09/02/2026
Some thoughts on Wendell following his passing.
When I meet new people here in my new(ish) home state of Kentucky, the most common response is something like, “you moved across the country to start farming in KENTUCKY?? Why?” I’ll grin and straighten my posture a bit and say, “well, there’s this farmer and poet up there in Henry County…”
I didn’t start reading Wendell Berry’s work until about 5-6 years ago as a new farmer in Utah. At the time I was going through a process of deep introspection, revising my beliefs after living years within an ideological framework that simply didn’t work for me.
I read about land abuse, care for the Earth, gentleness for creatures and wild places, the beauty of community, the idea that belonging to a place was as valuable as meaningful love, that neighborliness is not only an expectation, but a gift. I learned about the complexities of people and belief systems, the joy of eating good food, and the serious nature of our responsibility as humans to respect and heal and nurture the world and its people. And more.
And so, as it came time to settle on a place to call home and a name to signify what that home and land can be for my family and my life and my new community, I settled on Kentucky and I settled on Think Little Farm.
Though I never got to meet the Mad Farmer in person, he is very much a part of everything I do and believe. In life, he knew love, respect, nuance, care, empathy, kindness, patience, and peace. What an unimaginable gift it is to know he left so much for us to explore.
“our lives depend upon other lives and upon processes and energies in an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control. And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economics, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand. We are not humble enough or reverent enough.”
-Wendell Berry, Think Little
