Cultural Renewal Case Study #2: The Wendell Berry-Inspired Farming Program
Teaching Virgil alongside soil microbiology
UPDATE 9/29/2025: Future posts in the cultural renewal case studies series will not be paywalled—they’ll be available for everyone. However, time constrains will prevent me from writing one every month.
Welcome to the second case study in the Case Studies in Cultural Renewal series here on the Hazelnut. The previous case study looked at a modern city built on traditional ideas of design, function, and beauty.
This entry examines an innovative agricultural program doing its part to rebuild our rural landscapes that have been devastated by Big Ag. The holistic farming practices taught in this unique program integrally support the flourishing of plants, animals, soil, land, humans, and human culture.
The program in question is the Berry Center Farm & Forest Institute, formerly the Wendell Berry Farming Program, originally run in partnership by Sterling College and The Berry Center. Through this groundbreaking program, students learn the principles and practices of sustainable agriculture that is informed by the work and thought of the great agrarian writer Wendell Berry, who has long advocated for the preservation of responsible farming techniques that respect plants, animals, humans, and human rural culture alike. The Berry Center, a project of Wendell’s daughter Mary, works toward the Berry family’s ideal of “a state and a nation of prosperous well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities.”
Berry has long understood the importance of education in bringing about a rural renaissance. As he wrote in Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, “The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. … Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.”
Mary Berry, who runs The Berry Center, first launched the idea of a school to teach her father’s principles in 2012 in partnership with St. Catharine College. The College eventually closed its doors and the program was transferred to Sterling College, and from there to The Berry Center itself. Through all these iterations, it’s remained under the supervision of Dr. Leah Bayens, a literature scholar and agrarian cultural studies expert. She teaches classes on agrarian thought and arts, agricultural history, and rural leadership—to complement the hands-on classes of the Institute which take place in fields, forests, and pastures.
When the program was still housed at Sterling College, it yoked together the writings of Virgil with the study of microbiology and draft animal power systems, revealing how holistic the program was (and is); it engaged students minds, bodies, and hearts, and teaches them to think not just about bottom-line profit but about the larger systems—environmental, ecological, economic, and cultural—in which farming is embedded, and which farming practices will affect for better or worse.
When the program was located at Sterling College, Dr. Bayens conducted an interview with the journal Hearth & Field, in which she explained the rationale behind the program. “Wendell’s thoughts from the ‘Unsettling of America’ to the ‘re-settling of America’, and now we are here in 2020, and the focus is on grappling with the truth that it has never been settled, not in a sustainable, real way,” she told the magazine. “The desire for a sense of place, people and commitment is palpable. . .While most programs prepare students to flow out of the country, away from the land, we are educating for homecoming, for the re-establishment of local farming and local culture.”
Hearth & Field explained the balance between mind and body characterizing the Institute:
“Students read Virgil, Aldo Leopold, Chaucer, and contemporary pieces by Crystal Wilkinson, and then put on their muck boots and take the reins of a draft horse to cut a row in a field. They learn forestry from experts who share an appreciation for their craft and love for their place. They participate in the beef cooperative, “Our Home Place Meat”, and learn first-hand the challenges of raising, producing, marketing, and selling meat. They meet the kin of black tenet farmers who helped build Henry County and hear the tales, both good and bad, that have formed the ethos of the land and community. They walk the hollers and read stories in the very places they were written. They are taught to look, and to see. To enter into the richness and depth of the people, the place, the land around them. Perhaps this is the most striking difference between what happens at the Wendell Berry Farming Program and other college programs. The focus is not just on the looking: the passive, the utilitarian, the transactional —it is on seeing: knowing, relating, walking with, and entering into.”
This is distinctive approach to education that integrates old and new, mind and body, individual and community, land and people. This is what education should be, because no discipline, especially agriculture, can be completely cut off from the others. Moreover, as the word “sustainable” itself implies, we must return to more eco-and-culture-conscious farming methods if we wish to preserve both the fertility of soil and the richness of local, rural community. The Farm & Forest Institute is doing just that. By training farmers who are committed to these traditional principles, they’re forming a new generation that can help reshape agriculture in America—which, as Berry famously pointed out—will also reshape culture.
Like the case study on Cayalá in Guatemala, this one reveals the cultural renewal requires educational institutions and programs willing to preserve tradition while also adapting it to modern-day circumstances. Both Cayalá and the Farm & Forest Institute are also founded on an understanding of wholeness and integration, building structures that support the entirety of human life, rather than dividing and compartmentalizing human existence, which frequently leads to a breakdown in cohesion and the damaging of the different strains that belong together.