The Making of a Marginal Farm

The Making of a Marginal Farm by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry recounts how his attachment to the Kentucky River Valley changed from youthful affection into a demanding, responsible life of farming and restoration. In 1956, looking across the familiar valley where his ancestors had settled and where he had spent his childhood roaming, he tells a friend, “That’s all I need.” At the time, he loves the place without understanding what it means to live in it. After marrying and living elsewhere, he and his family return to Kentucky in 1964. They buy the small property called Lanes Landing, with a house and “twelve acres more or less,” initially intending it as a summer place. Repairs to the old house become a complete renovation, and they move in during 1965. The acreage includes steep pasture, river-bottom pastures, a small garden, a damaged barn, and several other buildings. Though too small and poor to produce much cash income, the land can provide food. Over several years, the family restores the farm: they plant an orchard and garden, reclaim pasture, rebuild the barn, establish a henhouse, improve the soil, plant berries, and acquire a milk cow. They produce nearly all their food, including fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat, dairy products, and butter. They build storage facilities and a composting privy, avoid chemical fertilizers and nearly all insecticides, and find that healthier land produces healthier food and healthier people. The work is difficult and imperfect, but deeply satisfying. When a neighboring forty-acre tract is damaged by a developer’s failed plan for second homes, Berry buys it in 1972. The larger property is badly overgrown and scarred by bulldozing, with ruined ditches, unfenced fields, damaged buildings, and depleted soil. It becomes a reclamation project that eventually expands to seventy-five acres. To work the steep ground, Berry chooses horses rather than a tractor. Though anxious after many years away from team work, he learns with his mares to farm the difficult slopes. He and his son use horses for nearly everything except baling hay, finding them economical, effective, and gentler on steep land than tractors. The family also buys a wood-burning stove, using wood from clearing work and permanent woodlots for heat. Gradually they repair erosion scars, restore grass, stop washes, mend buildings, haul rocks from fields, and build fences. Yet rebuilding the fertility lost from hillsides may take longer than their lives. Their labor heals not only the land but themselves. Berry argues that land called “marginal” is not inherently unfit for human use; rather, people have used it wrongly. Plowing steep slopes with “jumper” plows and generations of carelessness stripped away immense depths of fertile soil. The loss is nearly beyond remedy in human time, and awareness of such destruction can lead to despair. For Berry, practical work on the farm becomes a way to resist that despair and prove that the land can be used kindly and conservingly. He establishes rules suited to the place: steep land is not plowed, slopes are pastured only where they can safely be mowed with horses, and the rest remains in trees. Livestock are increased slowly and rotated carefully to prevent overgrazing. Under this management, the hillsides recover and improve each year. Farming transforms Berry’s relation to the place from one of aesthetic or literary “subject matter” to an intimate, practical, and moral responsibility. Although the farm has not been conventionally profitable, it begins to make economic sense through shelter, food, fuel, and livestock sales. Berry maintains that a family can live on such land while improving it, though only with outside income and careful restraint. He warns that conserving difficult land requires knowledge, labor, vigilance, and cultural values that encourage respect and moderation. His own attempt to build a pond causes a hillside slump, demonstrating how serious even one mistake can be. A further danger lies beyond the farm: the abused Kentucky River watershed. Mining, logging, extractive farming, and development make floods higher and faster, weakening riverbanks and causing destructive “slips.” After the flood of December 1978, Berry loses an acre of bottomland and faces continuing threats to several buildings and to the entire riverbank. His farm cannot escape the wider damage caused upstream by a consumptive economy. Nevertheless, Berry finds strength in knowing the earth’s vulnerability and in caring for a place that is passing away. Farming such land is difficult, but it is an enduring human condition, made bearable and meaningful by love of the work.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Environmental Nonfiction, Agrarian Essay, Nature Writing · 4,464 words

First lines

ONE DAY in the summer of 1956, leaving home for school, I stopped on the side of the road directly above the house where I now live. From there you could see a mile or so across the Kentucky River Valley, and perhaps six miles along the length of it. The valley was a green trough full of sunlight, blue in its distances. I often stopped here in my comings and goings, just to look, for it was all familiar to me from before the time my memory began: woodlands and pastures on the hillsides; fields and croplands, wooded slew-edges and hollows in the bottoms; and through the midst of it the tree-lined river passing down from its headwaters near the Virginia line toward its mouth at Carrollton on the Ohio.

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essay collection · environmental literature · sustainable agriculture · rural life · small farming · agrarianism · land stewardship · ecology · conservation · local food · community · economics

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