This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In the late evening of Aug. 31, 2026, I missed a call from Jennifer, a seventh-generation cattle rancher in Georgia. She was one of more than 70 family farmers and ranchers across the rural U.S.
South and Midwest whom I'd gotten to know through my research over the past five years. We still kept up from time to time, but a late-night call had me worried that something had gone awry on her farm. I sent a quick message to ask what was happening.
Her response: "Wendell Berry passed." I immediately knew the depth of grief behind her solemn text. Berry, a prolific Kentucky farmer, writer and activist, served as an inspiration for many environmentally minded people. But as an environmental anthropologist, I'd seen firsthand the specific impact he had on the rural producers I studied.
Like Jennifer, they farmed land that had been in their families for generations. They had used conventional, industrial practices for decades, but in recent years they had transitioned toward sustainable or regenerative methods. Berry was an outspoken proponent of both environmentally minded farming and its connection to his own Christian faith.
In a climate in which people in these farmers' communities are increasingly told that those two values are not politically aligned, sustainable farmers of faith told me that Berry validated their own sense of morality. In 2023–2024, I spent 16 months conducting ethnographic research with "ex-conventional" farmers—those who had split from both agricultural and social conventions in their communities. The vast majority of producers in the U.S. today farm "conventionally," meaning they grow a "monocrop" of only one species and use intensive methods of plowing the soil, called "tillage," as well as synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.
The farmers I studied, on the other hand, had recently changed their perspectives, observing that those conventional practices were contributing to damage to the soil, land and water. As a result, they started shifting methods to attempt repair. Many reduced or eliminated their petrochemical use, stopped tilling their fields and added additional plant varieties and cover crops to protect the soil.
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