The Small Farm Future Blog

“But I mean his poetry is actually pretty good” – for Wendell Berry (1934-2026)

Posted on September 4, 2026 | 11 Comments

Following my obituary for The Land magazine in my previous post I’d intended to publish in this next one my article on landlordism that appeared in the final issue. Instead, it turns out that another obituary takes precedence – in this case for Wendell Berry, who died last Sunday.

There are others better placed than me to give a proper account of his life and work. Here, I’ll just make a few personal remarks which I hope might serve, however inadequately, as an act of remembrance.

I became an adult in the 1980s, at least in the quantitative sense of accumulating enough years to meet official definitions, although not alas in any more meaningful qualitative way. I emerged from a semi-rural but modern and non-agrarian childhood with a liking for nature and a vague sense that the way people lived in my southern England homelands didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but without much idea of what to do about it.

Studying anthropology at university, along with Marxism (the two went pretty much together in that time and place), in some ways gave me more tools to understand the weirdness of present times, but in other ways trapped me further in it. It was only after fifteen years of serving the modernist gods that I started to break free, partly through permaculture and practical growing, and partly by absorbing writers beyond the usual ambit of left-leaning academic social scientists. Wendell Berry was one of them, a delightful early discovery in this rewiring of my mental circuitry.

I can’t say I’ve been an exhaustive reader, but Berry’s The Unsettling of America and The Gift of Good Land were significant milestones for me at that time. Probably my favourite Berry essay, though, is ‘The whole horse: the preservation of the agrarian mind’. Here are a few excerpts:

…whereas industrialism is a way of thought based on monetary capital and technology, agrarianism is a way of thought based on land …. the agrarian mind is less interested in abstract quantities than in particular qualities …. It is not at all impressed by the industrial legendry of gross national products, or of the numbers sold and dollars earned by gigantic corporations. It is interested – and forever fascinated – by questions leading toward the accomplishment of good work: What is the best location for a particular building or fence? What is the best way to plow this field? What is the best course for a skid road in this woodland? …. Questions which cannot be answered in the abstract and which yearn not toward quantity but toward elegance … And though this mind is local, almost absolutely placed, little attracted to mobility either upward or lateral, it is not provincial; it is too taken up and fascinated by its work to feel inferior to any other mind in any other place.

My guess is that regular commenters on this blog will instantly get this, whereas a lot of people operating within mainstream modern parameters won’t, or at least will want to raise all sorts of doubts, caveats and objections. Some of these doubts and objections have force, and I’ve harboured them myself. I’ve spent a lot of time in my writing trying to work through them, without ever abandoning the conviction that agrarian localism is likely, practically, to be the future course that many people’s lives will take whether they like it or not. Yet one of the great things about Berry’s writing is that he shows us the moral reasons for liking it – and for liking it not in a mushy, individualistic, modern sense of “passionate about agrarian localism” but in the older register of republican virtue – a politics that’s largely been forgotten in modern culture but that I believe we will urgently have to re-learn (‘whether we like it or not’).

Anyway, my attempts to articulate a case for agrarian localism similar to Berry’s have had mixed results. Perhaps it’s hard to have good conversations about it with people who don’t feel in their gut the force of what Berry is saying in passages like the one I’ve cited. I felt it in my gut when I first read it, and it changed my perspective on the world.

In the same essay, Berry addresses the objection to agrarian localism that it involves ‘turning back the clock’:

“We never have yet developed stable, sustainable, locally adapted land-based economies. The good rural enterprises and communities that we will find in our past have been almost constantly under threat from the colonialism, first foreign and then domestic and now “global”, which has so far dominated our history and which has been institutionalized for a long time in the industrial economy. The possibility for an authentically settled country still lies ahead of us”.

While I basically agree with this, I’d add a couple of qualifications. First, it’s true that agrarian localism has been constantly under threat from colonialisms of one sort or another and has been in some sense a subordinate theme or minor key in human history. But it’s also been the authentic substrate that colonialisms absolutely need and depend upon, and there are times when it’s had its day. Never forever, and never without threats or complications – but then that’s real life. I don’t have much time for the belief in a perfectible future that modern techno-fixers and revolutionary ‘progressives’ share with medieval millenarians, but it afflicts contemporary thinking and makes it easy to underplay the historical successes of agrarian localism.

Still, second, I agree that the possibility for an authentically settled country lies ahead of us – it’s a worthy dream to inspire us to be our best selves and best societies. But I’m wary of spatial metaphors in history and society like ‘ahead’. They’re too redolent of the progress narrative, that intransigent modern religious ideology which we wear like a millstone around our neck, and that’s all too evident in criticisms of ‘green nostalgia’, in metaphors of moving ‘forward’ into the future, of never going ‘back’. Instead I emphasise Berry’s key insight about the agrarian mind – it is interested in the accomplishment of good work in the here and now. It’s not interested in comparing itself favourably or unfavourably to other minds in other times and places. The contemporary obsession with proving that things are better than they used to be is pathological.

On that note, if – like Karl Marx – I’d been writing in the England of the mid-nineteenth century, I might reasonably have thought that the way ‘forward’ was global industrialism. But early 21^st century England isn’t such a great place to be a Marxist, a modernist, an industrialist or – problematic term! – a ‘globalist’. A better way to accomplish the work demanded of us by present times is through being an agrarian localist.

There’s a wrinkle in Berry’s essay that I want to examine briefly, though. His title – ‘the whole horse’ – comes from Allen Tate, one of the Southern Agrarians who co-authored I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Berry draws a wise criticism of contemporary times from that manifesto: “industrialism always proposes to correct its errors and excesses by more industrialization”.

Exactly so. But while Berry has nothing critical to say about the Southern Agrarians in his essay, others certainly do – notably that contrasting a southern agrarian tradition with a northern industrial one without also talking immediately about European colonialism, slavery and racism is dreadfully misleading.

I’m kind of torn here. There’s a tendency within ‘progressive’ and universalising ways of thinking like Marxism and most socialisms to invoke the political negatives of grounded local traditions as if that completely invalidates them, along the lines that there’s nothing worth considering within southern agrarianism because, hey, slavery. Again, this rests on that millenarian sense of modern progress toward some future heavenly state where all social violence is ended, against which actual societies that fall short of the ideal can only be dismissed as fallen and corrupted. On the other hand, slavery and other iniquities are brute and brutal facts of local histories that can’t just be sidelined – overcoming them demands a turn outwards to the more universal.

Berry’s championing of the agrarian mind focuses on the practical: what is the best way to plow this field. The answer doesn’t depend on whether you’re black or white, female or male. Or not much, anyway. Perhaps what’s most important is another point Berry makes in respect of agrarianism: “The central figure of agrarian thought has invariably been the small owner or small holder who maintains a significant measure of economic self-determination on a small acreage”. This is something I’ve emphasized in my own writing – and the key point is that small ownership must be an option for everyone, not just in-groups of favoured social status. In that sense, what Berry called ‘the possibility for an authentically settled country’ must now involve political universalism as well as ecological particularity.

I doubt he’d have disagreed. In fact, his writing drew on the strong tradition of Christian universalism to make similar points – out of social universalism comes the possibility for local ecological wisdom. The opposite tendency exists within Christendom too – out of Christian exclusivity came the universal economy of slave plantation agriculture, involving the antithesis of Berry’s agrarian mind.

Not many people advocate for slave plantation agriculture anymore. Indeed, the industrial modernism that slave plantation systems helped birth now presents itself as a saviour of the poor and benighted (which, come to think of it, was an old justification for slavery too), and as the only way of feeding the world. The challenge for those of us wishing to carry forward Wendell Berry’s legacy is to keep making the case for food sovereignty in the face of this sly modernist gambit of enclosure. People can feed themselves, not the world, when they assert their right to land and economic self-determination. And that is enough, if people elsewhere can assert the same right.

I suppose I should feel honoured that in a recent podcast involving two antagonists of mine who push the enclosure-oriented, modernist, colonial, ‘only we can save the world’ mentality, I was namechecked alongside Berry in their Hall of Infamy. After disposing of me with the bizarre claim that I think the rest of the world can go to hell and starve, they moved on to Berry:

And the patron saint is the farmer poet in America. What’s his name again? Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry, of course, who rejected all forms of technology. So I think this is the difficulty with wanting to turn the clock back is like, where’d you stop? Where’d you stop the clock? How far back? Are you going back to feudalism? Are you going back to the Stone Age or to the early Industrial Revolution or what?

They go on to say, “But I mean his poetry is actually pretty good”.

Lord deliver us from this stupidity, and from such incipient attempts to turn Berry into a good poet with bad politics. Wendell Berry didn’t want to turn the clock back. He wanted stable, sustainable, locally adapted land-based economies, an end to the colonialism of industrial modernism, and the possibility instead for an authentically settled country. Rest in peace, teacher, but please keep showing us that way. Because the battle is getting hotter.