A Conversation with Wendell Berry

Poet, essayist, farmer, and novelist Wendell Berry will be joined by daughter Mary Berry Smith and area farmers to discuss the changing landscape of American agriculture and its relationship to local economies and rural life. Berry, who has taught English at New York University and at the University of Kentucky, lives on a farm just five miles from his birthplace in northern Kentucky. He is celebrated not only as a writer but as a philosopher, ethicist, and conservationist. Mary Berry Smith lives in north-central Kentucky, not far from her father, on a traditional cattle and tobacco farm. She has diversified her operation to include grape growing and wine-making in the centuries-old tradition of family farms in Europe. This lecture commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. It is also the 2007 Shivvers Memorial Lecture, in memory of John Shivvers, who farmed near Knoxville, Iowa.