it’s true, so I do not mind. Well, thank you. Maybe we should start with your origin story since we’ve hinted at it a little bit.
But how did you become the executive director of the Berry Center? How did this become your life path?
Mary Berry: The only way I would have become the executive director of anything is to start the thing that I became the executive director of. I started the Berry Center in 2011 after... A lifetime of farming. I farmed full-time until 2011. And I came to start the Berry Center for a couple of reasons. The first being what I saw then and I see now as the failure of the local food movement to become cultural change. I think the local food movement has concentrated too much on food and not enough on land use and the economic lives of farmers and rural communities.
We’ve got plenty of food in this country. So as my father says, when you have plenty of food, food is the last thing on people’s minds. When you don’t have enough, it’s the first thing. I think that what we’ve managed to accomplish with the local food movement is some opportunity for some farmers, and I was one, that benefited from the local food movement, and I am duly grateful for But it hasn’t changed the culture of farming in this country. So that was a realization that made me want to do something.
The second was my family’s history with one of the most successful agricultural co-ops in our history, which was the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative. My grandfather was extremely instrumental in making that Depression-era program work. It worked very well here. Let me say before I go on this disclaimer, I speak now not on behalf of the tobacco product, but on behalf of the program that he and others put in place. The program protected highly diversified good farming in the eight-state Burley Belt for over 60 years. The program ended in 2004 because of maybe some things that we’ll want to talk about.
But for once and for a while, we had a good diversified agriculture. We had a stable farm population, meaning, of course, that we had stable soil. Soil was kept undercover. And anyway, we might want to talk more about the Burley Tobacco Program. The reason it inspired me to want to start something called the Berry Center was because even in Kentucky, it had been forgotten. I was going to meetings when we were talking about the history of agriculture. We were talking about the future of agriculture.
And the Burley Tobacco Program never came up. I think it wasn’t coming up, partly because... People forget quickly many things, but I think it also wasn’t coming up because it flew in the face of the free market. It meant that farmers were fairly paid for what they could produce. And I think that it’s not our free market model that Americans seem to like so much and that has never worked for farmers. So in 2011, I decided that I would just do something about it. So I started the Berry Center with the ideas of, well, with the fact that we’re desperate for farmers.
We have three quarters of 1% farming in this country. Fewer than 16, maybe 15% of us now live in rural places. All the talk that I’m sure you know more about than I do about the problem of climate change. In fact, most of our problems in this country, I believe, are related to bad land use and a bad economy. So I went to work on saving the archival papers of my grandfather’s from his service to the Burley Tobacco Program, my Uncle John Barry Jr.'s service to the same program, and, of course, a lot of my father’s work that speaks about the program but also speaks about, well, you know, good farming, agrarianism.
And what I knew about running a nonprofit would fit in a symbol. If I had known all that I didn’t know then, I might not have done it. But I’ve learned as I’ve gone along, just as you do. So here we are sitting at the Berry Center getting 2021 will be our 10-year anniversary. Wow, that’s quite a milestone. I think so. It’s a miracle.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a miracle, yeah. It seems like a lot of the work of your father and of the Berry Center is about keeping people on the land and putting more people on the land and making it possible for agrarian lives to be lived. And it goes beyond just The economics of it too. There’s a strong focus on community and also a very strong literary element to it as well. I know you have things like the Agrarian Culture Center and your work at, I was looking at the course listing at the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College.
So it does seem to be almost like an old school humanities focus to it as well. Is that an okay way of summing up partially what you’re trying to do?
Mary Berry: Yes, I think it is. It would be a mistake to think that the problems of agriculture are simply agricultural. Our problem in this country is cultural. Everything that we’re worried about, I think, right now stems from our cultural problem. We don’t value what we ought to value. We haven’t held on to the knowledge that we should have held on to. In the history of our country, there have been times that farm people, country people, were beginning to take some hold and to establish themselves and their good practices in particular places.
And we should have, looking back, we certainly should have strengthened that and encouraged it. And instead, we’ve mostly wiped it out. So, yes, when I went to work at the Berry Center, I started with really the idea of taking an inventory. I’m not sure I thought about it that way then, but I certainly do now. I thought then about what we still have We have some remnants of a pretty good agricultural community, pretty good agricultural practices. We have a well-watered landscape. We have good soil.
We have some people who still know how to farm without destroying the land that they’re using. So I just set about to find out Are you saying that the land-grant universities don’t really like what you’re up to? Well, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, but let me speak the truth about that. We are so far out on the margins that I don’t think the land-grant universities have given us much thought. Occasionally they do. I’ve been in enough arguments to know that sometimes they do. But the land-grant university, at least the big one in Kentucky, gave up its mandate to serve the people of Kentucky a long time ago.
About, I think, two years ago, Extension celebrated its 100th anniversary. And I couldn’t, I passed the sign in front of the Extension office in Henry County every day on my way to work. And then, of course, passed it again on my way home. And it congratulated, well, saying happy anniversary to Extension. And I was thinking, what in the world do they have to celebrate? We’ve been in a downward spiral ever since they started. So it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t mean that there are not good people working in extension because I’ve known some and they are good.
But their focus has been industrial. And the result has been to run farmers off the land while very efficiently funneling money to agro-industrial companies. So, yeah, I don’t think that the University of Kentucky is even interested in what we’re doing.
Ross Kenyon: Much of what I pick up in following your work there is a focus on scale and how important it is for smaller scale communities, this drive towards urbanization that we all do. Is being not really the best way for us to live our lives. And so I think it kind of makes sense. It seems like much of what you’re doing is focused on Henry County, is focused on a small number of farmers and intimate relationships and things that are actually quite difficult to scale and maybe inappropriate to try to scale.
Like if you had a National Center for Local Community, would that even make sense? Do you need to have some D.C.-based nonprofit to do that? But it seems like you are trying to focus very tightly in this geographical area, except for the fact that Sterling College is in Vermont. But it does seem to be that there is some Kentucky overlap there, too. Is your vision so focused actually on this one county?
Mary Berry: First of all, the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College is located in Henry County. So the students and the professors are in Henry County, Kentucky. The program as it is taught in Henry County doesn’t exist on the campus in Vermont. It couldn’t because we’re teaching a kind of farming in the middle that exists in Kentucky that doesn’t exist in Vermont. So there’s that. We are desperate for good examples, for examples of how something might work for farmers and for farming communities. My friend Wes Jackson once said, if you want to help a farmer, you need to help their community.
This doesn’t mean, you know, doling out cash or programs. It means, you know, thinking of the whole, not just pieces. So I think what we’re working on here, and I think our programs are beginning to get enough, they’ve been around long enough to begin to be examples for other people to use and other people are using them. Other places, you know, we talk and are glad to share what we know with other people in other parts of this country trying to do something like we’re doing for their own places.
But the thing that I think we need to think about is the value of small solutions. And it’s been difficult in this country for a while now to get people to think about small solutions. I mean, even people who are worried about climate change aren’t interested in small solutions. They’re interested in big solutions. Well, some big solutions may be useful. I’m not going to say that they’re not. I don’t have the expertise to say that they’re not. But I know that inherent in these small solutions is the answer to the problem of climate change.
We have to change the way we live. We have to change the way we get food, shelter, and clothing that we must have. And we’ve just got to get started somewhere. I mean, I’ve always liked my life here in Henry County. I’m from here and have always loved it here and never wanted to live anywhere else. But in 2011, I was pretty worried. I would say depressed by the fact that things were just, in spite of a 40-year local food movement, just going to hell here.
We were just losing so much so fast. When I started to work at the Berry Center... I began to see how the work that we had chosen to do, talking about parity pricing for farmers, production control, working with the culture here, working with young people who want to farm, and many other things that we do, I saw that the work began to break out into particularities. So you could go to work on particular things. The work then begins to evolve into the questions and problems that you know how to solve.
As long as I was thinking, I mean, I was farming, so I was solving problems on my own farm. But when I thought about the world, I mean, good Lord, how do you go to work on the problems of the world? How do you go to work on the problems of even just the state of Kentucky? But you can go to work on the problems of Henry County, Kentucky. And that tells you, I think, something about going to work in other places and how that might be done.
And so it’s very hopeful and very helpful to have this work to do. I would recommend it to other people.
Ross Kenyon: I’m really glad you took it that direction, Mary, because that is a question that I am very interested in because it seems a recurring theme on the show has been at smaller scales. Some of the political fights between progressives and conservatives tend to fall away a bit. When you’re more neighborly, these solutions look a lot different when you’re fighting over The fate of an entire country. That being said, there are also climate change solutions that need to happen at scale in order to make the think little approach of Wendell Berry and others viable.
We sort of need all of it. And I think there are good reasons to pursue those strategies. But I also am with you that I find people who think that they know what’s best for the entire world or country or even state. I find that to be somewhat of a dangerous attitude if it’s not coupled with a sense of humility and that humility should be grounded in a specific place. And I think that’s kind of what you’re getting at. Or there’s some glimmers of that I’m catching.
Am I imagining that or do you know what I’m trying to say here?
Mary Berry: I think that history teaches over and over and over again that people who think that they know what’s good for Everybody else, generally speaking, are not, well, they may get some things done, but they’re not always the right things. And, yeah, I don’t think it’s the correct way to go. I mean, it’s really Shakespearean, isn’t it? There may be all kinds of or some big solutions that will help us in the situation we’re in. Right now, as I said earlier, I don’t know enough to say that I trust that there are, and I don’t know enough to say that there aren’t.
But I also know that there are too many people waiting on those solutions. My husband said a couple of years ago at a meeting at the Berry Center, my husband is a full-time farmer. He said we were having a meeting of young farmers here, and he said at one point, the cavalry ain’t coming. We’ve got to save ourselves. And he meant that as a community, as people who care about a particular place and about each other. And it’s not separatist. It’s not stepping out of the world in some way.
It’s looking at what’s going on and what you can do about it and doing it. I think it’s a big mistake to have people just waiting for the big solution.
Ross Kenyon: I moved out of an apartment into a house not long ago, granted still within Seattle, so it’s not a huge amount of land for farming, but much of my time has been devoted to the care and maintenance of the house and fixing up the yard and making it productive and lovely and trying to cultivate beauty on a regular basis. And I feel much more engaged relative to how I was prior in an apartment. I feel like I notice things more. I’m more present. I enjoy things more by doing so.
And I’ve been focused quite a bit. Listeners of the show will know that craft has come up quite a lot. One of the recent episodes, we were talking about another big Wendell fan, Nick Offerman. And his work on woodworking. I love it. I think if many people were more grounded in that experience, we might see some of those results trickle out. Although it’s not nearly as flashy as if you vote for this one policy, we will all be saved. That seems like a much simpler way to go, but does it really get us where we need to go?
I don’t know.
Mary Berry: Not at the moment. I think we’re too—and I’m a believer in a lot of those—well, the program that I talked about earlier was a Depression-era program. But the work done during the Depression in this country was applied by and for people who knew how to live within their means, who were settled— Who knew how to take care of themselves and others to a great degree. We are so scattered, so mobile, that when I try to think of what exactly the policy would be that would help this particular place, I’m not quite sure what the policy is.
We’re going to have to dictate the policy. We’re going to have to say, we’ve got this going. This is what you can do to help us. We’re not waiting for you to tell us what you’re going to do to help us. We know what we need. So more and more of us need to know what we need. The farming program comes directly out of conversations for years that my father and Wes Jackson had about the problem of mobility in this country. And Wes talked about the problem in a speech he gave in the late 90s when he said, It was a commencement speech at a little school.
I’ve forgotten the name. But anyway, a commencement speech. And he said, the dominant major in colleges and universities for the last 50 years has been upward mobility. And now it needs to be homecoming. And that’s so we refer to our education program as an education for homecoming. And it’s a liberal arts degree. What do people need to know to make themselves at home in a place that they love, that they have some hope for passing on to people that they love? We don’t have the slightest idea how to live in this country.
I mean, this word sustainable is overused, and I can’t think of a word to replace it. But in this country, we have never realized We have not settled America. We have colonized America. Now we’ve got to figure out, because we’re reaching the end of the fertility that we’ve lived on, we’re reaching the time that we’re going to have to figure out how to actually live here, as, of course, the people we replaced here knew. But, you know, we’re here now. We’re right here. How are we going to go forward?
The things that we’re talking about, I believe, need to be on everybody’s minds. Everybody needs to be an agrarian now.
Ross Kenyon: I have a question on this theme from one of our Patreon supporters. If you’re listening and you would like to hang out with us and other fans of the show, we have a Nori Podcast Patreon. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to hang out with us. But I had mentioned that you and I were going to speak today, Mary, and one of our patrons, she asks, How can we reconcile our educated millennial tendency to be kind of transient, moving from city to city because we lead a lot of our lives online and the need to belonging to the land?
And I would append on to that my own experience, which is I don’t know that I have a home to do a Well, you don’t have to go home
Mary Berry: In my case, in my family’s case, there’s something in us that not all of us, not every member of the Berry family has stayed in Henry County. Some have gone. I have a cousin who lives in the Bay Area in California, and when he went out to Northern California to go to school, he felt immediately at home there in the way I have always felt at home here. I’m not disparaging that, but I’m saying, as the poet Gary Snyder says, you can make a home. Just stay somewhere and figure out how to live in a particular place.
That’s all. I mean, you’re talking about your move from an apartment to a house and what that’s meant to you. I think that’s coming out of some kind of need that a lot of us have to be at home in a place that we love and that we imagine staying for a long time. So I don’t think people have to go home, but I think we would be better off if people saw themselves as staying somewhere and making a home home. In a particular place. I mean, it is beyond, this moving around people do because they like the weather someplace else is beyond, I don’t understand it.
You know, it’s completely foreign to me. You’re not a snowbird? You don’t go down to Florida? No, I don’t. I like the things that there are. I love Kentucky, but I really love Henry County, Kentucky. In one of Daddy’s books called Jaber Crowe, Jaybert says at some point that he thinks he would recognize his home if he just saw the sky. That’s how I feel here. I mean, these are troubled times in rural Kentucky and rural everywhere. It’s hard sometimes to live here.
But it’s, you know, I never want to leave it. And I never will leave it. And I think I don’t listen fast. I don’t want to ever be heard as saying that somehow I have reached some level of understanding that is special. Most of what I know and feel has been passed on to me. And for some reason, it’s stuck with me and I wanted to continue here. I do think it would be nice if there was more work coming... From people who are from particular places, there’s a sort of, well, the do-gooder attitude that you go into a place and you tell people what they ought to do and then you go on to another place is just not, it doesn’t work.
I mean, if the Berry Center fails, if the, you know, it’s nonprofit, I’ve got to keep it funded. And who knows? You don’t, I don’t know if I can keep it funded. I’m going to do, give it my best shot. But if the Berry Center closes down, I will continue to work as hard as I can on the things that are important to me because it’s just part of living here. So I do think that in that, the Berry family, my father, his father, his sisters, his mother, I think we have been different in that way.
It’s just different than some. Is to say, here we are. We’re going to work as hard as we can. We’re not responsible for the result. We’re just responsible for the effort. And that seems to me to be talking in circles a lot. But you can do something about that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m very interested in the role of social capital and relationships between people and how important that is to sustain relationships and community life. And I’m thinking of books like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. And it seems like so much in the Port William novels that is done to keep the community healthy. A lot of it seems like just going and hanging out at Jaber Crow’s barbershop. I mean, they obviously help each other with farm chores and during the harvest and things like that. But a lot of it just seems to be showing up and being with one another.
Mary Berry: Showing up and being with other people is certainly part of it. But it’s all important. Daddy speaks of a time in Henry County in Kentucky that I saw the end of. It was an agrarian county. It still is to some degree, but much degraded. We were living by the same calendar, not just the day of the week, but the agricultural calendar. We were doing the same things at the same time, not always in exactly the same way. It was very interesting, the farming that was going on here at that time.
People shared more than just good times and just Parties and potlucks and so on. They shared the same fate in a lot of ways. I remember many years ago, a preacher at one of our little churches in Henry County went to speak to Daddy about the problem of tobacco. And he was preaching from the pulpit. This was many years ago, probably 35 or 40. He was preaching against tobacco and people in his congregation were objecting to it, upset by it. And he went to talk to dad about it.
And daddy said, are you going to stay here with these people? Tobacco is threatened. It’s going to end. Are you going to stay here and be with them through whatever it is they have to go through to get to the other side of this? And if you’re not going to stay here with them, then maybe you better be quiet about it. The community that Daddy writes about are people that were going to hang together. They were going to stay together, stay in this particular place and help each other through the good times and the bad times.
And they had deep cultural ties to the place and to each other. So, yeah, it was having the time, not sitting around in front of screens, but sitting in front of The hardware store or the drug store in Port Royal and visiting in the evening. It was certainly that. Plus the rest of it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s some, I’m trying to remember the exact term. It’s from The World Ending Fire. There’s an essay in there. It was like visiting until bedtime. Is that what it is? Yeah. That’s a great tradition. Neighbors coming and hanging out and doing that.
Mary Berry: Yeah, it used to be what people did in the evenings. And of course, a lot of people saw the danger of screens way back. I’m thinking of Jerry Manders' book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. That was back in the, gosh, that was published in the 60s or 70s. I was young then and I told Jerry Mander when I finally met him many years ago that he had helped ruin my young life. But because we didn’t have a television, but we did have the book for arguments for the elimination of it.
And I wanted a television.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, I like to think that in hindsight, you feel that you were made better off by that decision.
Mary Berry: Of course, of course. But I was just saying to somebody the other day, we were talking about what young people go through and, you know, that they have to rebel against something. And I’ll tell you, the burden of being Wendell and Tanya Berry’s child was this. They were never wrong about anything except maybe my dating when I was 15. But otherwise, there was nothing to rebel against except that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s some rebellious people in the Port William novels. They usually just move to the big city and come back in fancy cars and pretend to care about being a hobby farmer, right? That’s like the best way you could have rebelled, I think. Well, they fall victim to the siren song of limitlessness, of more, of ease, of something better. I know that treadmill effect of always seeking more, that isn’t necessarily an urban or rural thing. I’m sure you have neighbors who are just as much in that trap as anyone else is.
Mary Berry: Oh, of course. I mean, of course. Nobody, nobody in using daddy as an example, nobody important to daddy except his family here. No teacher ever said to him, stay home. They all said, if you want to be a writer, you’ve got to leave. And he believed it. It grieved him, but he believed it. And he was gone for a while. And then, you know, he thought, I want to go home. And he did. But of course, I mean, the whole culture is pushing people to go somewhere else and then to go somewhere else again and again and again.
The whole culture. I’m not blaming people. It’s hard to resist. So certainly it’s an urban and rural phenomenon.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a hard thing to resist. I’ve certainly moved for better economic opportunities. I’ve changed cities a number of times. I’ve traveled quite a bit. And I keep my eyes open for opportunities like that. And part of it is vanity. There’s something... Interesting about someone who’s been a lot of places, who’s seen a lot of things and experienced a lot. I’m not too big to say that part of that is definitely vanity, but there is also that is just direct pecuniary gains to be had from moving for, like I moved to Seattle for my company, Nori, who produces this podcast because it was my best opportunity to do something I cared about and also have a better future for my family.
And that’s hard to say no to. I guess the problem is that maybe the Berry Center has seized upon is why is it so hard to stay home? Why are these other opportunities just so good? And to what extent is this something that has been unfairly encouraged by policy?
Mary Berry: Well, the problem is why has moving been the dominant theme? That’s the problem. I think Wes Jackson would say it’s probably highly dense carbon. But why has that ruled the day? Why is it not fascinating to think that you might know a particular place really well because it will take your lifetime and more than your lifetime? I’m not saying everybody should do the same thing. I’m not saying everybody should farm for heaven’s sake. I’m not saying that. I’m saying, what is good?
What is precious? What will lead to contentment? What will lead to happiness? I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods about that, and the bill of goods we’ve been sold has consolidated money in a few hands. And the rest of us, the sad thing in this country is that so many people think that we need to stay out of the way of the 1% because, with any luck, we’ll be one of them. Well, I don’t think so. So I think it’s just that, you know, to think.
I mean, just to think, to live an examined life, to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. What motivates us? What means something to us? I sit in no judgment here. I’m not making a judgment about other people’s particular lives, but I am making a judgment about the economy that we’re living in now and the dominating themes of it, the dominant themes of it, I should say. In this time of such terrible social unrest, I think of this economy and I think we will not have social justice.
It will not happen as long as our economy is destroying the land that we depend on and destroying the people that ought to belong to the land that we depend on. It’s not going to happen.
Ross Kenyon: Seems like you’re working on a number of different prongs related to this. We’re not merely training future farmers and inculcating this agrarian culture and mindset and giving them this humanities background. There’s also the work that the Berry Center is doing with our home place meat. And there’s also some policy initiatives like what you’re referring to. You refer to a couple of times about imitating the burly tobacco program from the Great Depression era. Could you tell us a little bit about both Our Home Place Meet and this program that you have in mind?
Mary Berry: Sure. The program was policy. It was a Depression-era program, and it was voted in to law. It had the power of law. The principles of the program that mean the most to me, and I think to many other people, and why it’s an example going forward of how we might Build a stable farm population in this country is the combination of supply management, keeping farmers protected from overproduction, and the idea of parity pricing, which means paying farmers, this is the simplest possible definition. It’s much more complicated than this, but it’s the idea that we might pay farmers a fair price to Allowing farmers to get back cost of production and keep some profit.
Not a killing, but a fair profit. So we’ve taken those principles and we’ve applied it to the program that we call Our Home Place Meat at the Berry Center. We’re working with mostly pretty young farmers in Henry County, producing a product called Rose Veal, which has no It’s a very different product than the traditional white veal. This is processing calves raised on their mother. They’re raised on grass and on mother’s milk, and they’re processed much younger, and it’s delicious meat. I mentioned earlier that I set about to work at the Berry Center by thinking about an inventory.
Well, one of the good farming left in Kentucky is cattle farming or livestock farming. Our marginal countryside needs to be covered with grass, forage crops, hay crops. This is the perennial agriculture that my father and others called for in the 50-year farm bill, keeping the ground covered. So we don’t have Right now we have an 80% annual versus 20% perennial agriculture. We need to reverse this back to your subject of climate change. We need to be 80% perennial and 20% annual, far less ground plowed.
Our Home Place Meats supports farmers who are farming the way we need them to farm. They’re keeping carbon sequestered and they’re making a decent amount They’re making a fair price for their cattle. They’re out of the boom and bust cattle market, and it keeps the cattle out of the god-awful commodity beef industry, which is inhumane to people and to animals. And it’s driving farmers into bankruptcy. So our program, I mean, I’d love to think that it had, you know, the power of law, but it doesn’t.
We don’t have friends in high places. We don’t have anybody... That wants to work with what we’re doing in Congress. I mean, who am I going to call? Mitch McConnell? I mean, that’s not going to happen. So we’ve just gone to work on it. I also want to say one more thing about this program. It is a price support program, which means the price is locked in yearly so that the farmers know what they’re going to get for their cattle. It is not a subsidy.
It is not a subsidy. It was never a subsidy under the Tobacco Co-op. I think subsidies are a mistake. It’s a price support. Keeps the price steady.
Ross Kenyon: Is the distinction that there’s just a guaranteed buyer ahead of time who says, I will pay this amount for it, and it’s a price that farmers like enough to go for it. That’s why it’s not a subsidy, but a price support. Is that the difference?
Mary Berry: Price support is just to keep the price fair so that it doesn’t suddenly too many cattle hit the market and when too many cattle or too much anything hit a market, the price falls. This is the story of American agriculture for farmers. So the price support just holds the price at the contracted price, which we’ve worked on here to know what the parity price is. You know, farmers are saying they’re trading their right to gamble for a steady price.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m curious about that. And especially this direct to consumer, having a consumer facing brand like Our Home Place Meat. It seems like a lot of people are going that direction. I know many, many farmers want to get in the direction. I sort of associate that with consumer behavior in a somewhat free market. But perhaps you contextualize it a bit differently. Do you not understand it that way?
Mary Berry: I don’t. I mean, we’re not outside of the market we exist in. We’re not outside of the world we exist in, of course. We have to think about the things that you talked about. But in American agriculture right now, we offer farmers pretty much two choices and two choices only. They can either be large and industrial or they can be small and entrepreneurial. There is almost nothing in the middle. We’re working with farmers who have the census designation as farmers in the middle.
It’s an economic designation. Most of the farmers in Kentucky have historically been farmers in the middle. They’re not small and industrial. I mean small and entrepreneurial. They’re not huge and industrial. The average farm in Kentucky is about 100 acres. The average cattle herd in Kentucky is about 27 cows. This is small farming. What I think that our farmers need is something that works like the tobacco co-op work and other co-ops work. By the way, Organic Valley, the dairy co-op, It was started based on knowledge that the founder of Organic Valley had of the Burley Tobacco Program.
I mean, there’s just an example of the fact that this can work. But what we’re doing, the Berry Center is the entity in the middle that is moving product while setting price, moving product, working with farmers, working with the market, To make this work for farmers. So what the farmers need to do is produce the product. We’re marketing and selling the product. Is that like how co-ops typically work in farming? I’m sorry to interrupt. Yeah, to some degree, yes. But there are not very many co-ops.
I mean, Organic Valley is a co-op and it’s working for farmers. And I say it’s working for farmers because I know it is, because I know some farmers that it’s working for. There have been a lot of co-ops. In fact, one of the things said about the Burley Tobacco Programs to this day is it was one of the only farm programs that ever worked for the life of the program for the people it was supposed to serve, the small family farmer. A lot of co-ops have served other interests other than the farmer, if they even exist anymore.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know. It’s perhaps less common than it used to be. Well, Mary, if someone wanted to support the work of the Berry Center, what’s a good way for them to do so? I imagine there’s multiple ways to do so.
Mary Berry: There are multiple ways, and I think I spoke earlier of my drawbacks as an executive director. Here’s one. But anyway, I think some of the wonderful people I work with could rattle these things off easier than I can. But we have a website called BarryCenter.org. It has all kinds of information about our programs and ways to get in touch with us. And I think that’s probably the best way. We have a Facebook page, which I never, ever see. And of course, people can call the center directly.
It’s 502-845- And we have now before the COVID crisis, we had visitors from all over the country and really all over the world coming by fairly often. We have a bookstore here. We’re selling books, of course, to people who come to the store, but also online. And so we welcome visitors and are glad to see people. But right now, of course, I wouldn’t be heard recommending travel. Not at this point.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. I probably wouldn’t either. I was supposed to be in the area too. I think I was supposed to be in the area in March. I was really terrible. I was so excited. I was like, yes, Kentucky is within my grasp. I can go visit. And no. So at some point in the future, I would like to come and check out the Berry Center. I look forward to meeting you in person. Yeah, this digital thing is not fully doing it for me.
I think it would be better in person.
Mary Berry: It typically is a bit more Well, I think if we ever think that meeting digitally is better than meeting in person, we better check ourselves pretty seriously. But, you know, it’s better than, I will say that Zoom meetings are better than conference calls, which I really hate.
Ross Kenyon: God, that’s the idea that someone would prefer a Zoom call to in person is very, I think the Berry Center either needs to expand dramatically or close up shop if that happens. Right. I agree with you. And then I guess another way someone might be able to support is to, if you are a meat eater, one can buy our home place meat online.
Mary Berry: Yes. And our website will direct you to the page where our home place meat can be purchased and we ship all over the country.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Okay. Links are in the show notes for all of those things. Thank you for spending time with me, Mary. Well, it has been a pleasure. And thank you so much for thinking that you would like to talk to me about our work. Of course, of course. Well, thanks for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher. Running us a review on Apple Podcasts really helps a lot if you can take a couple minutes to do so.
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