A Talent for Necessity

A Talent for Necessity by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry portrays Henry Besuden of Vinewood Farm as a sheep breeder whose greatest achievement was restoring exhausted land and making his flock serve the health of the farm. Besuden became a leading breeder and showman of Southdown sheep, winning twelve of eighteen carload-lamb competitions at the Chicago International Livestock Exposition and selling a record-priced yearling ram. Yet his success came not from rich farmland but from 632 inherited acres that had been rented repeatedly for corn, depleted, indebted, and cut by deep gullies. Orphaned young and faced with land that could not support conventional farming, Besuden concluded that he had to improve the farm or starve, and that sheep were the only livestock able to live from it. He began restoring the ground through experiment and persistent labor. Rock dams and brush windrows did not adequately stop erosion, and some gullies required bulldozing. His principal method was to use the plow carefully, turning furrows inward from the edges of gullies until the ravines became broad saucers that spread runoff rather than concentrating it. He seeded small grains, timothy, sweet clover, Korean lespedeza, and eventually grass; used mulch and weeds where they could protect weak places; and planted black locust for soil holding, shade, grass improvement, and posts. He considered sweet clover his finest land builder because it opened clay and added nitrogen. Besuden kept most of the farm in grass, reserving only the safest fields for tobacco. Over twenty-three years, the visible scars were covered and the farm supported an exceptional Southdown flock, though he insisted the soil was still far from fully restored. His interest in sheep was therefore never merely competitive. A perfect lamb, in his view, was one a farmer could make money on, but sheep also “paid their rent” by building fertility. He opposed farming that emphasized row crops and production at the expense of grass, forage, animals, and long-term soil reserves. He argued that sheep could prosper on land too poor for cattle, distribute manure evenly while grazing, and improve pastures and crops enough to support other stock later. His farming ideal was a way of working compatible with nature. He valued the spiritual satisfactions of farm life alongside practical results and believed conservation depended on the manager’s love for the soil. He treated fields as individual places with distinct character rather than numbered units. To improve thin ground, he built small movable hay houses so hay could be fed where fertility was needed, then moved elsewhere. At his height, Besuden kept about 400 ewes in registered Southdown and commercial “Western” flocks, with roughly 1,000 sheep after lambing. His management aimed to obtain the greatest possible use of forage and minimize purchased grain. Grain was a supplement for periods without pasture, while hay, legumes, rye, clover, and grass formed the basis of the flock’s feed. He stockpiled nearby pasture for late grazing, sowed rye to extend the season, and bred ewes to lamb in January and February. After limited winter grain feeding, ewes and lambs moved from rye grown on old tobacco ground to clover and then grass pastures. Market lambs were sold directly from pasture at eighty to eighty-five pounds. He diversified fescue pastures with timothy and legumes, favoring Korean lespedeza and also using clovers and birdsfoot trefoil. He reseeded legumes in March with sheep trampling in the seed and clipped pastures to maintain fresh, even growth. His pasture management depended on daily observation from horseback. He watched for the “bloom” of tender new growth and moved sheep when it disappeared, knowing fresh pasture increased grazing time. He kept flock sizes manageable so weaker lambs would not be forced to eat rejected grass, and he placed shade near water because sheep in summer would often not leave shade for distant water. Lambing demanded equally close attention. Besuden’s barn was designed to protect ewes, avoid mud and strain, discourage dogs, and permit efficient feeding, sorting, handling, and loading. It contained many lambing pens, a heated room for special cases, and red markers above pens to signal ewes needing attention. When alone during lambing, he sometimes tied a string from a ewe’s hind leg to his wrist so her labor movements would wake him. Berry presents Besuden’s “talent for necessity” as the power to imagine healthy fields beyond gullies and good lambs within the cycle of seasons, while also maintaining an exact mental ideal of the Southdown. His victory over a breeder who selected fifty lambs from ten thousand, while Besuden chose his winning carload from about seventy-five, demonstrates his judgment. Yet judgment alone is insufficient: Besuden’s governing principle is attention. Good farming requires little things done on time, steady care rather than speed, and a habit of keeping the land’s smallest needs always in mind.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Literary Nonfiction, Biographical Profile, Agrarian Writing · 4,052 words

First lines

IN THE DAYS when the Southdown ram was king of the sheep pastures and the show-ring, Henry Besuden of Vinewood Farm in Clark County, Kentucky, was perhaps the premier breeder and showman of Southdown sheep in the United States. The list of his winnings at major shows would be too long to put down here, but the character of his achievement can be indicated by his success in showing carload lots of fat lambs in the Chicago International Livestock Exposition. Starting in 1946, he sent eighteen carloads to the International, and won the competition twelve times. "I had 'em fat," he says, remembering. "I had 'em good. " Such was the esteem and demand for his stock among fellow breeders that in 1954 he sold a yearling ram for $1200, then a record price for a Southdown.

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essays · environmentalism · agrarianism · sustainability · rural life · farming · conservation · community · localism · economics · social criticism · ecology

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