The Berry Conference will ask: What will it take to resettle an under-populated rural America?

Photo from The Poetry Foundation

Novelist, essayist, poet and farmer Wendell Berry has long been active at the intersections of culture, economics and agriculture. Two years ago, he and his daughter Mary founded The Berry Center to address issues of land use, agriculture and food, and this weekend the center will hold its first conference in his honor. Writers, environmentalists, farmers and others have already spoken for all the available seats, but Bill Moyers is covering it (and so will The Rural Blog).

“We wanted to get some great people together to talk about what it’s going to take to resettle an under-populated rural America,” Mary Berry, the center’s executive director, told Erica Peterson of WFPL Radio in Louisville. The two-day event will focus partly on the work of Wes Jackson, the director of The Land Institute in Kansas. "Jackson says America has a deficit of people in rural areas who will grow food and resettle communities," Peterson writes. "He says colleges should offer students more skills that will let them return to their rural homes and improve the communities, rather than setting graduates on paths that take them, and their talents, out of rural America forever."

Berry Center board member Sarah Fritschner told Peterson: “It is a Wendell Berry function in a way that the simplicity of buying the right thing and eating the right thing can translate into something so much more complexly wonderful.”  Peterson says Fritschner, a former food editor of The Courier-Journal, "thinks a lot of people connect with Wendell Berry’s message through the local food movement, and they see buying locally as a way to exercise his philosophy." (Read more)