Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
The Roots of Our Home Place Meat
Wendell Berry was a Kentucky farmer and one of America's most influential writers on agriculture and rural life. His belief that good farming must care for the land and sustain the people who work it is at the heart of Our Home Place Meat.
The Roots of Our Home Place Meat
Born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934, Berry returned home in 1964 to farm and write near Port Royal. His life there shaped his understanding of what good farming requires. A farmer must know the land closely, respect its limits, and be able to earn a living without wearing it out.
For more than sixty years, Berry explored these ideas in his essays, poems, and fiction. In The Unsettling of America, he questioned an agricultural economy that prizes efficiency while asking too little about its cost to farmland and farming communities. In his stories of the fictional community of Port William, he showed what it means to belong to a place through work, memory, and the care of neighbors.
Berry's concern was never only about farming practices. He asked whether the way we grow food strengthens the people and places that make it possible. If farmers cannot afford to care well for their land, both the land and the community suffer.
Putting His Writings to Work
That understanding helped inspire The Berry Center, founded in 2011 by his daughter, Mary Berry. The Center puts his writing to work, building on the Berry family's long commitment to farmers and a healthy agricultural economy. Its work begins with a practical question: How can farmers make a fair living by farming well?
Our Home Place Meat is one answer. Established by The Berry Center in 2017, it works with livestock farmers in Henry County to build a market that supports good farming and fair prices. The goal is to help farm families remain on the land while caring for it well.
The name Our Home Place speaks to the heart of Berry's work. A home place is not merely where we live. It is somewhere we are responsible for. The work is to know it well enough to care for it, and to make it possible for others to do the same.
