BERRY CENTER INC
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : l***********y@b*********r.o*g
Mission Statement
The Berry Center is putting Wendell Berry's writings to work by advocating for small farmers, land conserving communities, and healthy regional economies.
About This Cause
Our Story Established in 2011, 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. When we consider these objectives, the remarkable accomplishments of three Kentuckians stand out. The works of author Wendell Berry, his father, lawyer and farmer John M. Berry, Sr., and his brother, state senator and lawyer, John M. Berry, Jr. reflect a single vision: a state and a nation of prosperous well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities. The speeches, letters, manuscripts and articles of these men, especially as they pertain to agriculture in the state of Kentucky and the nation, are held and studied at The Archive of The Berry Center for study and dissemination. 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 right here in Henry County, Kentucky. In the hopes of putting the lessons of the tobacco economy to work ensuring parity prices for farmers, The Berry Center is home to Our Home Place Meat, a beef program patterned after the tobacco cooperative model which ensured farmers made healthy profits and kept money in local economies. 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. We hope that you, too, will join us in this good and vital work. Our Vision Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, published in 1977, awakened a national and global conversation on the dire state of agriculture. The Berry Center was launched in 2011 to continue this conversation and preserve the legacy of Wendell Berry’s work and writings and the exceptional agricultural contributions of his father John Berry, Sr., and his brother John Berry, Jr. We are putting these inspiring writings and histories into action through our Archive at the Berry Center, Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore, Our Home Place Meat—a local beef initiative, and The Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College. The core of our work is to advocate for farmers, land conserving communities, and healthy regional economies. Our work seeks to provide solutions to essential issues that are rarely in public discourse and certainly not reflected in agricultural policies. “What will it take for farmers to be able to afford to farm well?” and “How do we become a culture that supports good farming and land use?” These are just a few of the questions that The Berry Center is addressing. We believe that the answers—while firmly rooted in local work—are central to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems including the devastation of natural resources and biodiversity; rapid onset of climate change; economic and social inequities; and the collapse of healthy farming and rural communities. Visitors from all over the world travel to The Berry Center to visit our archive and neighboring Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore and learn about our agricultural programs. Located in the handsome 1820 Oldham House in downtown New Castle, Kentucky, we are becoming a principle destination for historians, researchers, students, and agrarian leaders seeking information and history that is difficult to find or even unavailable.