Food System Vulnerability: A Local Response to a Global Challenge

“ What is important to me about the Berry Center, and what I am learning from it, is its willingness to go to work at home, on a small scale, to improve the economy of local farmers and, therefore, the health of the local land. This is radical now, when public attention is all on global solutions to global problems. But what works here is likely to work elsewhere, whereas a global solution that won’t work locally is a waste of time.” —Wendell Berry

Inhumane feedlots and processing plants are a relatively recent phenomenon. Only a generation ago, Kentuckians ate mostly Kentucky beef, from cattle born, raised and processed right here in Kentucky. The culture that sustained a resilient local meat economy has all but disappeared, but the good soil, pastures and ideal conditions needed to raise healthy animals haven’t. In fact, there are still more than 2 million cattle in Kentucky, more than any other state east of the Mississippi River. The difference is that today, calves born and raised in Kentucky are shipped long distances to feedlots for fattening and eventual slaughter in brutal industrial facilities staffed by workers who are treated abominably.

Three years ago, The Berry Center, located in Henry County, launched an initiative called Our Home Place Meat to study, find solutions and fix the problem.

The Berry Center was established in 2011. As described in its mission statement, The Berry Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing focus, knowledge and cohesion to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agricultural system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities.

The Center has established a school as well. The work of educating young farmers is being advanced by the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College, a collaboration between The Berry Center and Sterling College, offering a full time, tuition free undergraduate degree in regenerative agriculture in Henry County, Kentucky.

The Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore at The Berry Center develops cultural programming for rural readers, encouraging the preservation of local knowledge and pride of place for generations of people who are ever more distant from their agrarian roots.

Taken all together, The Berry Center promotes the vital connection between urban centers and the rural communities that surround them by collaborating closely and working actively alongside entities and institutions with complementary goals.

Our Home Place Meat is offering exceptional meat to customers, ensuring stable income for small family farmers through good farming practices and a cooperative culture, and continuing the legacy of Wendell Berry’s agrarian vision.

The Berry Center was founded by and is currently led by Mary Berry, daughter of American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, and farmer Wendell Berry. Mary’s love for farming, farmland and farming men and women is apparent in all that she says and does as she guides The Berry Center into its second decade.

To develop the Our Home Place Meat Initiative, she has drawn together and nurtured an energetic, talented group. Sandy Canon is the director of Our Home Place Meats, and Beth Douglas serves as its marketing manager. Mary is quick to acknowledge the critical importance of the team in creating and implementing the vision of Our Home Place Meat.

Our Home Place Meat necessarily involves a deep involvement with markets and customers. Mary and her team are currently working out the details of a 20-year plan to address the needs of a significant regional supplier for chefs in our region. The intention is to design and implement a system where the farmers’ supply and the customers’ demands are kept in balance over time. A supply management arrangement that achieves parity is essential in order for farmers to receive a stable, consistently fair price to be able to afford to farm without resorting to off-farm jobs to maintain livelihoods.

Change is hard, and cultural change is especially hard. The regeneration of a practical farm culture, where farmers talk to each other about solving difficult problems and fixing complex systems is daunting. Mary reports that over the course of the last three years, she can gauge the increasing level of enthusiasm by the steadily increasing volume of the farmers’ voices during meetings about soil fertility, animal health, breeding and farm management.

Our Home Place Meat aims to heal the land and a culture that we all depend on, which in itself is an immense undertaking. Additionally, the initiative is helping consumers really think about land and the people who supply the food we eat.

We consumers will not need to rely on inhumane feedlots and processing plants when we are able to eat well raised beef produced on land well cared for. In the process, we will all have had a hand in healing the land and healing a culture.

Our Home Place Meat is a practical realization of Wendell Berry’s agrarian vision for caring for the land and those who farm it. Both land and culture respond to good treatment. As Our Home Place meat succeeds, both the land and the culture will respond by becoming healthier.

LEARN MORE ON EDIBLECOMMUNITIES.COM:
 

Consumers Hold The Key To Building A Better Meat System

by Marilyn Noble

All it’s taken to expose the precarious state of our modern industrial meat supply is a tiny bit of infectious genetic material wrapped in a protein coat.

The coronavirus pandemic has shone a not-so-friendly light on the inhumane ways both animals and people are treated in a system dominated by four major companies: Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef. ... READ MORE